The British Parliament passed the Abolition Act in 1807 and the slave trade, which had run for nearly four centuries, was abolished in Britain.
1500-1870 African slave trade
As the saying goes, Rome was not built in a day, and the abolition of the slave trade in England was no longer a one-day or two-day decision. Prior to this, there had been a weak abolitionist force in Britain, which had grown in the sanger incident.
Kuwa case
The slave ship Sanger, part of the Liverpool Slave Trade Syndicate, threw about 142 African slaves into the sea on 29 November 1781, citing a lack of fresh water on board. Because the consortium had already insured the slaves on the merchant ships, when the Sanger returned, it filed a claim against the insurance company. The insurance company refused to pay on the grounds that the merchant ship had killed intentionally. So in the end the two sides went to court.
The Court initially held that, because of the lack of fresh water on board and the risk of rioting among the slaves on board, which would pose a personal danger to the captain and crew, in which case it was lawful for the captain to order the black slaves to be thrown off the ship, the insurance company should pay for the losses caused by the death of the slaves.
The hearing at that time attracted the attention of the then leader of the abolitionist movement, Glenville Sharp, who tried to make the crew of the Sanger through his own efforts on charges of murder, but failed.
Atlantic slave trade
Sanger
Zong, formerly known as Zorg, belongs to the Dutch Commercial Company Middelburg, which in Dutch means "Care" care. As a slave ship in Middelburg, it sailed successfully to the Surinamese coast in 1777. As a 110-ton square-tailed vessel, it was captured on 10 February 1781 by a British 16-gun warship named The Alert.
In March 1781, the Sanger was purchased by the owner of the William, a representative of the Liverpool Merchant Syndicate. Members of the syndicate include Edward Wilson, George Case, James Azpinar, William, James, and John Grayson. William Gregson was interested in 50 slave trade trips between 1747 and 1780, and he also became mayor of Liverpool in 1762. At the end of his life, the ships in which he owned a stake plundered a total of 58,201 people from Africa.
On the voyage of the Sanger incident, the consortium provided insurance for up to £8,000 for the 244 slaves on board. £8,000 was equivalent to the market value of half of the slaves on board.
crew
The captain of the Sanger, Luke Collingwood, was once the surgeon of the William. As Captain Luke Collingwood lacked experience in commanding navigation. The doctor on the ship is responsible for choosing which slaves can be put on board, and those who are not selected are most likely to be killed directly, usually in front of the doctor. Arguably, Collingwood had seen too many slaves killed. This actually set the stage for the massacre aboard the Sanger.
First Mate James Kelsar, also from the William. The ship's only passenger, Robert Stubbs, was the former governor of the British fortification Anomab near the Cape Coast Castle, who was forced to leave the position nine months later. Witness testimony collected by the Commission for Africa accused him of being a semi-illiterate alcoholic who mismanaged the slave trade in the fort.
The Sanger had a crew of 17 when it left Africa, which is too few to 17 to improve the sanitary conditions on board. However, it was too difficult to recruit sailors in England willing to risk the plague and slave rebellion. It's even harder than capturing Dutch ships off the coast of Africa.
The Sanger was staffed by dutch sailors from the former Zog, the crew of the William, and free sailors from settlements along the African coast.
Halfway
On 18 August 1781, the Sanger set sail from Accra. With 442 slaves on board, the number of slaves has far exceeded the number of people that the ship itself can transport safely.
In the 1780s, Imperial ships could typically carry 1.75 slaves per ton. The sanger rate has reached 4 people/ton. British slave ships of this period generally carried about 193 slaves, and ships as small as the Sanger carried so many slaves and their anomalies.
The Sanger began its transatlantic voyage to Jamaica after refueling water in Sao Tome on 6 September.
The following is the crew's account, which was also the basis for the court's decision at the beginning:
On 18 or 19 November, the ship approached Tobago in the Caribbean and failed to stop to replenish fresh water. At this point, there is no clear answer to who is in control of the Sanger, and it could be anyone. Because Captain Collingwood had been seriously ill for some time at this time, James Kelsar, the first mate who was supposed to take over the captain's duties, was suspended due to an argument on November 14. Robert Stubbs served as captain of a slave ship decades ago, and although he was not a crew member on board, he temporarily took over the Sanger in Collingwood's absence.
massacre
November 27 or 28, 27 nautical miles (50 km; 31 miles) from Jamaica, but mistaken for the French colony of Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola. The Sanger continued westward, away from Jamaica. When the boat was 300 miles (480 km) in the leeward direction of the island, it was noticed that Jamaica had been missed.
Overcrowding, malnutrition, accidents and disease have killed several seafarers and some 62 enslaved Africans. James Kelsol later claimed that there were only 4 days of water left on board when the voyage error was discovered, while Jamaica had 10-13 days left.
According to the law, if these slaves died on shore, Liverpool's shipowners would not be compensated by the insurance company. Similarly, if the slave died "naturally" at sea, then insurance could not claim. However, if some slaves were abandoned in order to save the remaining "cargo" or the vessel itself, then claims could be made under the concept of "general average". Insurance for the ship could be compensated for £30 per abandoned slave.
