Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where every
Speaker 2: year I buy Sophia weapon. It's also about bad people,
Speaker 2: except for this episode. Well, this week we're doing a
Speaker 2: reverse episode about some heroes, the people who ended the
Speaker 2: British slave trade and eventually the whole Atlantic slave trade.
Speaker 2: And you know, they're good people. We haven't talked about
Speaker 2: them yet. We've only talked about bad people so far.
Speaker 2: Episode one was really a lot of bad stuff in
Speaker 2: one and I do apologize for that. On the Christmas week, our.
Speaker 1: Guest today is is big ship Guy James Stow.
Speaker 2: Big big boat Man James big Stout, Captain James.
Speaker 1: Stow, James Stout, Sir Captain James Stowe.
Speaker 3: Not one of those things again, never been near a king.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I do like to go into I get
Speaker 3: very m well, but I don't let that stop me.
Speaker 2: No, I'm not.
Speaker 3: We did we see sickness.
Speaker 2: If I've learned one thing about the history of sailing,
Speaker 2: no one has ever let being sick stop them from
Speaker 2: getting out a boat.
Speaker 3: You can't. You got to power through it.
Speaker 2: Speaking of powering through it, you know we just got
Speaker 2: the horrible case of the Zorg and the mass murder
Speaker 2: that happened on board it, and then a lawsuit by
Speaker 2: the Gregson syndicate saying we should get money for those
Speaker 2: people we murdered, which a British court ruled, yeah you should.
Speaker 2: So that's where things ended in Part one. In Part two,
Speaker 2: some people are going to get mad about this. Now,
Speaker 2: there was no coverage of Gregson v. Gilbert at the
Speaker 2: time of the court case. It was legally a minor
Speaker 2: civil trial over an insurance dispute, and there was really
Speaker 2: no reason to believe that anyone aside from the parties involved,
Speaker 2: were paying attention to what happened in court or cared
Speaker 2: about what had happened aboard the Zorg. But one anonymous
Speaker 2: person watched the proceedings that day, March sixth of seventeen
Speaker 2: eighty three, and they were horrified by what they saw.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: There's some theorizing in the book The Zorg about who
Speaker 2: this person might have met, but we don't really know.
Speaker 2: It was just someone was there that day who had
Speaker 2: a conscience and who viewed Africans as human beings. Right,
Speaker 2: And a lot of stuff that happened, of a lot
Speaker 2: of very important stuff is going to result from the
Speaker 2: fact that one person with a conscience was there that
Speaker 2: day right now. A little less than two weeks after
Speaker 2: the judge in this case issued his ruling, this person
Speaker 2: published an anonymous letter in two major newspapers, The Morning
Speaker 2: Chronicle and The London Advertiser. The letter noted that the
Speaker 2: Zorg still had four hundred and twenty gallons of water
Speaker 2: left when it put into port in Jamaica, and thus,
Speaker 2: as the underwriters argued, there was quote no necessity for
Speaker 2: a conduct so shocking to humanity. This is our only
Speaker 2: first person account of the court proceedings, and the author
Speaker 2: of this anonymous letter claims that quote the narrative seemed
Speaker 2: to make every person present shudder. He lamented that, in
Speaker 2: spite of this, the jury voted in favor of the
Speaker 2: Gregson Syndicate. The letter then takes some more philosophical turn,
Speaker 2: with the author wishing some man of feeling and genius
Speaker 2: would give poetical language to the last thoughts of one
Speaker 2: of the ten enslaved men who chose to kill themselves
Speaker 2: after seeing their little brothers and sisters hurled into the ocean, quote,
Speaker 2: whose indignation made him voluntarily share death with his countrymen
Speaker 2: rather than life with such unheard of English barbarians. The
Speaker 2: letter then concludes with this paragraph, it is certainly worthy
Speaker 2: of observation that our legislature can every session find time
Speaker 2: to inquire into and regulate the manner of killing a partridge,
Speaker 2: that no abuse should be committed, and that he should
Speaker 2: be fairly shot. And yet it has never been thought
Speaker 2: proper to inquire into the matter of annually kidnapping above
Speaker 2: fifty thousand poor wretches who never injured us, by a
Speaker 2: set of the most cruel monsters that this country can
Speaker 2: send out pretty unsparing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's pretty good right too. Yeah, yes, I make
Speaker 3: it a good point.
Speaker 1: We ever, do we ever found out who wrote this?
Speaker 1: Or does it stay anonymous?
Speaker 2: Again, it's we don't really know the author. Sidharth Kara
Speaker 2: has a theory as to who it is. But it's
Speaker 2: not like it's it's we don't know. We simply don't know.
Speaker 2: We never really will.
Speaker 1: To a point, I think it's cool that two newspapers
Speaker 1: printed it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's good that they printed. Again, there's sentiment,
Speaker 2: there's abolitionist sentiment. There's people of like conscience and care
Speaker 2: who are informed and know how bad it is. They're
Speaker 2: just not really unified yet. Right. There's there's you know,
Speaker 2: a small organization of like Quakers, but for the most part,
Speaker 2: most of the people who are like upset about slavery
Speaker 2: aren't together yet, right, And this it's it's over this
Speaker 2: case that they're going to get stitched together. Right. So
Speaker 2: letter finds an audience, but first mostly with England's small
Speaker 2: Quaker anti slavery movement, but it doesn't cause an immediate
Speaker 2: broader uproar on its own. However, it succeeds in reaching
Speaker 2: the one person who, it turns out most needed to
Speaker 2: hear it, a freedman named Olata Equiano. And this guy
Speaker 2: is one of the coolest dudes I have ever heard of.
