the West Indies that it possessed. But, most of all, Britons tolerated it because they simply didn’t hear about it all that much. Luke Collingwood, as captain of the slave ship Zong, was about to change all that.
In 1782 Collingwood was on his way from Africa to the Jamaican colonies, carrying 400 slaves. But he was an inexperienced trafficker and had overloaded his ship. Down in the hold, the cargo were dying so he decided to throw the ill slaves overboard. Of course, each one had a substantial monetary value, but he would be OK because they were all insured for £30 each – a few thousand pounds in today’s values. He would tell the insurers that he had had no choice because the ship was running out of water. The insurers might grumble, but they would pay out; 133 slaves were therefore thrown to their deaths.
When he reached port in England, after dropping off his surviving cargo in the Caribbean, his ship’s owners put in their insurance claim for the dead slaves. But things didn’t go entirely to plan. The insurers were suspicious and took the case to court. Of course, no one was really concerned about the fate of the slaves other than as commodities and, the court eventually found for the Zong’s owners against the insurers, who were ordered to pay up.
Like any other civil case, there was minor interest from the newspapers of the day, but it would soon have been forgotten had not one Olaudah Equiano caught sight of a report. Equiano was a freed slave, originally from modern-day Nigeria, where he had been captured at the age of 11. In 1783, he was 40 and working in London as a house servant when he spotted the news story about the Zong and had an idea. He took the report to Granville Sharp, a self-taught lawyer whom he thought would be the man to start a fire.
For two decades, Sharp had been involved in the Abolitionist cause. His interest had begun in 1765 when a young black slave had been brought to the home of his brother, William, a doctor who would later become surgeon to the King.*
The slave boy, Jonathan Strong, had been badly beaten and then abandoned by his owner. Once he was fit and well, Granville found him a job as footman to a pharmacist, but when Strong’s former master spotted him two years later he tried to kidnap his former possession. Granville went to court to stop him and had Strong legally declared a free man. Since then, Sharp had become something of a nuisance for slave owners, taking them to court over anything he could think of. He willingly agreed to help Equiano.
Based on Collingwood’s insurance claim, which included an admission of having thrown many men to their death, Sharp attempted to have Collingwood and the ship owners prosecuted for murder. The attempt failed but the resulting publicity gained him more supporters among the growing political classes and from the Quakers, without doubt the most radically political of the Christian denominations of the time. On 22 May 1787, the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was born, consisting of nine Quakers and three Anglicans, including Sharp. Together they set about documenting the treatment of slaves and even brought examples of shackles and punishment devices to London, so the citizens could see how innocent men were being treated as – at best – criminals. It became the first public civil rights campaign. The Society regularly wrote to newspapers and organised public meetings and petitions to end the slave trade – one was signed by a fifth of the population of Manchester, which illustrates how deep and wide the campaign permeated.
As the spirit of the day turned to the Abolitionist cause, they recruited William Wilberforce MP, who offered to introduce a bill to Parliament to abolish the slave trade. It wasn’t until 1807 that Wilberforce managed to get a bill through but it did happen. And 15 years later a bill was passed to abolish slavery itself in most parts of the British Empire. Soon the Royal Navy was actively destroying the slave trade wherever it could find it.
Collingwood’s attempt at insurance fraud had had global effects.
BUT DID HE DO IT? – THE DEATH OF LORD CASTLEREAGH, 1822
Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, was a controversial fellow. For decades he was one of the most influential men in Europe – and therefore the world. His reputation rested on his position as Britain’s Foreign Secretary, which allowed him to build the European system of diplomacy that delivered peaceful but conservative government across the continent. He was also hated by poets.
For example, after the 1819 Peterloo Massacre of political radicals, blamed on the reactionary Cabinet of which Castlereagh was a leading member, Shelley wrote:
I met murder on the way
He had a masque like Castlereagh
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven bloodhounds followed him
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.
Shelley died in July 1822. Had he lived another month he might have perked up a little to hear that Castlereagh had been acting distinctly oddly. In an interview with George IV, the minister told the King that he was being watched by a mysterious servant. His ominous words were: ‘I am accused of the same crime as the Bishop of Clogher.’
The Bishop, Percy Jocelyn, had, the previous month, been defrocked and prosecuted after he was found in the back room of the White Lion in Haymarket with his trousers and a Grenadier Guardsman around his ankles. Sensibly, Jocelyn ran away to Scotland, to become a butler. A popular ditty of the time described the tale:
The Devil to prove the Church was a farce
Went out to fish for a Bugger.
He baited his hook with a Soldier’s arse
And pulled up the Bishop of Clogher.
It is uncertain, however, whether Castlereagh (a) really had been foolish enough to do it with a Grenadier Guardsman and was being blackmailed, (b) had not been foolish enough to do it with a Grenadier Guardsman but was being blackmailed anyway or (c) was completely mad.
The King, very concerned, told him to speak to a doctor. Perhaps he was worried that Castlereagh had picked up a dose of something he wanted to get rid of, or maybe he thought the minister was one seat short of an overall majority. Certainly, the Duke of Wellington, a chum of the Foreign Secretary, believed it was the latter and wrote to Castlereagh’s physician, asking him to see his patient as soon as possible.
Castlereagh, in a state of agitation, retired to his home in Kent, where his wife, Amelia, took away all the razors to stop him killing himself. Ever resourceful, however, on 12 August 1822 he managed to find a letter opener and cut his own throat. His doctor found him bleeding and recorded his dying words: ‘Bankhead, let me fall upon your arm. Tis all over.’ It put an unambiguous end to an exceptional career.*
Yet, even after dying, Castlereagh managed to influence legislation. An inquiry into his death was held a few days later and ruled that he was mentally ill at the time. This was a charitable judgment because had the ruling been ‘suicide’, he would have had a stake driven through his heart and been buried in unconsecrated ground – possibly at a crossroads in order to prevent his ghost from haunting anyone who lived nearby (crossroads were known to confuse ghosts, who wouldn’t know which way to go).
At the time,
