Belle (17 page)

‘He gave me a particular account of his releasing two Blacks from slavery, since his being Chief Justice,’ wrote Hutchinson. In the course of the evening at Kenwood, Lord Mansfield discussed two cases with him, that of James Somerset and that of ‘the Two Princes of Calabar’, which had some similarities to the Amissa case. Their story was extraordinary. The two African princes were called Little Ephraim Robin John and Ancona Robin Robin John, and they were related to the ruler of Old Town in Old Calabar (in present-day Nigeria), Grandy King George. In 1767 they were captured during an ambush and sold into slavery. Having survived a massacre in Old Calabar they were sold in Dominica to a French doctor. After several months they escaped with the help of a ship’s captain, but he double-crossed them and sold them to a merchant in Virginia. Five years later they came across two countrymen from Old Calabar, who had sailed to America on a Bristol ship called the
Greyhound
. The men recognised the princes, and the ship’s captain, Terence O’Neil, agreed to help them, so they escaped yet again and boarded his ship. But once they arrived in Bristol, O’Neil betrayed them, and tried to sell them. Little Ephraim wrote of his ‘great surprise and horror … when they came to put on the Irons we then with tears and trembling began to pray to God to helpe us in this Deplorable condition’.
¹⁵

This is where Lord Mansfield entered the story. It was just fifteen months after the Somerset case. Although the princes were imprisoned by O’Neil, they managed to write to Thomas Jones, a Bristol slaver they knew from Old Calabar. Initially he failed to respond, and the princes reconciled themselves to their fate. Then, at the last minute, as one of them recorded, ‘The Lord as good as stayed the wind which prevented our sail then I write agin to Mr Jones which moved him to pity.’
¹⁶
Jones applied for a writ of
Habeas Corpus
, arguing that the princes were being held prisoner ‘in order to be conveyed out of this Kingdom to Virginia against their consent and in order to be made slaves’.
¹⁷
This all sounds very like the Somerset case. Mansfield agreed to the writ, and the men were set free. However, they were captured yet again, and thrown into the lock-up house (temporary jail), and then a house of correction. In the meantime, Captain O’Neil had them arrested for ‘a pretended Debt for their said passage to England’.

Little Ephraim wrote to Lord Mansfield, who ‘sent to fetch us to London where we was examined then Discharged’. The princes argued that they had never been slaves: ‘we were free people … we had not done anything to forfeit our liberty’. Mansfield was troubled because, unlike Somerset, and indeed Thomas Lewis and Jonathan Strong, the Robin Johns had never lived in England: ‘the whole transaction was beyond sea’, and thus more legally complex. After a delay of some days the parties settled, a compromise being reached in which the alleged Virginia owner was reimbursed for the princes ‘as purchase money or value of the two said Africans’, and they were allowed to go free. In a very surprising turn of events, the man who originally captured the Robin Johns was forced to pay £120 to the Virginia owner. The details of the arrangement were formally accepted by the court, Lord Mansfield presiding.

That he had a special interest in the case is suggested by the diary of Thomas Hutchinson, who said that it had given ‘particular pleasure’ to Mansfield, who was ‘much pleased at their relief’.
¹⁸
This revelation is striking, as this is the only surviving evidence of Lord Mansfield expressing his private thoughts on the slave trade. He is not the judge here; he is not at Westminster, where all eyes are upon him. Here we see Lord Mansfield’s evident pride in his ‘releasing two Blacks from slavery’. And that pride is expressed on an evening when he drinks coffee with Dido and walks with her in the grounds of Kenwood.

Striking, too, is the fact that the Robin Johns appealed to Mansfield in the first place. This suggests the wide-reaching repercussions of the Somerset case, despite the fact that Mansfield always emphasised that it did not abolish slavery as such in England. Rather, it prevented masters from forcibly removing slaves against their wishes. Hutchinson wanted to discuss this sensitive issue, which had had such repercussions in England and America: ‘I wished to have entered into a free colloquium and to have discovered … the nice distinction [Mansfield] must have had in his mind, but I imagined such an altercation would be rather disliked and forbore.’
¹⁹

One of Mansfield’s enduring concerns about the possible effects of the Somerset case was the economic implications both for the owners who had lost their ‘property’ and would seek compensation, and for the freed slaves who would be rendered homeless and destitute, with the result that they would seek parish relief. In the courtroom he had asked the question, ‘How would the law stand with the respect to their settlement; their wages?’

Charlotte Howe was a slave brought to England by her owner in 1781. Following his death, she was baptised and considered herself to be free. She applied to two parishes for poor relief, but neither would grant it, as the poor law only applied to hired servants. This case exposed Mansfield’s very real concern about who would take responsibility for destitute former slaves. He ruled that the ‘case was very plain … the statute says there must be a hiring, and here there was no hiring at all. She does not therefore come within the description.’

Furthermore, in a pamphlet published in 1786, it was reported that Mansfield used the Charlotte Howe Case to clarify his Somerset ruling:

Lord Mansfield very particularly took occasion to declare, that the public were generally mistaken in the determination of the court of the King’s Bench, in the case of Somersett the negro, which had often been quoted, for nothing more was then determined, than that there was no right in the master forcibly to take the slave and carry him abroad … nor was it held … that on setting foot in this country he instantly became emancipated.
²⁰

The dinner at Kenwood with Thomas Hutchinson is of supreme importance, as it shows how Mansfield was torn between the ethical questions of black emancipation and his concerns about its financial implications. Once again, he was agonising over the old question of the rights of liberty versus the rights of property.