Speaker 2: This is a fucking Equiano is a fascinating man. Have
Speaker 2: you heard about this person, James.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'd love to assign Equiana to my undergraduate courses. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. His book is fantastic book. Yeah, and you can
Speaker 2: find it online. It's free. Right, we'll be quoting from
Speaker 2: it some here. A fascinating person. So Equiano had been
Speaker 2: born around seventeen forty five in Ebo, part of modern
Speaker 2: day Nigeria, which was then part of the Kingdom of Benin,
Speaker 2: and although He claimed his village was only nominally controlled
Speaker 2: by the king, right that like, yeah, we have a king,
Speaker 2: but he's not really a factor in daily life, which
Speaker 2: is probably accurate. As a young boy, he'd never heard
Speaker 2: of white men, or Europeans, or even the ocean. His
Speaker 2: father was a village elder and held a high position
Speaker 2: in local government. As a child, allowed us seems to
Speaker 2: have had a keen eye for injustice. Because of his
Speaker 2: father's position. He spent a good deal of time watching
Speaker 2: court proceedings and later wrote that adultery for women was
Speaker 2: often punished by slavery or death. Quote. The men, however,
Speaker 2: do not preserve the same constancy to their wives which
Speaker 2: they expect from them. It's one thing you see Battaloda
Speaker 2: is that is he is a thinker. This is not
Speaker 2: a man who just accepts like, oh, yeah, adultery, you
Speaker 2: gotta kill a woman if she does that. He's a
Speaker 2: man who's like, but the guys are all cheating and
Speaker 2: nobody cares about that. It seems unfair. Yeah, he's an
Speaker 2: empathetic and intelligent man. He was aware of slavery from
Speaker 2: a very young age. You had to be in the
Speaker 2: part of Africa he lived because there are slave slavers
Speaker 2: running rampant. He later wrote about stout Mahogany colored men
Speaker 2: from the Southwest who traveled through town to trade firearms, gunpowder,
Speaker 2: and other goods. Quote, they always carry slaves through our land,
Speaker 2: but the strictest account is exacted of their manner of
Speaker 2: procuring them before they are suffered to pass. Sometimes indeed
Speaker 2: we sold slaves to them, but they were only prisoners
Speaker 2: of war or such among us that as had been
Speaker 2: convicted of kidnapping, or adultery or some other crimes which
Speaker 2: we esteemed heinous. Now, these are his recollections of how
Speaker 2: he thought that, how he justified things as a small child. Right,
Speaker 2: This is not how he feels about the matter as
Speaker 2: an adult. And in fact he cut it makes he
Speaker 2: as to clear in his autobiography that his belief that like, well,
Speaker 2: these guys, you know, they're not allowed to just take
Speaker 2: slaves willy nilly, right, you know, we make sure that
Speaker 2: they that they're not just that's not accurate. Right, That's
Speaker 2: the thing he learns, unfortunately not long later in his childhood. Right,
Speaker 2: and he does note at the time that like, well,
Speaker 2: you know, my dad told me that, yeah, it's Okay,
Speaker 2: we always make sure that you know, they're not just
Speaker 2: grabbing people off the street at random, you know, when
Speaker 2: they come through. But he knows, like they always carry
Speaker 2: these big empty sacks with them. I wonder what those are,
Speaker 2: four jeez for Christmas stuff. Yeah, he's a child, so
Speaker 2: he doesn't really see that as a warning sign until
Speaker 2: it was too late. Now there is like that there
Speaker 2: is some basic knowledge that they are in danger, because
Speaker 2: he writes that during the day, when the grown people
Speaker 2: leave town to work the fields, the kids would assemble
Speaker 2: to play, and at least one kid at any given
Speaker 2: time would have to stand watch, would like climb up
Speaker 2: a tree to watch for kidnappers who quote sometimes took
Speaker 2: those opportunities of our parents' absence to attack and carry
Speaker 2: off as many as they could seize. So, first off,
Speaker 2: you get a really good glimpse in Equiato's book as
Speaker 2: to like what the slave trade has done to daily
Speaker 2: life and like these small villages in this part of
Speaker 2: Africa where it's like, yeah, the kids just know that
Speaker 2: you always have to be aware that, like kidnappers might
Speaker 2: come and steal all of you. Yeah, yeah, that's a
Speaker 2: real danger. Yeah again, I'll make it up this time, no,
Speaker 2: he writes, quote, one day, as I was watching at
Speaker 2: the top of a tree in our yard, I saw
Speaker 2: one of those people come into the yard of our
Speaker 2: next neighbor, but one to kidnap, there being so many
Speaker 2: stout young people in it. Immediately on this I gave
Speaker 2: the alarm of the rogue, and he was surrounded by
Speaker 2: the stoutest of them, who entangled him with cords that
Speaker 2: he could not escape till some of the grown people
Speaker 2: came and secured him. So this is, you know, a
Speaker 2: positive end. And this is his first direct encounter with slavers,
Speaker 2: but it's not going to be his last. Not long
Speaker 2: after this, he and his sister are minding the house
Speaker 2: while their parents are away. Two men and a woman
Speaker 2: jump over the walls, steal them both their mouths, and
Speaker 2: sprint off with them into the woods. For the next
Speaker 2: few days, they're taken through the woods, bound and gagged.
Speaker 2: During the day, he wrote that the only comfort we
Speaker 2: had was in being in each other's arms all that
Speaker 2: night and bathing each other with our tears, And this
Speaker 2: single comfort was not to last. Long quote. The next
Speaker 2: day proved of a greater sorrow than I had yet experienced.
Speaker 2: For My sister and I were then separated while we
Speaker 2: lay clasped in each other's arms. It was in vain
Speaker 2: that we besought them not to part us. She was
Speaker 2: torn from me and immediately carried away. Well, I was
Speaker 2: left in a state of distraction not to be described.
Speaker 2: I cried and grieved continually, and for several days I
Speaker 2: did not eat anything but what they forced into my
Speaker 2: mouth so horrific. It's pretty bad. Yeah, he's taken first
Speaker 2: to a village several days away while he is purchased
Speaker 2: by a local chieftain. And that's the thing he's this
Speaker 2: is not like a often you're taken straight to the
Speaker 2: coast where you're sold. You're now a slave and you
Speaker 2: will be sold around like a lot of these people.
Speaker 2: Do just stay in Africa, right and maybe get free
Speaker 2: or maybe don't. But he is a slave two local
Speaker 2: Africans for a while.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: His first owner is a local chieftain who treats him
Speaker 2: really well and he thinks has adopted him into the family. Right,
Speaker 2: he works as a blacksmith assistant. He spends the next
Speaker 2: month gaining their trust, and his plan is I want
Speaker 2: to escape, right, It's like I'm going to get their
Speaker 2: trust so I can make an escape attempt. This doesn't
Speaker 2: pan out, though, and he's ultimately bought and sold several times.
Speaker 2: He learns three languages as he journeys across Africa, and
Speaker 2: he ends up in a coastal village where he is
Speaker 2: sold onto a slave ship. Now, up to this point,
Speaker 2: he always emphasizes and it's kind of a weird part
Speaker 2: of the book, but he's really emphatic. I was always
Speaker 2: treated well. People were not mean. I mean what they're
Speaker 2: doing selling separated from his sister, selling, But they're not cruel.
Speaker 2: They're not yelling at him, they're not treating him as
Speaker 2: a subhuman. Right, They're just doing this awful thing to him.
Speaker 2: And as an eleven year old, it's really weird for
Speaker 2: him because they're being so nice while they do this
Speaker 2: awful thing. Like it's kind of a headbuck, right. And yeah,
Speaker 2: he generally enjoys good food and is kept relatively healthy
Speaker 2: this whole time. Right, And this ends as soon as
Speaker 2: he's sold onto a slaving vessel. Right. Quote. I was
Speaker 2: soon put down under the decks, and there I received
Speaker 2: such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never
Speaker 2: experienced in my life. So that with the loathsomeness of
Speaker 2: the stench and crying together, I became so sick and
Speaker 2: low that I was not able to eat, nor had
Speaker 2: I the least desired to taste anything. I now wished
Speaker 2: for the last friend death to relieve me. But soon
Speaker 2: to my grief, two of the white men offered me eatables,
Speaker 2: and on my refusing to eat, one of them held
Speaker 2: me fast by the hands and laid me across I
Speaker 2: think the windlass and tied my feet, while the other
Speaker 2: flogged me severely. I had never experienced anything of this
Speaker 2: kind before, and although not being used to water, I
Speaker 2: naturally feared that element the first time I saw it.
Speaker 2: Yet nevertheless, could I have got over the nettings. I
Speaker 2: would have jumped over the side, but I could not.
Speaker 2: And besides, the crew used to watch us very closely,
Speaker 2: who were not chained down on the decks, lest we
Speaker 2: should leap into the water. And I have seen some
Speaker 2: of these poor African prisoners most severely cut for attempting
Speaker 2: to do so, and hourly whipped for night eating. Now
Speaker 2: he is again eleven as this is happening to him.
Speaker 2: This is about seventeen fifty six, when he's transported first
Speaker 2: to the West Indies, where he witnesses the auctioning of
Speaker 2: slaves to plantation owners. But he's not sold himself because
Speaker 2: he's really sick, like he's just not worth anything in
Speaker 2: the eyes of these people, because he seems like he's dying.
