I found a treasure trove of old papers showing that my ancestors owned a slave plantation in Jamaica

In my late thirties, I found myself at a crossroads after learning that my wife and I would not be able to have children. I’ve always felt that the family is a haven, a refuge from storms, but also the starting point for great adventures – and now I found myself adrift in the middle of the ocean. So while my contemporaries threw themselves into the all-encompassing task of raising young families and looked to the future, I looked to the past.

I knew very little about the paternal side of my family tree. My father, an only child, had died in 1973 at the age of 38, and my grandfather a few months later. So I was four when I inherited the crumbling family home at Temple Sowerby in Cumbria. This was a 17th century farmhouse to which a symmetrical front had been added in Georgian times. By the time I knew it, it was full of wood rot and was eventually sold to become a hotel in 1977.

One day, about ten years ago, I was at my mother’s house, rummaging through a closet, when I came across a family tree high on a shelf in my father’s handwriting, mapped out on a long roll of graph paper. There was also a cardboard box filled with bundles of letters tied with faded pink ribbon, mostly from the early 1800s. It took me a while to get used to copper writing, but reading these letters felt like opening a window into the past. Mostly they related to occupations that my ancestors engaged in two centuries ago – banking, farming, mining, tanning – confirming that they belonged, as I had always suspected, to the lesser nobility of Westmorland. But there was one document that made my jaw drop. This was a ‘List of Negroes’ – an inventory listing the name, age, employment and pound value of each of the 196 enslaved workers on a sugar plantation in Jamaica in 1801.

There was one document that made my jaw drop. This was a ‘List of Negroes’

This disturbing discovery would change the course of my life. I couldn’t just sweep it under the rug; I couldn’t pretend nothing had happened.

Like many aspiring family historians, I signed up with Ancestry and hungrily took advantage of the all-you-can-eat buffet of records. I also spent countless hours searching online for “atkinson,” along with other words that might evoke my ancestors.

One evening I searched the National Portrait Gallery website and came across a result for a dealer called Richard Atkinson, whose dates matched someone in my father’s family tree – a 5x great uncle. I clicked through to the portrait. Instead of the oil painting I expected, a 1785 cartoon by satirist James Gillray (see above), which depicted 25-year-old Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger as a schoolboy being beaten by the Leader of the Opposition, Charles James Fox – and there in the background, recognizable by the ‘Rum Contract’ sticking out of the cupboard bag, was this namesake of mine. How did he end up here, surrounded by the greatest statesmen of his time?

As I dug deeper, I discovered that ‘Rum’ Atkinson had been the British Army’s largest contractor during the American War of Independence. Along the way he had amassed staggering wealth and connections; he was a director of the East India Company and an alderman of the City of London, as well as an advisor to two prime ministers. His nickname arose from an infamous contract with the government to supply 350,000 liters of Jamaican rum for an (allegedly) extortionate price, and four years of political scandal had followed. He had died in 1785 at the age of 46, leaving his vast fortune – including two Jamaican sugar plantations – to his seventeen nieces and nephews. Four decades of litigation followed as his heirs argued over their inheritance.

One day I saw a short page dedicated to my ancestors on the Temple Sowerby hotel website. One paragraph stood out. This was a description of a coupon book written by my 4x great-grandmother Bridget Atkinson, sister-in-law of ‘Rum’ Atkinson, which included recipes for eel, a sauce to serve with larks, bullace cheese and five types of blancmange. I publish cookbooks for a living – suffice it to say, my interest was piqued.

Shortly afterwards I spent a night in the old house. I must have called upon some powerful magic, because within days I had managed to purchase this astonishing receipt book from its bibliophile owner, found a branch of long-lost cousins, and discovered six boxes of family letters tucked away in the archives of Northumberland… and this was just the start. I would soon unearth a rich body of correspondence in The National Archives at Kew, the British Library and the National Library of Scotland, plus many other repositories.

At this point I realized that I might have stumbled upon the material for a book. It turned out that ‘Rum’, and subsequent relatives, had occupied ringside seats during some of the most momentous and disturbing episodes in British imperial history – not only the loss of the American colonies, but also the economic collapse of the British imperialism. West Indies. What started as a family history project quickly took on a life of its own.

But I was neither a trained historian nor a seasoned author. I had to learn the ropes of archival research and basic writing. My challenge – and it was quite a challenge – was to sift through thousands of letters to piece together the puzzle of my family’s story. The research was exciting. Every discovery felt like a breakthrough.

My challenge was to sift through thousands of letters to piece together the puzzle of my family’s story

If I hadn’t had a little luck, I wouldn’t have discovered half of my family’s business in Jamaica. About four years into my project I wondered how I could explain the large gaps in my knowledge in this area – the family letters were frustratingly silent. Early on I had learned that ‘Rum’ Atkinson had been close friends with Sir Francis Baring, the great investment banker, and I had visited the Baring Archive in the City of London, hoping (in vain) to find their correspondence. A few years later, just to be sure, I was browsing through the archive’s catalog online, when a sentence caught my attention: “Of particular interest are some boxes of papers relating to the business of Atkinson, Mure & Bogle of Jamaica and elsewhere. ” When I returned to the archive, the librarian produced five volumes containing twenty years of letters between Sir Francis Baring and various Atkinsons – over a thousand pages.

I was never naive enough to think that my family’s activities in Jamaica were unrelated to slavery, yet I was unprepared for the extent to which they had embraced this insensitive cause. The Baring papers detailed how my ancestors had acted as agents for Liverpool-based slave traders, brokering the sale of their human cargo to sugar planters in Jamaica. I had set out in search of my 18th century ancestors, but discovered a deep, irreconcilable tension at the core of my project. Some relationships, like Bridget, were easy to love. But others had participated in some of the most despicable activities imaginable. For example, Jamaican baptismal records showed that Matthew Atkinson, my three-time great-grandfather, fathered several children with enslaved women. And yet his family back home in England regarded him as the gentlest, sweetest man. It was disturbing and baffling.

Shortly before I finished the book, I found the ruins of the sugar mill on one of my ancestors’ properties in Jamaica. Crumbling walls of cut limestone, shaded by a towering African tulip tree with bright red flowers rising from the bushes. Picking my way through uneven piles of rubble, I came across a huge cylindrical cast-iron cauldron languishing in the undergrowth. It felt almost overwhelming to visit this place where hundreds of enslaved Africans had produced sugar, and horrifying to think that they had also belonged to my family.