by Simon Schama
And all this while he kept his political eyes open. In the legal skirmishings between Granville Sharp and Lord Mansfield, Equiano understood that he was witnessing a moment when history might actually alter the lives of slaves in the British Empire. Of Sharp’s own honesty, acumen and Christian zeal, Equiano had no doubt. In the unprepossessing, hollow-cheeked flautist he had found a hero, and in 1774 he needed Sharp’s help. Travelling back to Izmir as a steward, Equiano had recommended a black acquaintance, John Annis, as cook for the Turkey trader Anglicania. But like Jonathan Strong and Thomas Lewis, Annis had a covetous master from the Caribbean, one Kirkpatrick, who regretted the agreement permitting Annis to depart from his service and whose mind dwelled on the money to be secured from his resale. Annis was already aboard the Anglicania cooking for the crew while waiting to sail, and this gave Kirkpatrick his opportunity. The cook was followed, abducted and packed on to another vessel bound for St Kitts. To Equiano’s disgust, neither the captain nor the mate whom Annis had served, unpaid, for two months would lift a finger to deliver him: “I proved the only friend he had who attempted to regain him his liberty, if possible, having known the want of liberty myself.” And Equiano knew what to do to mobilize British freedom: he secured a writ of Habeas Corpus for Annis. Whitening his face in some semblance of disguise, he went with a tipstaff to Kirkpatrick’s house in St Paul’s Churchyard. There they confronted the master, but he claimed no longer to have the body in question.
It was then that Equiano sought out Granville Sharp, the veteran of such struggles. Still basking in the Somerset triumph, and expecting its provisions against the abduction and transportation of black subjects of the king to be enforced, Sharp had been optimistic. He gave Equiano advice on what to expect from the law. But the advice did not, alas, include caveats about unscrupulous lawyers. Equiano was duly robbed of his money, whilst those who took it did nothing for the plight of John Annis. “When the poor man arrived at St Kitt’s he was, according to custom, staked to the ground with four pins, through a cord, two on his wrist and two on his ankles; was cut and flogged most unmercifully, and afterwards loaded cruelly with irons about his neck.” Letters arrived for Equiano from Annis, which were “very moving.” In desperation he tried to pursue the case but, after the fact, nothing was to be done, and there, in servitude, Annis remained “till kind death released him out of the hands of his tyrants.”
Equiano and Sharp do not seem to have had much contact between the case of John Annis and that of the drowned slaves of the Zong. There had been a great and momentous war; they had each been busy. Almost to the end of hostilities Sharp had hoped against all reason that America might yet be reconciled to a chastened, reformed Britain in which liberty and humanity were once more enthroned. And once that hope had evaporated, he set about restoring the connections he most valued: with Anthony Benezet, Benjamin Franklin and a new correspondent, John Adams, all of whom he hoped would be steadfast in the coming crusade against the Accursed Thing. Swept up by his new-found zeal, Equiano had gone all the way back to his own origins and the source of the evil, West Africa, where he served as an unordained chaplain and preacher to Governor Matthias Macnamara at Cape Coast Castle. And he applied to the Bishop of London for ordination so that he might return to Africa as a missionary, thus, as he supposed, simultaneously saving the bodies and the souls of his fellow Africans.
Equiano, then, knew slavery about as well as anyone could, within or without the institution. He had seen enough to believe that nothing could shock him further, until, on the morning of the 18th of March 1783, he read an anonymous letter in the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser reporting the fate of the slaves on the Zong. Monstrous though it was, the story might never have come to light had not the insurers, faced with a bill from the owners for £3960 (£30 per African), decided to contest the purported “necessity” dictating the drowning of the blacks. The case had come before the court of King’s Bench in Westminster Hall and, although its macabre details were, according to the Chronicle’s reporter, “enough to make every one present shudder,” the jury had returned a verdict for the owners without even leaving the chamber for deliberation.