Speaker 2: So the Dutch take him back on board the slave
Speaker 2: ship and take him to America, and he gets better
Speaker 2: enough during that time that he's sold to a Virginia
Speaker 2: plantation owner. He gets kind of, within this horrible situation,
Speaker 2: one of the better jobs you can get, where he's
Speaker 2: working as a house slave, so he's able to kind
Speaker 2: of he's not laboring in the field. He's able to
Speaker 2: recover his strength more effectively, right, because he's it's less
Speaker 2: physically nightmarish work, and he gets better enough, and he's
Speaker 2: just proves to be very intelligent too, so he's got
Speaker 2: a lot of value to him. And he's sold again
Speaker 2: to the captain of a British merchant vessel named Henry Pascal.
Speaker 2: It's Pascal who gives him his European name, Gustavas Vasa,
Speaker 2: and sometimes you'll see him and he would go by
Speaker 2: Vasa periodically throughout his life as well as Equiano, right
Speaker 2: but yeah, Pascal gives him this name and takes him
Speaker 2: to England, and for a while things seem to be
Speaker 2: going really well. He's taught about Christianity. He makes like
Speaker 2: a friend with a local boy who's about his age,
Speaker 2: like a white boy, and they're actually very good friends.
Speaker 2: The kid dies like two years later, but they like
Speaker 2: he's adamant that, like, no, this kid was like really,
Speaker 2: we were very close. He helps him learn English, and
Speaker 2: because he's so smart, Equiano attracts wealthy British patrons, these
Speaker 2: like two I think older ladies pay for him to
Speaker 2: go to school, and so he's obviously kind of thinking
Speaker 2: I've lucked out. I might just kind of get out
Speaker 2: of the whole slavery thing and be like English, right,
Speaker 2: like maybe that's my future. Because Cascal seems to be
Speaker 2: treating him well, He's got these local ladies who are
Speaker 2: like paying for you know, he seems to have fallen
Speaker 2: into a good situation. And then out of nowhere, Pascal
Speaker 2: takes him back to see right, and so they spend
Speaker 2: some time on voyages together and he's still kind of
Speaker 2: being treated more like a servant. They're engaged in like
Speaker 2: pirates attacks several times like, he helps defend the ship
Speaker 2: in several desperate battles. They travel the oceans of the world,
Speaker 2: and Alouda says that at this time he feels a
Speaker 2: growing loyalty and affection for Pascal, who he believes has
Speaker 2: been so kind to him, because he plans to free
Speaker 2: him one day, right, So he he's really like as
Speaker 2: loyal to this dude as he can because he thinks that, like,
Speaker 2: I found a good one, right Unfortunately he has not,
Speaker 2: that is not the case. In an article for documenting
Speaker 2: the American South on Aquiano, Jin Williamson summarizes he is
Speaker 2: shocked at an abrupt betrayal during a layover in England,
Speaker 2: when Pascal has him roughly seized and forced into a barge.
Speaker 2: Pascal sells Equiano to Captain James Duran, the captain of
Speaker 2: a ship bound for the West Indies. Days by his
Speaker 2: sudden change in fortunes, Equiano argues with Captain Duran that
Speaker 2: Pascal could not sell him to me, nor to anyone else.
Speaker 2: I have served him many years, and he has taken
Speaker 2: all my wages in prize money. I have been baptized,
Speaker 2: and by the laws of the land, no man has
Speaker 2: a right to sell me. After Duran tells Equiano he
Speaker 2: talks too much English and threatens to subdue him. Equiano
Speaker 2: begins service under a new master, for he is too
Speaker 2: well convinced of his power over me to doubt what
Speaker 2: he's said. Right, So he's like, but like, I did
Speaker 2: all the stuff I'm supposed to do. I feel like
Speaker 2: I'm English now. And he's like, if you keep talking English,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna beat the shit out of you, right, Like
Speaker 2: that's what happens. Yeah, So he's taken back to the
Speaker 2: West Indies. He endures the nightmare trip down the Middle
Speaker 2: Passage a second time, which is just an unthinkable hell
Speaker 2: to have to do twice. He writes of seeing white
Speaker 2: members of the crew gratify their brutal passion with females
Speaker 2: not ten years old on the journey, right. In other words,
Speaker 2: they're just raping any big female that is on the boat, right.
Speaker 2: They don't care about age, you know, Like that's the
Speaker 2: kind of men who are doing this, right. Yeah. Once
Speaker 2: he arrives in the Caribbean, he is horrified that he
Speaker 2: will be sold to a plantation into a life of
Speaker 2: quote bondage, misery, stripes, and chains. But here again he
Speaker 2: meets with this crazy good luck with it's this weird
Speaker 2: situation where he's in like the like this horror the
Speaker 2: worst least lucky situation he could be in, but within
Speaker 2: that situation, he has crazy luck. Like I don't know
Speaker 2: how else.
Speaker 3: To describe it, because it's like one in ten million, right,
Speaker 3: Like this happens to millions and millions of people. One
Speaker 3: of them had this unique set of circumstances, and we're
Speaker 3: uniquely intelligent to be able to, yes, to take advantage
Speaker 3: of it in the way that he was, right, take
Speaker 3: advantages a wrong word.
Speaker 2: But like well yeah, but like like even people who
Speaker 2: would have been as smart but maybe aren't good with languages,
Speaker 2: probably wouldn't have had the success he has. Right, that's
Speaker 2: a separate kind event. Like he's just a bunch of
Speaker 2: shit happens, and he's a good writer. He is a
Speaker 2: really good writer. Yeah, yeah, maybe not I don't know
Speaker 2: about at this point, but yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: No, But there's not much shit from that period that
Speaker 3: I can assign in whole to undergraduates in twenty twenty
Speaker 3: five and have them being like that's fucked, Like it
Speaker 3: makes people feel things still centuries later.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really powerful. Yeah, I do really recommend reading
Speaker 2: it because, among other things, it's just there's a lot
Speaker 2: I mean, the early portions of the book are just
Speaker 2: a lot about life in that part of Africa at
Speaker 2: the time that you're not gonna run into a lot
Speaker 2: of first hand accounts of.
Speaker 3: No, it's interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So again within this horrible situation, he gets crazy
Speaker 2: lucky again because the next person to buy him is
Speaker 2: a Quaker, and again most a lot of Quakers are
Speaker 2: anti slavery. This guy, Robert King, clearly isn't totally against slavery,
Speaker 2: but he's also still a Quaker, right, And he's like
Speaker 2: a merchant or something. I don't know exactly what he's
Speaker 2: there to do, but he sees he once recognized as Wow,
Speaker 2: this kid is smart as hell, and he's he already
Speaker 2: speaks a ton of languages. There's a lot I can
Speaker 2: have him do. So the King starts having Equiana work
Speaker 2: a bunch of different jobs, and he starts like basically
Speaker 2: assigning him out to like subcontract and with other guys.
Speaker 2: And some of these guys are like fairly decent and
Speaker 2: are like, hey, what if we hired you to do
Speaker 2: extra side work and pay you personally for it, and
Speaker 2: King is like, yeah, you know, I have no problem
Speaker 2: with you making money on the side, right, why not?
