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Prince (1787 ship)

British slave ship

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMar 26, 2026
Entity authorityQ96400158 ↗
Source-derived summary

Prince was launched at Bristol in 1785 as Alexander and then made two complete voyages as a slave ship in the triangular trade in enslaved people. Her owners changed her name to Prince in 1787. As Prince, she made six more complete voyages as an enslaving ship. She sailed on enslaving voyages for owners in Bristol, Liverpool, and London. She foundered in 1800 as she was returning to England from her ninth, having delivered captives to Jamaica.

Career

Alexander first appeared Lloyd's Register (LR) in 1786, there being no online issue for 1785.

By then Alexander had already made one voyage as a slave ship.

1st voyage transporting enslaved people (1785–1786): Captain John McTaggart sailed from Bristol on 28 April 1785.

Alexander acquired captives at Bonny and sailed from Africa on 15 September. She arrived at Grenada on 14 September with 307 captives.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Prince (1787 ship)” is british slave ship. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Prince, ship and British, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1785, 1787, 1800, 1786—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Prince, ship and British is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “british slave ship” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q96400158. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1785, 1787, 1800 and 1786.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  2. Expand the search: follow Prince (1787 ship) primary sources, Prince (1787 ship) archive and Prince research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Prince (1787 ship)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.