As a devotee of Common Law, Sharp felt the ignominy acutely. As if slaving were not itself bad enough, should the verdict be upheld, the jettisoning of “human cargo” would be deemed lawful and others would certainly hasten to profit from this precedent. The seas would bob with wantonly murdered Africans. For their part the insurers, Messrs Gilbert and Others, were not about to concede the point, and brought a motion before the Bench (to be heard, of course by Lord Mansfield) for a retrial. And, however painful and repugnant it was to be for both Sharp and Equiano to argue the responsibility for a massacre entirely in terms of commercial liability, they recognized that the insurers’ questioning of the purported water shortage put them in the position, however reluctantly, of accusing the captain and owners of the Zong of having committed murder for gain. Sharp was determined to do everything in his power to support that position in the hope that by so doing he would be able to initiate the criminal prosecution the infamy assuredly warranted.
After Equiano’s visit Sharp contacted an Oxford law don, Dr Bever, and when the case came before Mansfield on the 22nd of May made sure that he himself was present in Westminster Hall together with a clerk he had hired to take shorthand notes of the proceedings. This busy scribbling attracted the attention of the counsel for the owners, Sir John (“Honest Jack”) Lee, currently Solicitor-General and shortly to be Attorney-General, a Yorkshireman with a well-earned reputation for blunt, if not profane, speech voiced in a broad accent and for the bullying manners of a waggoner in a hurry. There was a “person in Court,” he boomed at Mansfield and his fellow justices, pausing to glare operatically at Sharp, a person who had made known his intention to bring “a criminal prosecution for murder against the parties concerned.” But, Lee blustered on as if lecturing a particularly dull room of schoolboys, “if any man of them was allowed to be tried at the Old Bailey for murder, I cannot help thinking if that charge of murder was attempted to be sustained it would be folly and rashness to a degree of madness; and so far from the charge of murder lying against these people, there is not the least imputation. Of cruelty, I will not say, but—of impropriety: not in the least!” No one, Lee insisted, should pay heed to the “pretended appeals” of counsel for the underwriters to “the feelings of humanity,” for the master had a perfect right to do as he thought fit with his “chattels or goods.” The issue was not whether making property of men was or was not deplorable: “whether right or wrong we have nothing to do with it.” For it was unarguable that “for the purpose in insurance, they are goods and property.” Thus the only issue to decide was whether the preservation of the remainder did indeed depend on their being disposed of.10
But Pigot, Davenport and Heywood, lawyers for the insurers, were not browbeaten. They argued, unapologetically, that the matter of whether a human might ever be a cargo was most certainly material; that this was therefore “a new cause.” Indeed Heywood, like Dunning in the Lewis case and young Alleyne in the Somerset case, rose to the occasion and was not averse to setting the niceties of commercial law aside for the larger truth. “We are not now merely defending the under-witers from the damages obtained against them,” he asserted. “I cannot help thinking that my friends who came before me [a nod to Sharp and his trials] and myself on this occasion appear as counsel for millions of mankind and the cause of humanity in general.” It was grandiloquent, but if there was ever a time when grandiloquence was pardonable, this was it.
It had been eleven years since Somerset. Which Lord Mansfield would preside over the ghosts of the Zong—the cautious legal conservative, embarrassed by the popular misunderstanding of his ruling that it had made slavery illegal in England, or Dido Lindsey’s Uncle James of Kenwood House? Mansfield could, of course, see Sir John Lee’s point, and respected the stringent narrowness of the issue on which the jury had been asked to decide. For th
e earlier jury, “though it shocks one very much, the case of the slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard.” He could see that it had to be so and yet, Mansfield said again, “It is a very shocking case.” A new trial was granted.
This was all Sharp needed to set him off. Pamphlets and newspaper articles were circulated to those who mattered in lay and ecclesiastical circles; they accused, among others, the Solicitor-General, whose “argument was so lamentably unworthy of his dignity and public character and so banefully immoral in its tendency to encourage the superlative degree of all oppression, Wilful Murder.”11 It was, Sharp thundered in his letters to the Duke of Portland, to sundry bishops and archbishops and to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, a “necessity, incumbent upon the whole kingdom to vindicate our national justice” by the prosecution and punishment of the murderers, and, once that was done, to put “an entire stop to the Slave Trade,” short of which (warming to his favourite refrain) nothing would stay the “avenging hand of God who has promised to destroy the destroyers of the earth.”