Speaker 2: And so these guys like both teach him how to
Speaker 2: train him up and help him like learn these different trades,
Speaker 2: and he's able to make side money. And so he
Speaker 2: takes this side money and he starts buying and selling
Speaker 2: goods with the money that he makes, right and basically
Speaker 2: turning his salary into even more money. And he does
Speaker 2: well enough at this that in seventeen sixty six, when
Speaker 2: he's arout twenty one, he's able to buy his freedom,
Speaker 2: and he does. Robert King allows him to do this,
Speaker 2: which he didn't have to do. So again he's he
Speaker 2: got into like the luckiest part of a bad situation
Speaker 2: he could be and yeah, he's able to he becomes
Speaker 2: a free man. He's free after this point. So he
Speaker 2: spends the next several years taking work on merchant ships
Speaker 2: because that's what he knows how to do, and he
Speaker 2: travels around the world. In seventeen seventy three, he becomes
Speaker 2: one of the first Africans to visit the Arcticano wrote
Speaker 2: and corresponded widely and generally he's like an adventurer. This
Speaker 2: guy lives an amazing life, like he's one of the
Speaker 2: most incredible people who ever lived. Now the whole time, though,
Speaker 2: is his life is going well, right, he remains troubled
Speaker 2: with the inhuman institution of slavery that had robbed him
Speaker 2: of his childhood and his family. You know, he knows
Speaker 2: this is still going on. He's still angry about it,
Speaker 2: and so he starts meeting during the times when he's
Speaker 2: back in London, he starts meeting with and befriending some
Speaker 2: of the small number of Englishmen who opposed the institution
Speaker 2: of slavery. And after reading that op ed, he comes
Speaker 2: across this article about what's happened on the Zorg. He's
Speaker 2: sick with horror and fury at what has happened. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's just an awful thing, and he has personal experience
Speaker 2: with being on those boats, so it's much He knows
Speaker 2: much better how awful it is than an average person
Speaker 2: reading it, and he wants to do something. However, he's
Speaker 2: also a practical guy. He knows that even a freed
Speaker 2: black man has zero political power and influence in England
Speaker 2: at the time, so if he's going to have an
Speaker 2: impact on the situation, he's going to have to be
Speaker 2: cunning about it. One of Equiano's friends is a writer
Speaker 2: and a lawyer who's also like an early abolitionist named Granville.
Speaker 2: Sharp and Sharp is going to be the second of
Speaker 2: our heroes for this episode. One of the coolest dudes
Speaker 2: to ever live, really like just an actual great man.
Speaker 2: Born in Durham in seventeen thirty five, Granville was the
Speaker 2: middle Ish child of fourteen. Five of his eight older
Speaker 2: brothers survived early childhood, which means his parents were better
Speaker 2: than average. His family was working class, and as a
Speaker 2: youth he was apprenticed to the owner of a fabric store. However,
Speaker 2: he turned out to be one of those kids who's
Speaker 2: just like irrepressibly smart, right like he is not going
Speaker 2: to work at the fabric store, you know in Granville
Speaker 2: this expresses itself this he's a debate kid. He's the
Speaker 2: good kind of debate kid, but he has this pathological
Speaker 2: need to debate with his peers to the extent he
Speaker 2: is so committed to this that he makes a Jewish
Speaker 2: friend and they start having like good natured arguments about religion.
Speaker 2: And because he wants to argue better with his Jewish friend,
Speaker 2: he learns Hebrew and becomes a fluent speaker of me
Speaker 2: in order to argue about like the Tora with his
Speaker 2: Jewish friend.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's perfect, totally. Yeah.
Speaker 2: When he makes a friend who's a member of a
Speaker 2: weird Greek Christian sect, he learns Greek for the same reason.
Speaker 2: Like again, like Equioto, He's one of these guys. He
Speaker 2: just picks up languages. He's just crazy smart. Yeah. In
Speaker 2: seventeen fifty seven, he gets a job as a clerk
Speaker 2: in the Ordnance Office, which is, so far as I
Speaker 2: can tell, is like a mid level bureaucratic position. This
Speaker 2: leaves him with ample free time, which he spends idly
Speaker 2: studying the law and presumably learning more languages in order
Speaker 2: to argue with his friends. One of his older brothers
Speaker 2: is a doctor who hold and you get the feeling
Speaker 2: this is like a family of good people because his
Speaker 2: older brother, the doctor, runs a free clinic out of
Speaker 2: his house for the poor of London, right yeah, and
Speaker 2: Granville periodically will just like show up to hang out
Speaker 2: with him and his patients and like talk. There's not
Speaker 2: TV at the time, what else are you gonna do? Right?
Speaker 3: That podcast? No podcasts?
Speaker 2: Right? Yeah? So Granville shows up one day in seventeen
Speaker 2: sixty five, the year before Equiano bias his freedom, and
Speaker 2: he happens to meet a black and slaved person named
Speaker 2: Jonathan Strong. Strong had been taken from Barbados to London
Speaker 2: by his owner, slave trader, David Lyle. He was fifteen
Speaker 2: or sixteen when Lyle has him baptized. Now, religion is
Speaker 2: confusing at the best of times, and Strong, like many
Speaker 2: enslaved people, misunderstood the purpose of baptism and was under
Speaker 2: the impression that now that this was done, he was
Speaker 2: a free person because he had been baptized. Right, you
Speaker 2: can't hold Christian as a slave, right, that'd be fucked up.
Speaker 2: Pretty weird, pretty weird. And so he tells Lyle, well, like,
Speaker 2: I'm free now, right, And Lyle, being a slave owner
Speaker 2: and trader, doesn't have a great control over his anger,
Speaker 2: and just immediately pistol whips this adolescent boy nearly to death.
Speaker 2: He beats him so badly with the butt of a
Speaker 2: handgun that Strong goes temporarily blind and can barely walk
Speaker 2: up right. So, and you get the feeling he just
Speaker 2: loses his temper and beats this kid nearly to death
Speaker 2: because He's immediately like, oh shit, I killed him, and
Speaker 2: he just tosses him out onto the street like a
Speaker 2: piece of trash. He's like, well, he's not worth anything anymore. Bye.
Speaker 2: So somehow this dying boy manages to crawl or find help,
Speaker 2: and he gets to Granville's brother's free clinic where his
Speaker 2: immediate injuries are treated, but it's clear he needs more treatment,
Speaker 2: and it just happens to be on a day that
Speaker 2: like Granville Sharp is there with his brother, and so
Speaker 2: he and his brother take Jonathan to a nearby hospital
Speaker 2: and pull their money to pay for him to stay
Speaker 2: there for four months and recover. And when he's released,
Speaker 2: because they're just treating him like a freedman at this point,
Speaker 2: they find him paying work with a Quaker pharmacist they knew,
Speaker 2: so they get this guy to the hospital. He heals,
Speaker 2: he recovers pretty well, and they find him a job
Speaker 2: and he starts living a life right like he's an independent,
Speaker 2: free person making money For a year in change. Things
Speaker 2: are pretty good for Strow. But then in seventeen sixty seven,
Speaker 2: his former owner Lyle sees Jonathan on the street and
Speaker 2: is like, he's alive and healthy, and he gets really
Speaker 2: fucking angry. How dare that boy have the temerity to
Speaker 2: survive my beatings and not hand himself back over to me.
Speaker 2: He stole himself, Basically, he stole himself. Yeah, so Lyle
Speaker 2: doesn't want to deal with Strong anymore, but he works.
Speaker 2: He says like, Hey, I own this guy and he's
Speaker 2: really healthy. You just got to go get him if
Speaker 2: you give me thirty pounds. So he like sells this
Speaker 2: guy and then he hires slave catchers to abduct Strong
Speaker 2: out of his new life. Yeah, so you really stand up,
Speaker 2: gut great dude. Months of conflict, Well, Granville Sharp, who
Speaker 2: has been stranging the law, is like, you can't do this.
Speaker 2: He's a free man now. You can't make him leave.