On 29 November, the crew gathered to consider a proposal to throw some of the slaves out of the ship, which James Kelsar later claimed he initially disagreed with, but was soon unanimous. On 29 November, 54 women and children were thrown into the sea from the cabin windows. On December 1, 42 male slaves were thrown onto the ship; in the days that followed, 36 slaves were followed. Ten more men, in an expression of inhuman contempt for the slave owners, committed suicide by throwing themselves into the sea. After hearing the screams of the victims as they were thrown into the water, one slave demanded that the rest of the Africans be stripped of all food and drink instead of throwing them into the sea. The crew listened to this request. According to the Court of Throne (British High Court) trial report that a slave managed to climb back on the ship.
It was later claimed that the slaves were abandoned because there was not enough water on board to sustain the lives of all the slaves for the rest of the voyage. That claim was later questioned because the ship had 420 gallons (1,900 liters) of water left when it arrived in Jamaica on December 22.
In an affidavit, Kelsar said that on December 1, 42 slaves were killed, heavy rain fell for more than a day, and 6 buckets of water (enough for 11 days) were collected.
Subsequent
On 22 December 1781, the Sanger arrived on the Black River, Jamaica, with only a fraction of the slaves left For Africa, 208 men. The average selling price of these slaves was £36 per person, and the legality of sanger's capture from the Dutch was recognized by the Deputy Court of the Jamaican Navy, and the ship was renamed Jamaica Richard.
Luke Collingwood died three days after arriving in Jamaica and was therefore unable to testify in a court proceeding in 1783.
Legal Process
After news of Sanger's voyage reached England, the shipowner demanded that the insurance company compensate the slaves for their losses. The insurance company refused to pay compensation and was sued by the Liverpool Syndicate. However, before the hearing could begin, the Sanger's logbook was lost. The legal process provided nearly all documentary evidence of the massacre, and the ship's insurance company claimed that the logbook was deliberately destroyed, which the Grayson Syndicate denied.
The reliability of almost all surviving raw materials is questionable. The two witnesses who provided the evidence, Robert Stubbs and James Kelsar, had a strong motive to exonerate themselves. It is possible that figures about the number of slaves killed, the amount of water left on board, and the distance beyond Jamaica that Zong Qinghou mistakenly sailed were all inaccurate.
First judgment
At the beginning of the legal process, the insurance company refused to compensate the owner of the Sanger. The controversy was first tried at London City Hall on 6 March 1783, overseen by the Lord Chancellor, earl of Mansfield, who had served as judge in the Somerset case in 1772, which involved the legality of retaining slaves in England.
Robert Stubbs was the only witness in the Sanger trial, and as a result the trial resulted in the insurance company paying insurance compensation to the owner of the Sanger.
On March 19, 1783, Olaudah Equiano, a free slave, told the anti-slave trade activist Granville Sharp about the events that took place during the Sanger trial. The next day, Sharp sought legal advice on the possibility of indicting the crew for murder.
Court of Appeal on the Throne
Sanger's insurer applied to the Earl of Mansfield to set aside the previous judgment and requested that the case be reopened.
On 21-22 May 1783, Mansfield and two other judges, Judge Buller and Judge Wells, held a hearing at the Throne Court in Westminster Hall.
Deputy Attorney General John Lee represented all the owners of the Sanger, as he had done earlier in the Town Hall trial. Granville Sharp was also present, as was the secretary he hired, and written records were taken.
Mansfield summed up the first instance judgment and announced the following verdict:
There is no doubt (though shocking) that the situation of the slaves was like a horse being thrown onto a boat... The question is whether there is an absolute necessity to throw them under the boat to save the other people, the jury argued
The only witness to the Sanger massacre was Robert Stubbs, although lawyers received written statements from James Kelsar. Stubbs claimed that "it was absolutely necessary to abandon the Negroes" because the crew feared that all slaves would die if they were not thrown into the sea.
Sanger's insurance company argued that Collingwood had done so because he did not want his first voyage as the captain of the slave ship to be unprofitable and therefore made a "big mistake." John Lee responded that slaves "died like cargo" and were abandoned for the greater good of the ship. The insurance company's legal team replied that Lee's argument could never justify the killing of innocent people and that the actions of the Sanger crew amounted to murder. Over here. We can see that Granville Sharp, the leader of the abolitionist movement, is likely to influence the strategies employed by the legal team of the insurance company.
The hearing revealed that during the serial killings, it rained heavily on the ship. This led Mansfield to order another trial because the rain meant that the killing of slaves after the water shortage had eased was unreasonable, as it was all the more necessary to save the ship and its remaining human cargo. One justice in attendance also said that the evidence they had heard invalidated the jury's decision at first instance, and that the jury had been told that the water shortage was due to unforeseen sea conditions and that the ship was in poor condition, rather than due to the captain's mistake. Mansfield concluded that the insurance company was not liable for losses caused by mistakes made by the crew of the Sanger.