But could a human being ever really be reduced to the status of nothing more than an item of property?

14

The
Zong
Massacre

The
Zong
: slaves being thrown overboard

This atrocious and unparalleled act of wickedness

Thomas Clarkson

On 19 March 1783, Granville Sharp noted in his journal: ‘Gustavus Vasa a Negro called on me with an account of 130 Negroes being thrown Alive into the sea from on Board an English Slave Ship.’
¹

William Gregson was undoubtedly one of the most successful slave merchants in Liverpool. He owned a large number of slave ships. During the course of 152 slave voyages his vessels shipped 49,000 Africans to plantations in the Americas.
²
In 1769 he named his latest slave ship after himself, marking his incredible rise. The
Gregson
was the last of his ships to sail before the American War of Independence put a stop to trading for three years. In 1780 he re-entered the trade with a new ship, the
William
. Her captain was John Hanley, a trusted and experienced master. In 1781 Hanley saw an opportunity that he could not pass over.
³

In February of that year a ship, the
Zorg
, had been captured from the Dutch by the British navy. She was a relatively small slaver of 110 tons. Typically a ship of that size would carry about 190 Africans, but the
Zorg
came loaded with 244 slaves on board. On behalf of the Gregson syndicate, Hanley bought the ship and renamed her the
Zong
(or perhaps the name was misread, and then taken for granted). Gregson immediately took out insurance ‘upon the whole of the ship and on Goods … valuing slaves at £30 Sterling per head’.
⁴

Captain Hanley, who was already in charge of the
William
, appointed his surgeon Luke Collingwood as captain of the
Zong
. This step would have severe repercussions. Hanley instructed Collingwood to buy more slaves, and on 18 August he left Africa with 442 Africans on board, bound for Jamaica. The ship was dangerously overcrowded, and Collingwood was an inexperienced captain.

What happened next has been the subject of much debate, conspiracy theories, inconsistencies of evidence and confusion in the telling. The
Zong
overran her intended destination. Water supplies had dwindled, and an epidemic had broken out on the overcrowded ship. On 29 November 1781, Collingwood made the decision to ‘jettison’ a portion (roughly one-third) of his human cargo into the waters of the Caribbean. He calculated that it would make more sense economically to kill the slaves and claim the insurance money. When Gregson and his syndicate made their claim of £30 for each of the slaves who had been killed, they stated that the ship’s water supply had run out, and the captain had taken the ‘necessary’ step of sacrificing a few for the many.
⁵

No reconstruction of these horrific events can ever be fully accurate, for two reasons. First, the captain, who had fallen ill, died a couple of days after the ship reached Jamaica. Second, the ship’s logbook went missing, and has never been found. The insurers later accused Gregson of destroying it. He claimed that it was with Collingwood when he died in Jamaica, and was mislaid. But it would have been highly irregular for the logbook to have left the ship.Without it, the events were reconstructed by the testimony of a passenger on the ship named Robert Stubbs. Later, first mate James Kelsall wrote an affidavit putting across his own version of what happened. Neither source is necessarily to be trusted.

We will never know the full truth of what happened, but we do know that the circumstances of the
Zong
were highly unusual. As Luke Collingwood was a slave surgeon who had been promoted to the role of captain, doubts were later voiced about his capability.
⁶
While it was not unusual for a surgeon to be raised to captain, Collingwood was acting as both surgeon and captain of a very overcrowded ship. Usually the ship’s surgeon would keep an independent record or log, but because he was carrying out both roles, another vital piece of documentation was not kept.

Most slave ships carried twice the amount of food and drink they would need for the dreaded middle passage. As first mate, James Kelsall was responsible for loading and storing food. He took on fifteen or sixteen butts of water (162 gallons each), but failed to check the supplies at the point of departure or during the passage.

At some point in the voyage Collingwood fell sick, and was unable to command the ship. He appears to have suspended Kelsall, and given command to the passenger Robert Stubbs. This is another strange twist in the story. Stubbs, the only witness asked to give evidence at the
Zong
trial, was an ex-slaver captain (of the
Black Joke
), and former Governor of Anomabu, a small slave-trading post on the Gold Coast of Africa. He had a reputation as a drunk and a scoundrel. It’s unclear exactly what part he played: he later claimed that he was an innocent bystander.

On 21 November the water supplies were checked, and it was discovered that many of the butts were not full. The crossing had been slower than expected, and it appeared that a large amount of water had leaked from the butts in the lower tier. At this stage there didn’t seem to be anything to worry about, as the ship had enough water for thirteen days, and Jamaica, their destination, was only eight days away. For a Liverpool slave ship such as the
Zong
, the usual allocation of water was four pints per person per day. Unfortunately, no one suggested the wise measure of limiting the rations for slaves and crew.

Then a serious navigational error was made. The
Zong
’s crew sighted Jamaica, but believed it to be the French-held St Domingo, so they sailed away from shore. Because the captain was sick and the first mate suspended, it is unclear who made the mistake. By the time it was recognised, the ship was three hundred miles from Jamaica. Kelsall was reinstated as first mate, but the ship only had enough water for four days, and it would now take between ten and fourteen to return to Jamaica.