Speaker 2: You can't take him to another foreign country, right, Like,
Speaker 2: you can't do that. So there's a conflict follows. There's
Speaker 2: like this goes on for a while before like the
Speaker 2: court case actually resolves, and at one point during the proceedings,
Speaker 2: Lyle challenges Sharp to a duel, and Sharp's like, let's
Speaker 2: settle this in court. Basically. At another point, lawyers that
Speaker 2: Granville consulted warned him that English law saw slaves's property
Speaker 2: even once they were taken onto English soil, and Sharp
Speaker 2: has a law a moment of horror where he's like,
Speaker 2: there's no way the laws of my beloved England are
Speaker 2: this bad. So he spends the next like two years
Speaker 2: making himself an expert in the law and fighting this case,
Speaker 2: fighting Lyle and the man Lyle had sold Strong to
Speaker 2: James care and he eventually wins Strong's legal defense, wins.
Speaker 2: This is a significant case in like British like legal history,
Speaker 2: and it's the kind of thing where they win Strong's freedom,
Speaker 2: but they don't get a ruling that alters English law
Speaker 2: and respect to the rights of enslaved people. Right, So
Speaker 2: it's good because Strong doesn't have to be sold into
Speaker 2: slavery again, but it also doesn't like, it doesn't go
Speaker 2: any further right, and Sharp is disappointed by this, and
Speaker 2: because by this point, after a two years of fighting
Speaker 2: this case and immersing himself in the law, Granville Sharp
Speaker 2: has become, in Sidharth Kara's words, the first British person
Speaker 2: to devote his life to the extirpation of slavery, and
Speaker 2: his influence actually goes beyond that. Though it's wild how
Speaker 2: influential this motherfucking dude is One of Sharp's overseas friends
Speaker 2: is an American of some notoriety named Benjamin Franklin, and
Speaker 2: in is oft time, Sharp had a habit when he
Speaker 2: wasn't fighting slavery, he would write essays that were often
Speaker 2: published as pamphlets or tracts, and he sends one of
Speaker 2: these pamphlets to his buddy Benjamin Franklin, which lays out
Speaker 2: Sharp's argument that Americans shouldn't be taxed if they don't
Speaker 2: have parliamentary representation.
Speaker 3: This dude's like at the center of the global history.
Speaker 2: It's fucking a mazing, Like, yeah, just writing a lot
Speaker 2: of letters and absolutely changing the forest of gum history.
Speaker 2: He's like a really smart Forest Gump.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, Forrest Gump done a whole lot of
Speaker 3: very more impressive stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, It's just I I didn't know much anything
Speaker 2: at all really about Grandville Sharp until I started this,
Speaker 2: and like, yeah, we should probably talk more about this guy.
Speaker 3: Yes, dude, probably should be on money or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, twenty pound note.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, we got some people who already shouldn't be
Speaker 3: on money. Probably switch them out. Yeah, it'll be fine.
Speaker 3: It's like those people, I'm sure, I mean, Robert you
Speaker 3: and I have experienced this together. When when you are
Speaker 3: working in conflict zones, sometimes you will often the people
Speaker 3: who you work with are like the most remarkable people,
Speaker 3: Like you speak several languages, and they and like, yeah, you.
Speaker 2: Taught ourselves yourself Chinese because you were bored after learning English.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and yeah, like your grasp of our culture and
Speaker 3: politics and the way we talk it is perfect. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and you're the same in five other languages. And you
Speaker 3: can all you about domestic issues in the US with
Speaker 3: me with a great degree of intelligence to many American people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and who have like devoted their life in between
Speaker 2: like the stuff they're doing with you to like rescuing
Speaker 2: other people and like helping to provide like emergency medical
Speaker 2: care or get food to different like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you'll find out that Yeah, on Sundays they
Speaker 3: rescue puppies from fucking burnie buildings, and like it just
Speaker 3: fits perfectly with who that person is.
Speaker 2: I'm so tired after my work week. I just sit
Speaker 2: on the couch in the weekend.
Speaker 3: Yeah, how do I become more like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Grandville Sharp is one of those like, well, fuck,
Speaker 2: I'm not getting enough done guys, right and equianoist. To
Speaker 2: be honest, they're both like Jesus Christ, Like I wouldn't
Speaker 2: believe you if you were in a story. So uh.
Speaker 2: Sharpe's primary focus in the years after the Strong case
Speaker 2: was in expanding his studies as a lawyer so he
Speaker 2: could make an unimpeachable legal case for banning slavery. In
Speaker 2: seventeen sixty nine, he publishes a tract titled A Representation
Speaker 2: of the injustice and dangerous tendency of tolerating slavery or
Speaker 2: of admitting the least claim of private property in the
Speaker 2: persons of Men in England. He wasn't good at titling.
Speaker 2: He was good at a lot of stuff, but not titles.
Speaker 2: This became one of the first popular arguments against the
Speaker 2: system of slavery in England, not just arguing that it
Speaker 2: was a moral but that it was foreign to the
Speaker 2: spirit of an and intention of British law and cultural values.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: That's a key part of his argument is that like
Speaker 2: this isn't really English, right, Like we shouldn't based on
Speaker 2: the things we say about our shared values. This is
Speaker 2: not a natural thing for us to be doing. Right,
Speaker 2: Why are we so committed to this? Is it just
Speaker 2: venal profit it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I wonder if there's a modern analogy for that, roebit.
Speaker 2: What's interesting here, though, is that Sharp is not just
Speaker 2: wish casting a legal argument, right. His extensive study of
Speaker 2: the law had found precedent as far back as fifteen
Speaker 2: sixty nine for the assertion that slavery was not legal
Speaker 2: on British soil. Now, I'm not going to go into
Speaker 2: detail about centuries old British court rulings and rulings of
Speaker 2: like kings and shit, but there are cases from the
Speaker 2: sixteen hundreds to the seventeen hundreds that back up this argument.
Speaker 2: And one thing that was definitely true is that no
Speaker 2: law was ever passed in England to make it legal
Speaker 2: to own Africans. That's never there's never like a law
Speaker 2: that just says you can do this. Yeah, people just
Speaker 2: start doing it and they're like, well, this is property.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's happening though.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The best pro slavery advocates could do was point
Speaker 2: out a seventeen twenty nine legal opinion in which an
Speaker 2: Attorney general had argued that the legal status of a
Speaker 2: slave didn't change just because they set foot in England, right,
Speaker 2: which is something but it's not the same as like
Speaker 2: there being a lot saying you could do this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, right, you can't point it as a slavery act,
Speaker 3: yeah exactly. Even like when we go back in American history,
Speaker 3: like when we're looking for like when shuttle slavery begins,
Speaker 3: you can see cases where there are like indentured servants,
Speaker 3: right and as a form of punishment that terms of
Speaker 3: service are extended. But then it appears that the black
Speaker 3: people's terms of service are not extended, presumed because they
Speaker 3: are assumed to be in servitude for their entire life
Speaker 3: by nature of who they are. Right, But we can't
Speaker 3: point to a this is when they decided it was
Speaker 3: going to be like that, and those were the rules.