Predictably, the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, whose responsibility it would be to bring a prosecution before the Grand Jury, failed to act on Sharp’s appeals to their humanity, much less on their own sense of elementary justice. In fact they failed to act at all. So was it entirely quixotic for Sharp to have imagined they might?
Not quite, for there was at least one senior figure in the brutally pragmatic world of the Royal Navy who at the very least had mixed feelings about the slaving empire he was called on to protect and preserve. As Comptroller of the Navy, and thus responsible for its finances, Sir Charles Middleton had custody of one of the biggest and juiciest bowls of plums in the gift of government. And yet there was no sign that Middleton had been much tempted by sins venal (or any other sort). After living the life of a naval commander he had, as expected, settled into the life of a country gentleman. Once captain of HMS Arundel, he was now master of Teston Hall in Kent. This did not mean, however, that Middleton had settled for a life of reclusive provincial mediocrity padded by a naval sinecure. He was also Member of Parliament for Rochester, on the river Medway, and thus at the heart of the omnipotent beast that was the Hanoverian Royal Navy. Dockyards, seamen, chandlers and sawmills all laboured under the eye of the Comptroller. Complementing the assiduous Sir Charles was Lady Middleton, who, in the way of those times, was passionately drawn to good Christian works.
And there were few causes dearer to Lady Middleton’s heart, or indeed to her husband’s, than the vicar of St Peter’s and St Paul’s, Teston. The Reverend James Ramsay, with his soft Aberdeen lilt, was not the kind of parson you would expect to fetch up on the Medway—to say nothing of his wife, born Rebecca Akers, a creole lady whose complexion could not quite be described as Kentish. In fact, the Medway was just right for James Ramsay seeing that he had begun life as a naval surgeon, serving under Middleton on HMS Arundel. In 1759, the same year that Vassa was blooded in combat, Ramsay saw a different kind of action in the Caribbean.12 A slave ship, vulnerable to being taken by the French, joined Middleton’s fleet for protection. But it was flying the yellow flag of contagion. A hundred, both black slaves and white crew, had already died and the master asked Middleton for the care of a surgeon. None except Ramsay would go. Returning to the Arundel from his rounds, Ramsay stumbled getting on deck and fell awkwardly, fracturing his thigh-bone. He would be lame for the rest of his life, and Middleton never forgot this painful reward for his surgeon’s selflessness.
Determined on being Luke, both doctor and priest, Ramsay abandoned the navy and took holy orders, but returned to the Caribbean to minister, as he supposed, to black and white alike. On St Kitts, where he had three livings, he became notorious as the parson who invited blacks to his vicarage to be schooled and converted—and, even worse, tried to insert into the bidding a prayer for the conversion of the slaves. A Christian field hand, to be sure, would still be a field hand, but there was something damnably uncomfortable about subjecting Christians to the kind of lashing that from time to time must needs be applied to recalcitrant beasts of burden. Further, not content with interfering where he had no business, Mr Ramsay would not be quiet as he went about his parson’s business, presuming to admonish overseers and even the gentlemen of the plantations, from Christ Church to Basseterre to Nicholastown, on what he judged to be their un-Christian behaviour towards the blacks. Unconscionably he even permitted, actually encouraged, blacks and whites to worship together in his church. Clearly this could not be. For his presumption and meddling, Ramsay was reproved, first quietly, then more noisily in the island newspapers. When he seemed to heed none of this, more drastic gestures were made. Notes were pinned to the church door wishing ill to him and his creole wife. Should he persist, “merciless revenge” would be exacted. At some point the apostle, like most apostles, felt he had had enough.
