Slaver Captain

By John Newton

John Newton is now best remembered as an Anglican clergyman and the author of the hymn Amazing Grace.
For the first thirty years of his life, however, he was engrossed in the slave trade. His father planned for him to take up a position as slave master on a West Indies plantation but he was instead pressed into the Royal Navy where, after attempting to desert, he was captured and flogged round the fleet. After this humiliation he was placed in service on a slave ship bound for Sierra Leone, but there, having upset his captain and crew, he found himself the servant of the merchant’s wife, an African Duchess called Princess Peye, who abused him along with her slaves. As he wrote himself, he was ‘an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves of West Africa.’
In 1748 he was rescued and returned home and it was on this voyage that he experienced his spiritual conversion. Though avoiding profanity, women, gambling and drinking he continued in the slave trade, taking up a position on a ship bound for the West Indies and then making three further voyages as a captain of slave ships.
In 1755, after suffering a severe stroke, he turned away from seafaring and pursued a path to the priesthood, becoming the curate at Olney in 1764.
His Authentic Narrative, as it was called, is a remarkable, no-holds-barred account of the African slave trade, as well as an account of his struggle between religion and the flesh.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Nov 8, 2010
• ISBN: 9781783468713

Reviews for Slaver Captain

[cogitno · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Impressed into the Navy at the age at the age of 17, promoted to midshipman, flogged for desertion, then exchanged for a prime seaman into a Guineamen headed for the African coast. So began John Newman's life as a "Slaver", ending eight years later in 1754 following a final Call to God. It is probably not coincidental that the first Call, and a sinking ship, occurred almost simultaneously. The ship didn't sink and the conviction to honour the Word of God waned. It eventually did return, and found full voice when Newman penned the inspirational Hymn Amazing Grace.John Newman's early life is replete with adventure and exotic travel, and will be of particular interest to those fascinated by 18th and 19th century maritime history. His life is also a study in gradual moral and spiritual degradation followed by complete redemption. Slaver Captain will disappoint readers interested in maritime history as it concentrates very greatly on the latter.The memoir consists of two parts - the pamphlet "Thoughts on the Slave Trade: A Memoir of my Infidel Days as A Slaving Captain" written in support of the Abolitionist movement; followed by an autobiographical narrative consisting of 15 letters to the Reverend Mr Haweis. The letters are collectively titled "An Authentic Narrative of Some Remarkable and Interesting Particulars in the Life of John Newton". They were written in January and February of 1763 at the request of the Reverend Heweis to bolster Newton's application for an Anglican Ministry and constitute as much a confessional as they do biography. After a seven year campaign, he was finally offered the Living at Olney, Buckinghamshire in 1764. During those seven years, he made representations to the Methodists, Presbyterian and Independents, and garnered a favourable reputation as an evangelical lay preacher, all the while employed as Master of Tides (Tax Collector) for Liverpool. The Church’s initial reluctance probably owes more to Newton's mercantile history than it does to his particular profession as a Slaver. In Letter VIII of his narrative (February 1764) he states:"During the time I was engaged in the Slave Trade, I never had the least scruple as to its lawfulness, and was, upon the whole, satisfied that it was the work Providence had marked out for me. It is indeed accounted a genteel employment ..."The letters provide a concise narrative of his life from the age of three to his retirement from the Slaving trade in 1754. They are direct to the point of bluntness, severely self-critical and constructed with the singular purpose of exposing his gradual decline from dutiful son to indifference to insolence and finally to ignominy. He apportions blame to himself alone. But the bare facts laid out in the narrative clearly signal cause and effect. The narrative style is clear, if a little formal. Biblical references are used sparingly, and generally to good affect. The Narrative leaves little room to explore the life of a seaman in the African trade, and none on any of the technical aspects of Georgian era seamanship. One beautifully rendered passage describes his capture following desertion from HMS Harwich (a 50-gun fourth rate launched in 1743 as HMS Tiger):"They brought me back to Plymouth; I walked through the streets guarded like a felon, my heart full of indignation, shame, and fear. I was confined two days in the guardhouse, then sent on board my ship, kept a while in irons then publicly stripped and whipped."It is a little disappointing, though understandable given the purpose underlining the narrative, that such passages are scarce.Newton's "Thoughts on the Slave Trade" is work of considerable moral weight. It was written 34 years after he retired from the trade to support Wilberforce’s work in the Abolitionist cause. Self interest plays no part in this publication; his shame is manifest:"... it now comes far too late to repair the misery to which I have been an accessory. I hope that it will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders"Newton argues his case rationally and without sentiment or condescension . Firstly "With regard effects, and losses, suffered among our own people"; and secondly "As it affects the blacks". His first hand experience of the carnage that accompanied this trade, and his estimate of the annual death rates accompanying the trade is logically constructed and shocking. His moral and ethical arguments are sophisticated and still relevant. The pamphlet also put a human face to the African people, elevating them from the popular contemporary view of savages to a just and sophisticated society.John Newton lived to see the passage of the Slave Trade Act in 1807.A wonderfully erudite essay by Vincent McInerney introduces this volume: the essay on its own is almost worth the prices of admission.