There is no evidence that further trials have taken place. Despite Sharp's efforts, no one was prosecuted for the murder of slaves. Subsequent provisions of the Slave Trade Act of 1788 and 1794 limited the coverage of insurance in relation to slaves, outlawing the general term of the promise to insure all other dangers, losses and misfortunes. There is a similar phrase in Sanger's insurance policy, which was emphasized by the slave owners' representative during the hearing in the Court of throne. The appeal digest was eventually published in the Nominate reports, based on contemporaneous manuscript notes by Sylvester Douglas, Baron Glenbevi, and others, and published in 1831 as Gregson v. Gilbert (1783).
Mansfield's motives
Jeremy Krikler argues that Mansfield wants to ensure that commercial law is as helpful as possible to Britain's overseas trade, and as such, he is keen to uphold the principle of "general average", even in relation to homicide. This principle holds that if the master abandons part of the cargo in order to save the remaining cargo, he can claim losses from the insurance company. Therefore, the findings in favor of insurance companies will greatly weaken this idea. Heavy rains began before the homicides were over, which led Mansfield to order a retrial, while the concept of "general average" did not change. He stressed that if it were not for the captain's mistake that caused the water shortage, the massacre would have been legal and the owners' insurance claims would have been valid.
In drawing these conclusions, Crickler commented that Mansfield ignored the ruling of his predecessor, Matthew Hale, arguing that killing innocent people in the name of self-preservation was illegal. The ruling proved important a century later in the case of R v Dudley and Stephens, which also dealt with the legitimacy of murder at sea. Mansfield also does not recognize another important legal principle, namely that an insurance claim is unlawful if it is caused by an unlawful act.
Impact on the abolitionist movement
Granville Sharp ran an active campaign to raise awareness of the Holocaust, writing to newspapers, the Secretary of the Navy and the Prime Minister (Duke of Portland). Neither Portland nor the Navy wrote back to him. The first Sanger trial was in March 1783 and was reported in only one local London newspaper, with very little coverage of the massacre before 1787. Moreover, nearly 18 months after the events, a newspaper article in March 1783 represented the first public report of the Holocaust.
Despite these setbacks, Sharp's efforts have had some success. In April 1783, he submitted a report of the holocaust to william Dillwyn, a Quaker, who asked to see evidence critical of the slave trade. The London Annual Meeting of the Sorority decided to begin a movement against slavery shortly thereafter, and in July 1783, 273 Quakers signed a petition and submitted it to Parliament. Sharp also sent letters to Bishops and Pastors of the Anglican Church, as well as to those who were already sympathetic to the cause of abolitionism.
Thanks to Sharp's efforts, the Sanger massacre became an important topic in abolitionist literature, with thomas Clarkson, Ottoba Cugoano, James Ramsey, and John Newton discussing the genocide. These narratives often ignore the names of ships and captains, so, in the words of Srividia Swaminathan, "a portrait of abuse can be mapped to any ship in the Midway Passage." ”
The Sanger Massacre provides a powerful example of the horrors of the slave trade, which spurred the development of the abolitionist movement in Britain, which in the late 1780s expanded dramatically in size and influence.
Depictions of the Sanger massacre continued to appear in 19th-century abolitionist literature. In 1839, Thomas Clarkson published his history of the rise, progress, and achievements of the abolition of the African slave trade, including a description of the Slaughter of the Sanger. Clarkson's book had a major influence on the painter J.M.W. Turner, who exhibited a painting called Slave Ships at the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1840. The painting depicts a ship in which some shackled slaves are thrown into the sea and eaten by sharks. Some of the details in the painting, such as the shackles worn by slaves, seem to be directly influenced by the illustrations in Clarkson's book.
Slave ships
The painting appeared at an important moment in the ongoing global abolitionist movement, a month before the first World Congress Against Slavery was held in London, when the Royal Academy exhibition opened. The painting was admired by its master, John Ruskin, and described by the critic Marcus Wood as one of the few truly great depictions of the Atlantic slave trade in Western art.
Beauty Beyle
In 2013, the film "Belle the Lady" was released against the backdrop of the Trial of the SãoGar Throne, the illegitimate daughter of British Naval Colonel John Linderson and a Caribbean slave, and was later adopted by the Colonel's uncle, Lord Murray. The Lord is the Chief Justice of the Court of Thrones and is responsible for the trial of the Sanger Compensation Case.
The story is based on the history of how a black illegitimate daughter influenced the Justices' trial of the Sanger case.
The end of the story shows the judgment of the Sanger, and how to produce this judgment is formed in the preparation of the whole movie. A very good movie. As mentioned earlier, only the insurance company is not compensated, and no one is liable for the Holocaust. The rise of the British Empire was filled with the blood and tears of others. After four hundred years of slave trade, it began to gradually end after petitions from various religious and civil society groups, and the fact that the profits of the slave trade were much less than before.
Human nature, in the face of interests, when to look up!