Robert Milligan (merchant)
Robert Milligan was a Scottish merchant, ship-owner and slave trader who was the driving force behind the construction and initial statutory sectoral monopoly of the West India Docks in London. From 1768 to 1779 Milligan was a merchant in Kingston, Jamaica. He left Jamaica in 1779 to establish himself in London, where he got married and had a family of eight children. He moved to Hampstead shortly before he died in 1809. By the time of his death, one of Milligan's partnerships had interests in estates in Jamaica which owned 526 slaves in their sugar plantations.
a Portrait of Milligan by Lemuel Francis Abbott
Statue of Robert Milligan formerly in front of the Museum of London Docklands, by Richard Westmacott
The West India Docks are a series of three docks, quaysides, and warehouses built to import goods from, and export goods and occasionally passengers to the British West Indies. Located on the Isle of Dogs in London, the first dock opened in 1802. Following their commercial closure in 1980, the Canary Wharf development was built around the wet docks by narrowing some of their broadest tracts.
An 1802 painting of the completed docks. The canal to the left of the painting was later closed and became a third dock. The view is looking west towards the City of London.
The Henry Addington chosen as the first ship to enter the Grand dock, 27 August 1802, followed by the Echo, the second ship to enter
West India Docks by Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson (figures) from Rudolph Ackermann's Microcosm of London, or, London in Miniature (1808–11).
The Spanish air defence frigate Méndez Núñez moored at South Dock in 2015