So in 1777 James Ramsay came back to England. Spoken highly of by Sir Charles Middleton, he became chaplain to the fleet under, successively, Admirals Barrington and the notoriously testy, gout-racked Rodney. More mutilated bodies came Ramsay’s way: splints and intercessions amidst the smoke and juddering din. He published Sea Sermons and prayed that Rodney would not deal quite so harshly with the Jews of St Eustatius for running guns and rum to the Americans. Indeed, it was not the Americans whom James Ramsay wished to fight but the satanic deeds he had seen in the islands. In 1779 he went back to St Kitts, where again, he made himself unwelcome, a burr in the breeches. Two years later, he was chased once more from the plantations. This time, advised gently but soundly by Sir Charles, he settled for the livings at Teston and Nettlestead. Yet between writing sermons and tending to the parish Ramsay was all the while ordering his memories and his moral sentiments. If he could not fight the Accursed Thing from the pulpit he would do so from the printed page. The revulsion stirred by the monetarization of evil embodied in the Zong case seemed to give the Kentish parson his opportunity. In the summer of 1784 his Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies was published.
If James Ramsay was expecting a hornets’ nest, he certainly got it. His tour through the barbarities he had witnessed during nineteen years in St Kitts—the cart whip that “cuts out flakes of skin and flesh at every strike”—was greeted with a storm of derision and abuse, not least from the “island agents” who remembered him well. They accused him of being a hypocrite. Had the sainted abolitionist not owned slaves himself? Yes he had, but only house slaves whom he freed on departure. The lameness? On the island it was said that he had fallen while administering a kick to the breeches to one of his blacks, and now the man had the gall to pretend to have broken his thigh in the navy, the better to pad his pension! It was an outrageous slander, and Ramsay felt it keenly as the abuse rained down. He understood nothing of the world, the indignant advocates of the Society of West India Planters and Merchants charged, neither the way it had always been, nor the way it must be if the British Empire was to be sustained, especially after the grievous blow it had suffered in America. Did the reverend gentleman know history? Apparently not, for even a cursory reading of antiquity would enlighten him to the knowledge that since the records of humanity commenced there had never been a society without slaves, any more than there had been a world without the wars that habitually produced captives and bondsmen. Did the reverend gentleman know anything of Africa? Evidently not, or he would be aware that the poor natives there were subject to cruelties and atrocities beside which the worst that a plantation overseer might commit would resemble the very milk of Christian charity and benevolence. Did he know the economy? Obviously not, for he would otherwise appreciate the general ruin that would be brought upon countless deserving Britons from the wreckage of the sugar trade he so carelessly and piously proposed. And for that matter did the Kentish parson know England? Surely not, for if he did he would have to concede that the condition of the plantation negro, however unfree, well fed and sheltered as he must needs b
e if the plantation was to prosper, was far preferable to that of the rustic labourer evicted from his strip by enclosures and doomed to roam the hedgerows for a pittance, or that of the city beggar trapped in filth and degradation.
Rattled, but sheltered by the Middletons, Ramsay stood his ground. On one point he remained especially adamant. Blacks were not, as the Jamaican Edward Long had averred, closer to the orang-utan than to man. They were in every quality and faculty fully our humanity. “That there is any essential difference between the European and African mental powers, as far as my experience has gone, I positively deny.”13 With this one empirically acquired conviction, James Ramsay was already the moral superior of David Hume and Thomas Jefferson.
In the sultry summer of 1784, buzzing with swarms of wasps and gnats, heavy with daily thunder, the battle was joined. Defenders of slavery—who were beginning to mobilize their own advocacy—liked to depict the dispute as one argued between the worldly and the unworldly, men of business against men of the cloth. But this was not at all true. The leaders of the Quaker campaign—an informal committee of six who met every two weeks to concert their publicity in the London and provincial press—were all businessmen and, they liked to think, hard of head if tender of heart. They included a young banker, Samuel Hoare, and a tobacco merchant, John Lloyd, who had been repelled by what he’d seen of slavery on business trips to Virginia.14 Adam Smith’s attack on the slave trade was republished, arguing against it principally on the grounds of its economic inexpediency. For most of the Quakers, though, a trade in humans was no proper trade at all. “No right exists…to alienate from another his liberty,” wrote Joseph Woods, a wool merchant, sounding a deliberately transatlantic note, “and therefore every purchase of a slave is in contradiction to the original rights of mankind.”15