I am very fond of Dartmouth Museum, but I, too, am somewhat underwhelmed by the temporary exhibit on slavery. It seems to be driven by a – quite justifiable – righteous indignation and desire to expose and condemn the whole ghastly business, rather than by patient historical research and evaluation of the facts and context.

The evidence presented to link it to Dartmouth is at best tenuous and totally misses out the central fact that, in 1700, a slave ship, the Daniel and Henry, was financed, fitted-out and sailed from Dartmouth.

In practice, they found that procuring west Africans was hard, very dangerous, expensive and time-consuming. Also, Dartmouth did not have access to large centres of population or markets for cotton and tobacco that would have made the third leg of the triangle profitable. The voyage was not a success, and I suspect that this is the reason, not the moral scruples of Dartmothians, that the trade did not become established here. See Nigel Tattersfield’s fascinating book The Forgotten Trade for more details.

Of more immediate concern is the fact that slavery, in a different form, still goes on today - in this country.

Nick Teage

Stoke Fleming, Dartmouth