Speaker 2: Right right yep. So Granville comes into the seventeen seventies
Speaker 2: well armed to argue that slavery is not really legal. Next,
Speaker 2: per Mike Kay's piece for antislavery dot Org in seventeen
Speaker 2: seventy two, Sharp defended James Somerset, a slave who had
Speaker 2: escaped and been recaptured. This proved to be a crucial
Speaker 2: test case, as Sharpe argued that slavery itself was unlawful
Speaker 2: in Britain. Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice and presiding judge,
Speaker 2: was reluctant to reach a conclusion on whether the right
Speaker 2: to property outweighed the right to freedom, and tried to
Speaker 2: persuade the parties to settle out of court. When this failed,
Speaker 2: he attempted to word his decision so that he freed
Speaker 2: Somerset without setting a precedent. Despite Mansfield's efforts, most observers,
Speaker 2: including other judges, thought that the effect of the judgment
Speaker 2: was to free slaves that were brought to Britain, and
Speaker 2: that this provided a legal avenue for many slaves to
Speaker 2: obtain their freedom. So this is the kind of the
Speaker 2: case where Mansfield is doing everything he can for this
Speaker 2: not to have any wider effect. But all people here
Speaker 2: is that like, well this guy got freed, right, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I feel like this makes me free, right. So large
Speaker 2: numbers of enslaved people in England start fleeing their masters
Speaker 2: in an errant belief that slavery had ended on the island.
Speaker 2: Many abolitionists who misunderstood the ruling celebrated it as a
Speaker 2: sign of the fundamental justice and equality of English law.
Speaker 2: Judge Mansfield had to issue a note that the case
Speaker 2: was only really relevant to a specific niche situation, which
Speaker 2: caused Ben Franklin to joke that English abolitionists were celebrating
Speaker 2: the majesty of their legal system for its virtue and
Speaker 2: quote setting free a single negro right where he's like, okay, guys,
Speaker 2: like it's good, but like maybe calm down a little bit,
Speaker 2: you know, Yeah, this is this is one guy. There's
Speaker 2: still a lot of guys. It's did a net negative
Speaker 2: now this this judge, the Earl of Mansfield, is a
Speaker 2: really interesting guy because not only is he the judge
Speaker 2: in the Somerset case, he's going to be the judge
Speaker 2: in the Zorg case. This isn't weird because he's one
Speaker 2: of the most significant figures in the whole history of
Speaker 2: English law. He's the judge for a lot of big
Speaker 2: cases at the time, right. But he's a particularly interesting
Speaker 2: guy to rule on cases like this because he has
Speaker 2: no child of his own, but he's raising his illegitimate niece,
Speaker 2: Dido Bell as his daughter, and she is a black
Speaker 2: woman of mixed race. Right, So he is simultaneously repeatedly
Speaker 2: being like, enslaved people are property and my ruling should
Speaker 2: not be seen to free anyone, and is also clearly
Speaker 2: capable of understanding that they're human beings because he is
Speaker 2: a black woman, right, And there's all there are a
Speaker 2: couple of moments where because he's never talks in a
Speaker 2: way that's very sympathetic to this, but there's a couple
Speaker 2: of rulings where it's like, well, maybe this is where
Speaker 2: his sympathy moved him a little bit. Not to give
Speaker 2: him much credit, because I don't think he's a very
Speaker 2: nice guy, but it's a really he's a really interesting
Speaker 2: judge too, trying this case right now, and again he
Speaker 2: is not considered a friendly judge. Sharp considers him a
Speaker 2: deeply hostile judge in fact, and in the Zorg case,
Speaker 2: Mansfield has no trouble ruling that enslaved Africans are property anyway.
Speaker 2: By the time we hit seventeen eighty three, Sharp is
Speaker 2: well established as the guy to talk to if you're
Speaker 2: trying to defend or create writes for enslaved people in England. Right,
Speaker 2: And so it's not hard to see why our friend
Speaker 2: a lot of Equiano would like Granville Sharp right, seems
Speaker 2: like a pretty natural friendship. And so once Equiano reads
Speaker 2: that article about the Zorg case, he does the seventeen
Speaker 2: hundreds equivalent of pasting a link to a news article
Speaker 2: in the group chat, and he like sends a copy
Speaker 2: to his friend Granville Sharp. Granville writes in his diary,
Speaker 2: Gustavas Vasa called on me with an account of one
Speaker 2: hundred and thirty negroes being thrown alive into the sea
Speaker 2: from on board an English slave ship. And this is
Speaker 2: the start of a process that is going to like
Speaker 2: terminate in the creation of the first mass move against
Speaker 2: slavery in British history, right, Like this is the inciting instant,
Speaker 2: is Equiano sending this letter to Granville Sharp, So Sharp
Speaker 2: hits the ground running. He starts meeting with the lawyers
Speaker 2: who represented the insurers in that case and is like, Hey,
Speaker 2: I think we can file an action against the Gregson
Speaker 2: Syndicate and request a new trial. And I think we
Speaker 2: can win that new trial because we didn't really have
Speaker 2: a full trial last time. If we really make a
Speaker 2: thing of this, we can make them go through discovery
Speaker 2: and we can look at the log books and the
Speaker 2: other documentation kept by the crew of the Zorg, right,
Speaker 2: and we can see did they really need to kill
Speaker 2: those people?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 2: Yeah? He also starts barraging influential figures in the country
Speaker 2: with letters demanding the Admiralty Court charge the crewmen of
Speaker 2: the Zorg with murder. He's going to do this the
Speaker 2: rest of his life. It never works, but he does
Speaker 2: keep trying, right. Most of his efforts don't bear fruit,
Speaker 2: but he succeeds in getting a hearing over a motion
Speaker 2: to set a new trial, and this hearing is scheduled
Speaker 2: for May twenty first, seventeen eighty three, less than two
Speaker 2: months after the first trial. Greg's and v. Gilbert, which
Speaker 2: is the hearing is not going to be a tiny,
Speaker 2: largely ignored case. It's going to be a major court thing,
Speaker 2: with exacting notes taken on court proceedings and a huge
Speaker 2: amount of media attention covering every twist and turn. Sharp
Speaker 2: is not technically the lawyer here, but he's basically acting
Speaker 2: as an advisor to the defense council, which consisted of
Speaker 2: three lawyers. The most important of these was a fellow
Speaker 2: named Samuel Haywood. And Haywood's a really interesting person. He
Speaker 2: was born in Liverpool in the seventeen fifties. He went
Speaker 2: to Cambridge and he comes from like a very rich family, right,
Speaker 2: I mean he goes to Cambridge, right, and he's rich
Speaker 2: because his dad, Benjamin is a slave merchant in Liverpool
Speaker 2: and his younger brother, also Benjamin, Benjamin Arthur, is a
Speaker 2: slave merchant in Liverpool. And over like the years they'd
Speaker 2: been doing this, something like one hundred and thirty different
Speaker 2: slave voyages had been financed and operated by the Heywood family. Right,
Speaker 2: they had transported at least a According to Sidharth Kara,
Speaker 2: they had transported something like forty two thousand enslaved people,
Speaker 2: like over the course of their time in this industry.
Speaker 2: And in fact, the Heywoods had invested in at least
Speaker 2: one slave ship with William Grigson with like the Grigson Syndicate.
Speaker 3: Right, Oh wow, Yeah.
Speaker 2: So this is a kid whose money and who's child
Speaker 2: like schooling and stuff is paid for by slave money,
Speaker 2: and he's an abolitionist by now. He fundamentally objects to
Speaker 2: the slave trade, right, and so he just he like
Speaker 2: when he's representing the underwriters in this case, he is
Speaker 2: probably pissing off his family. So it's just very interesting, Right,
Speaker 2: Chris is a kid from slave money who's like, nah,
Speaker 2: this is bad nah r. Just if anyone ever says
Speaker 2: people who grew up in that culture, couldn't know what
Speaker 2: was wrong.
Speaker 3: Like, yeah, yeah, dude, this guy here's a dude, I'm.
