Читать книгу The Great Cat Massacre - A History of Britain in 100 Mistakes - Gareth Rubin - Страница 10

In 1782 Luke Collingwood put in a false insurance claim and accidentally ended the slave trade. It was a bit of a mistake for Collingwood, who was captain of a slave ship.

The trade was a truly international affair. West Africans would capture rival tribesmen, who would be sold to Arab slave dealers. These would take the slaves to the coast, where European ships would transport them to the West Indies and America to work on plantations.

Slaves were a valuable commodity, but the weak link in the chain from African villages to Jamaican sugar plantations was the sea voyage. The slaves were crammed into a tiny space below decks, often not much more 60cm high. The stench of the human waste and disease festering in these conditions meant that a slave ship could be identified just by its smell. Often the enslaved would throw themselves overboard through fear or misery. Many more simply died due to the appalling conditions.

Although the slave trade was lucrative – indeed, Bristol grew fat on it – slavery itself was not something most Britons would have been happy about. Britain itself had long been a free society, with legal rights enjoyed by all. Slavery itself was probably illegal in Britain itself and certainly rarely practised. The trade was tolerated because slavery either in its most brutal form or in the sense of indentured servitude was common throughout the world and because the Church of England didn’t seem to mind it – the Church itself owned slaves at a plantation in 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.