William Butterworth (1769–1834)

self-portrait, pubd 1823

© reserved

Butterworth, William (1769–1834), slave-ship sailor and engraver, was born on 2 October 1769 at 55 Kirkgate, Leeds, Yorkshire, the second of five children of the Leeds engraver and copperplate printer John Butterworth, who had set up in business in Leeds in 1758. William described himself as 'one denied the advantages of birth, without education, except such as is to be gained at a day school, in a provincial town' (Butterworth, 1).

Inspired by what he later described as the 'nautical anecdotes' of a cousin in the Royal Navy, Butterworth ran away from home at the age of sixteen, together with a teenage companion who was likewise 'determined on adventures' (Butterworth, 2). It was not until 1823 that he published an account of his travels in Three Years Adventures of a Minor in England, Africa, the West Indies, South Carolina and Georgia. The book records that on leaving Leeds the two youngsters made for Liverpool, where they were persuaded to join the crew of the slave ship Hudibras. On 26 May 1786 the ship sailed for Africa, arriving some two months later at Old Calabar in the Bight of Biafra.

Butterworth was able to go ashore frequently during the six months it took to buy slaves for the vessel, making the acquaintance of African slave traders and getting into numerous scrapes. His book includes a detailed account of the obsequies for an Efik chief, including human sacrifice. Butterworth's time in Africa coincided with part of the period covered by the pidgin English diary of the slave-trading chief Antera Duke. The two narratives, written from very different perspectives, complement each other interestingly. The veracity of Butterworth's story is further confirmed by the accuracy with which he recorded the names of other slave ships, and their captains, present off Old Calabar at the time.

Butterworth's observant, sensitive, and humane eyewitness record is one of very few accounts by common seamen (most of whom were illiterate, or unable to write much more than their names) of the horrific middle passage. The events he described included a slave uprising and a subsequent foiled insurrection, and incidents that provide a vivid insight into the day-to-day life of sailors and their human cargoes in that brutal trade. Butterworth's book seems not to have been reviewed on publication, and thereafter was largely ignored, at least in print, for as long as studies of the slave trade focused on economics and statistics. More recently historians working on the social and cultural history of the slave trade have rediscovered his book as an important primary source, even a classic of slave-ship literature, and have drawn on it extensively. So have studies of the West Indies, the American south, and the African diaspora.

Butterworth sailed from the Caribbean in August 1788, and six weeks later disembarked in London. He made his way back to Leeds where, under his father's guidance, he set about learning engraving and copperplate printing. On 21 September 1791 in Leeds parish church he married Mary Ann Calvert, with whom he had three children. She died in childbirth and was buried in the same church on 8 November 1798, the day the baby who survived her was baptized there and given her name, Mary Ann. Butterworth had no children with his second wife, Ann Livesey, whom he married on 8 June 1800. She was from the family with whom he and his father were in partnership in the firm of engravers Butterworth, Livesey & Co.

Butterworth took particular pride in having engraved the 111 plates (with 587 separate illustrations) for The Young Sea Officer's Sheet Anchor, or, A Key to the Leading of Rigging, and to Practical Seamanship by Darcy Lever, first published in 1808. These plates, which are the heart of the book, set the work apart from other nineteenth-century manuals of seamanship published in Britain and the United States. They were engraved from Lever's pen and wash sketches (now in the National Maritime Museum), which have less detail. The print versions have a precision and clarity which, for example, make it possible to follow individual ropes through the network of rigging. There were in effect two very different requirements for the engraver in this instance: proficient printmaking and, crucially, practical understanding of ships. Many could have satisfied the one or the other, but Butterworth's combination of both must have been highly unusual if not unique. He noted rightly that in engraving the plates (technically etchings with engraving) he had been 'aided by the knowledge I had gained of rigging, &c.' while at sea (Butterworth, 490). He also managed to pull Lever's illustrations together so that each plate became a more unified composition. He had a share in the copyright for the manual, which seems to have been something of a collaborative enterprise between Lever and himself. Butterworth, Lever, and the printer of the first edition, Thomas Gill, doubtless met each other through the Leeds Volunteers, in which they all served from its establishment in 1794. This standard textbook of seamanship was thus a joint effort between amateur infantrymen, not sailors, based in Leeds, remote from ships and the sea.

Apart from copperplate printing for his livelihood, and soldiering, Butterworth 'painted in crayons and oil for improvement; learned music; practised engraving on copper with the greatest assiduity', and studied 'engraving on gems and stones' (Butterworth, 490). He died at his retirement house in St Michael's Road, Headingley on 3 October 1834, the day after his sixty-fifth birthday, and was buried at St Michael's, Headingley, on 5 October. An obituary recorded that 'he was deservedly esteemed by all who knew him for his uprightness, cheerfulness and kindness' (Leeds Mercury, 11 Oct 1834). The name Butterworth continued to be associated with printing in Leeds until Butterworth and Pilkington Ltd was dissolved in 2002.

An obituary for Henry Schroeder in the Leeds Intelligencer (26 Feb 1853) subsequently asserted that Schroeder was the author of 'Three Years of a Miner's Life' [sic]. This unfounded confusion presumably arose because the men were both Leeds copperplate printers and authors. A compilation of Leeds biographies, published in 1865, simultaneously attributed authorship to both, separately (Taylor, 353n, 453n). Subsequently the two lives were conflated, Butterworth being taken as a pseudonym for Schroeder (DNB; Boase, Mod. Eng. biog.), a muddle that persisted for over a century.