Speaker 2: Not I don't know that if he was like a committed,
Speaker 2: full on abolitionist, because a lot of these guys were
Speaker 2: just anti the slave trade and thought that that was
Speaker 2: the like the Middle Passage stuff with the trianglear was
Speaker 2: the worst part of it. But that's still a better
Speaker 2: than not being against that, right, it's a step yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's an unusual position still in the brave
Speaker 3: one to us at that time, right, right, if you're
Speaker 3: visiting a whole family a slave trader is yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So from the jump, there are some uncomfortable tensions
Speaker 2: behind the scenes. In this case, the insurers and their
Speaker 2: counsel benefited from Granville Sharp's lobbying and legal mind, but
Speaker 2: they're not on the same side precisely. The insurers are
Speaker 2: slavery profiteers. They don't want the trade to end. They
Speaker 2: don't want abolition yeah yeah, making money off of it, right,
Speaker 2: they just don't want to pay money. In this case,
Speaker 2: Sharp is on board with them because he also doesn't
Speaker 2: want Gregson to get a bunch of money for killing
Speaker 2: these people or for his people killing these people, but
Speaker 2: he also sees this case fundamentally as a way to
Speaker 2: set further precedents on the road to ending the slave trade. Right,
Speaker 2: he is thinking about this from the jump that that
Speaker 2: I am doing this because it's a step to something better.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: Judge Mansfield tries to deny that possibility from the outset
Speaker 2: of the trial, insisting that this case is purely regarding
Speaker 2: the insurance policy on the Zong or the zoo. Mansfield
Speaker 2: insists the case of the slaves was the same as
Speaker 2: if horses had been thrown overboard, and for the most part,
Speaker 2: the actual arguments in the case do not rely on
Speaker 2: enslaved Africans having more rights than a horse. Right. That
Speaker 2: is kind of what's going on here. The central legal
Speaker 2: question is not was it bad that they killed these people?
Speaker 2: It's did these people have to die because disasters that
Speaker 2: the Zorg's crew were not in control of had caused
Speaker 2: a situation where it was impossible to keep them alive?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: Is this a situation where there was no other option,
Speaker 2: where people were going to die one way or the other,
Speaker 2: and they were trying to save a portion of the
Speaker 2: of the crew and the cargo or was this a
Speaker 2: case where the people operating the ship had fucked up
Speaker 2: constantly and unnecessarily murdered a bunch of people and were
Speaker 2: now trying to get insurance money to cover up the
Speaker 2: fact that they fucked up? Right? Which of these is
Speaker 2: what happened here?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: And to be clear, if you approach the case of
Speaker 2: the Zork from just that standpoint, ignoring the crime against himanity,
Speaker 2: the gregs and Syndicate and its employees are in the
Speaker 2: wrong right because they did fuck up repeatedly and horribly. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, you do not have to be like morally
Speaker 2: against Slaver to be like, well, but like, no, guys
Speaker 2: didn't know what the fuck you were doing. You just
Speaker 2: threw them over. But you had four hundred gallons of
Speaker 2: water on the boat.
Speaker 3: Yeh uh.
Speaker 2: You know who else has a lot of water? Hm?
Speaker 3: I can make a guess.
Speaker 2: Yeah the spot. This podcast is sponsored entirely by the
Speaker 2: Pistachio Farmers of Central California. Jesus, you know, yeah, pistachios.
Speaker 2: We've got enough water probably Yeah?
Speaker 3: Fuck the Colorado River.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Actually, it's doing okay right now, happy for it
Speaker 2: at an all time high, which means climate change is soft.
Speaker 3: Oh good, I'm glad it'd be worried about that.
Speaker 2: Yep, we did it, and we're back so diligent cross examination.
Speaker 2: You know, early in the court proceedings, here comes across
Speaker 2: a bunch of examples of the crew of the Zorg
Speaker 2: fucking up hideously, right, it finds out because they're talking
Speaker 2: to Stubbs and they're talking to that to his first mate,
Speaker 2: and Stubbs admits, like a bunch of shit he shouldn't
Speaker 2: on the stand including it, like wait, wait, you guys
Speaker 2: sailed past other islands that had water but didn't because
Speaker 2: you were like worried that they might have been taken
Speaker 2: by like an enemy who would take your boat, but
Speaker 2: you didn't know. And he just went past the islands
Speaker 2: that were full of water. And then he admits that, like, well,
Speaker 2: we thought we had enough water when we passed those islands,
Speaker 2: but then we looked inside and realized that the water
Speaker 2: barrels weren't as full as we thought. It was like,
Speaker 2: you didn't check on your water. You didn't check to
Speaker 2: see if you had enough water. It seems like a
Speaker 2: pretty important thing to check. Yeah. Likewise, the lawyers point
Speaker 2: out that the Gregson sindicate had a responsibility to hire
Speaker 2: a competent captain. Not only was Collins would not that,
Speaker 2: but when he got sick, he passed on command to
Speaker 2: a demonstrably incompetent man. When a skilled sailor and navigator
Speaker 2: was locked in his room forbidden from doing his job,
Speaker 2: it was not the sea's fault or the underwriter's responsibility
Speaker 2: if the syndicate hired a captain who couldn't And this
Speaker 2: is a line from the court case, tell Hispaniola from Jamaica, Wow,
Speaker 2: burn on the dead.
Speaker 3: Guy good in the eighteenth century.
Speaker 2: Now, much of the case came down to the fact
Speaker 2: that further interrogation of the ship's stores and the actual
Speaker 2: documentation of their journey showed that when they landed in
Speaker 2: Jamaica they had days of water left, and if they'd
Speaker 2: been close to running out, there were again multiple islands
Speaker 2: they could have gone to to get their water within
Speaker 2: a day or so. In addition to that, on the stand,
Speaker 2: Stubbs revealed that it had rained several times near the
Speaker 2: end of the journey and he'd failed to have the
Speaker 2: crew collect rain water. Stubbs really continues to us, should
Speaker 2: we get water now, let's just kill some more guys sorry,
Speaker 2: kill some more women and children. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Fuck.
Speaker 2: So this case, which had been rushed through the first time,
Speaker 2: on second viewing seemed much more disturbing, even to skeptics
Speaker 2: like Mansfield. The dark question that hovered over the whole
Speaker 2: proceeding was this, if not out of necessity, why would
Speaker 2: Stubbs and the crew have thrown one hundred and thirty
Speaker 2: people overboard? And the answer that people kept thinking was
Speaker 2: probably the obvious one, is this, after a too long
Speaker 2: journey on a slave ship crammed with twice its maximum occupancy,
Speaker 2: without enough food or enough water, and disease and dimmick,
Speaker 2: many of the enslaved people on board were too sick
Speaker 2: and visibly ailing to fetch much of a price at auction.
Speaker 2: So if you just kill them, the insured value is
Speaker 2: higher than what they would sell for. Jeez, we don't
Speaker 2: know that that's what was going on, but this is
Speaker 2: what people start talking about, and it's not an unreasonable proposition. Yeah, no,
Speaker 2: pretty ghastly yeah yeah, ghostly right, And this changes the
Speaker 2: thinking of a lot of people like Mansfield, who are
Speaker 2: not abolitionists, but who are like, oh shit, but if, like,
Speaker 2: if we established this precedent, people might just start murdering
Speaker 2: ships full of enslaved people to just get the insurance money.
Speaker 2: And that seems like a nightmare, Like that's even bad
Speaker 2: to me, and I kind of suck ass, you know.
