Cambridge University historian uncovers letter to diarist who was a naval official in 1670s
His journals would become famed for their vivid detail and candour. But now, almost exactly 360 years after diarist Samuel Pepys chronicled the Great Fire of London, new research has found that he “erased” and “curated” correspondence to conceal he had been offered an enslaved boy as a bribe.
Cambridge University historian Dr Michael Edwards consulted hundreds of records in The Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge; The National Archives; and the Bodleian Library in Oxford for the study “Samuel Pepys, the African Companies, and the Archives of Slavery, 1660–1689”.
One of the most unsettling details of the study, published in the Historical Journal, concerns the offer of a human bribe to Pepys, a senior naval official in the 1670s.
Edwards, a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge writes how, in April 1675, John Howe, a naval officer, sought to win Pepys support in his case that he had been wrongly deprived of a ship’s command after the death of its captain.
