People database

People from the Italian peninsula involved in the Atlantic slave trade and slavery, 15th–19th centuries. Search by name or filter by role, place, network and period.

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  • Scala Giambattista

    1840–1850
    Slave trader Government and Diplomacy
    Origin
    Chiavari
    Place of activity
    Lagos

    Born in Chiavari in 1817 to a family of sailors, he left school at the age of twelve to go to sea with his father. Having obtained his captain's licence in Genoa, he made trading voyages between the Ligurian port and Brazil, with at least two calls in West Africa around 1846. The suspicion of his involvement in the slave trade dates from this period. The main source of the accusation is the British consul Benjamin Campbell, who met Scala in Freetown in 1853 and reported to the British Foreign Secretary that he recognised him as one of those skilful and cunning Genoese captains who sailed under the Sardinian flag and had repeatedly eluded the patrols of the Royal Navy. He was later Italian consul in Lagos; in 1862 he published in Sampierdarena the memoirs of a journey he had made to Abeokuta in 1858.