Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [15]
We are left with the unpleasant conclusion that, when the slave trade was at its height, mainstream British opinion simply did not consider that any wrong was being done. In 1672, King Charles II had granted the British Royal African Company the right to create a fleet for the ‘selling, bartering and exchanging of, for or with any gold, silver, Negroes, slaves, goods, wares and manufactures’ – a bill of fare which made the hierarchy quite explicit. A century later the belief that slaves were merely a commodity was still alive. In November 1781 sickness broke out on the overcrowded decks of the Liverpool-registered slave ship the Zong during the Middle Passage. ‘Normal’ conditions on these ships were disgusting enough, the stench overwhelming. But when, predictably, dysentery or some other sickness broke out, conditions were horrific. On the Zong an epidemic began to spread among the Africans, and with each slave who died, the value of the cargo in the markets of Jamaica dropped. After seventy had perished, and with many more very sick, the captain – who had a financial stake in the voyage – came up with a way to protect his investment. In the sort of actuarial calculation possible only if all considerations of humanity were discounted, he realized that while deaths on board would become a charge on the shipowners, if the seriously ill were to drown at sea, jettisoned to ‘save the ship’, the problem was one for the insurance underwriters. He told the crew that water supplies were gravely low and that therefore the sick Africans, who would die anyway, should be thrown in the sea. The day after he reached this decision, fifty people were put over the side. The next day, another forty were forced overboard, followed on the third day by another twenty. All told, over 130 sick Africans were thrown into the sea. The story for the insurers was that they had had to be ‘sacrificed’ to preserve water supplies, which were dangerously low. Yet when the Zong reached Jamaica just before Christmas it had over 400 gallons of fresh water on board, more than enough to supply everyone – the result, the owners later claimed, of a sudden, unexpected downpour.
The lawsuit which followed was not a criminal prosecution for murder but a civil case in which the underwriters and shipowners argued about property. The Solicitor General, who represented the shipowners in court, asked, ‘what is all this vast declaration that human people have been thrown overboard? … This is a case of chattels or goods. It is really so: it is the case of throwing over goods, for to this purpose, and the purpose of insurance, they are goods and property, whether right or wrong we have nothing to do with it.’ The case eventually fizzled out in a familiar pattern of legal verbiage and lawyers’ bills. But the attendant publicity sufficiently outraged a young man named Granville Sharp that he attempted – unsuccessfully as it turned out – to bring a private prosecution for murder against the slavers. Sharp, the godfather of the movement to remove the stain on Britain made by the slave trade, had in a previous case persuaded the Lord Chief Justice that a runaway slave who made it to Britain could not be forcibly returned to the colonies. ‘Let Justice be done, though the Heavens may fall,’ said the judge, in a ruling which went to the heart of the contradiction between ‘freeborn Englishmen’ and enslaved Africans. Sharp belonged to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (whose ownership of the Barbados plantation he was unaware of). And it is notable how much of the anti-slavery cause was made by religious believers, especially Nonconformists: nine of the twelve founding members of the London committee of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade were Quakers. When, finally, the campaign achieved its goal it gave the British Empire a vital moral purpose.
Almost the only remark anyone now remembers of the great Victorian