Speaker 2: So this fact is shaking even to guys like Judge Manfield,
Speaker 2: and he ruled quote to be sure, what mister Haywood
Speaker 2: has observed is a very material circumstance. So many negroes
Speaker 2: thrown overboard after the rain came, without any account of
Speaker 2: how they came to do it. It is so uncommon
Speaker 2: a case. I think, upon the ground of re examination,
Speaker 2: it ought to go to a new trial. And he
Speaker 2: grants a motion for retrial. Now this is never to be.
Speaker 2: There's not a second trial because William Grigson, head of
Speaker 2: the slaving syndicate, decides that a second trial is not
Speaker 2: go well, right, and it's just gonna waste money. So
Speaker 2: let's just cut our losses and return to operating the
Speaker 2: slave trade at a massive, massive level. His insurers celebrate
Speaker 2: their victory. But you could be forgiven for seeing that
Speaker 2: at this point the case is like an overall mixed
Speaker 2: bag or even a wash for the cause of abolitionism, right,
Speaker 2: because you know the people who one are still involved
Speaker 2: in the slaving industry. No one has attained any additional rights.
Speaker 2: No one's ruled that enslaved people are human beings. They're
Speaker 2: still the same as cargo. Right, how is this? You
Speaker 2: could see someone, especially like a political radical at the time,
Speaker 2: being like, this is the worst kind of incrementalism. You've
Speaker 2: achieved nothing. Right. You can see how someone might think
Speaker 2: that that is not the case. And in fact, part
Speaker 2: of why I think the story's important is it illustrates
Speaker 2: how critical small and seemingly pyrrhic victories can be in
Speaker 2: pursuit of sweeping social change. First off, well, there's no
Speaker 2: second trial. The fact that a retrial was grand means
Speaker 2: that slave merchants had been given a warning. You can't
Speaker 2: just kill people and claim their insurance money on them. Right.
Speaker 2: And then, as Sidharth Kara writes and the Zorg, even
Speaker 2: if just for a moment, the Africans who lay at
Speaker 2: the bottom of the ocean thousands away were seen as people,
Speaker 2: not property, and Kerr is arguing that this causes kind
Speaker 2: of a perceptual shift in a lot of people who
Speaker 2: can't help as they're hearing how horrible what this is,
Speaker 2: sympathize with these people who are still legally just property,
Speaker 2: and that that's an important shift. But the larger victory
Speaker 2: in the case was that it had started the process
Speaker 2: of gathering together and galvanizing great legal minds, writers and
Speaker 2: agitators towards pursuing an end to the slave trade in
Speaker 2: an organized fashion, right, And that's what we're going to
Speaker 2: talk about in part three. But I should conclude today
Speaker 2: by saying a little about our main villains for these episodes,
Speaker 2: William Grigson and Robert Stubbs. During the first case, Stubbs
Speaker 2: had high hopes of getting a job with the syndicate
Speaker 2: and perhaps even support to regain his lost gold by
Speaker 2: helping Grickson make good on the slaves that they'd killed.
Speaker 2: When this failed, he gets cut loose. Now Stubbs never
Speaker 2: makes it back to Africa. He scrapes together a meager
Speaker 2: living for the next few years, and he dies aged
Speaker 2: sixty and seventeen eighty seven. In his will, he gives
Speaker 2: gave his son George all my wearing apparel, which wasn't
Speaker 2: much used to the boy who never made it back
Speaker 2: from Africa and died there earlier that same year, age nineteen.
Speaker 2: All Stubsy one more, one more real piece of yah.
Speaker 3: His kid, his clothes, his old man clothes.
Speaker 2: He literally does. He doesn't give his kids any money.
Speaker 2: I don't think he has much, but he's like already
Speaker 2: paid to raise him. Why would I give him money?
Speaker 3: Paid the ship that one kid off to Africa?
Speaker 2: Jesus, what a piece of shit?
Speaker 3: Yeah, what a what a could Yeah find his grave
Speaker 3: and piss on it if you're in the region.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you can find it, pee on it. William
Speaker 2: Gregson unfortunately lives into eighteen hundred when he dies aged
Speaker 2: seventy nine, after having financed more than one hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty slave voyages that tore nearly sixty thousand Africans from
Speaker 2: their homes. Roughly sixteen percent of these people died en route.
Speaker 2: Gregson died wealthy and respected, having never been called to
Speaker 2: account for his crimes against humanity, which is a bummer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that sucks.
Speaker 2: I'm sure his descendants aren't still rich today.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure that's something you can be so sure of,
Speaker 3: rob It. I think that's a good chance they might be.
Speaker 2: No. The of the moral arc of the universe bends
Speaker 2: towards justice, James, Ah.
Speaker 3: But it moves slowly as a problem. It moves real
Speaker 3: fucking slow, a little bit too slowly sometimes because if
Speaker 3: someone give it a bit of a gidea up, you know.
Speaker 2: And it's less of an arc and more of like
Speaker 2: one of those one of those needles they have on
Speaker 2: like a seismograph. So it's just like jumping back and forth. Yeah,
Speaker 2: pretty often.
Speaker 3: Sure doesn't seem to be bending in the direction recently.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know, man, Yeah, that's the story.
Speaker 1: Oh, stubbsy man, stubbsy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, at least he died reasonably young, like he could
Speaker 3: have made it to one hundred that the other dude, No,
Speaker 3: can't imagine what.
Speaker 1: When I was sixteen seventeen eighty seven.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean he lives longer than poor little George.
Speaker 2: That's right, he lives longer than his son.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what a fucking did Yeah, he presumaly doesn't even
Speaker 3: know who's died because he gives that few shits. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like, here have some old shirts, kid.
Speaker 3: My old clothes. Wow, that I wore as I fucked
Speaker 3: up again and again over a series of fuck ups
Speaker 3: that lasted my dire life.
Speaker 1: Oh I'm glad that guy is dead.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm.
Speaker 3: We all are I think, Yeah.
Speaker 1: James, do you want to plug your book real quick?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you won't encounter any any stubsy type characters. But
Speaker 3: there's some heroes in here. I think, some people who
Speaker 3: have done some really remarkable things. Yeah, I wrote this
Speaker 3: about anarchists at war. It's called Against the State. You
Speaker 3: can pre order it from ak Press. You can hear
Speaker 3: about some people trying to build a better world less
Speaker 3: incrementally than this in many cases, kind of with a
Speaker 3: bit more I guess kinetic means. But nonetheless, I think
Speaker 3: like there's some stories and things that we can learn
Speaker 3: in our much less violent lives from these people and
Speaker 3: the way they organize and the way that they have
Speaker 3: gone about things, And people will read it and enjoy it.
Speaker 2: You can buy it from ak Press.
Speaker 1: Pre order link will be in the episode change should.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah you should. Yeah, don't buy it from Jeff Bezos.
Speaker 3: He's not as bad as some of the people on here,
Speaker 3: but not a great dude.
Speaker 2: Not a great dude. And yeah, you know, until next time, folks, well,
Speaker 2: which we will be like tomorrow. But just in general,
Speaker 2: I guess as you look at out how fucked up
Speaker 2: things are, remember that things change pretty quickly, and the
Speaker 2: evils that seem entrenched and impossible to fight generally aren't,
Speaker 2: and that even victories that seem pyic or meaningless can
Speaker 2: lead to much greater things, just by virtue of the
Speaker 2: fact that through the act of fighting, people are brought
Speaker 2: together who become capable of fighting more effectively even greater injustices.
Speaker 2: So keep fighting and again, piss on that guy's great
Speaker 2: if you find.
Speaker 1: It, Yeah, Yeah, Behind the Bastards is a production of
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