Part One: X-Mas Special: The Heroes Who Ended The Slave Trade

Cool zone media.

What's enslaving my

like 10 million people over the course of 300 or so years?

Welcome to behind the bastards. Is that Sophie? People have missed the old kind of introduction where I did like a what's Xing my whys sort of thing.

Is there something inappropriate about how I did this intro? It was very inappropriate. Also, I liked my intro where I said, Welcome to Behind the Bastards.
I'm not Robert Evans.

Yeah, you didn't do a British accent last time, Sophie. Yeah.
Weird choice.

But I was doing that.

I was doing that not because of our guests, but because of our topic. Oh, I thought you were doing that because of our guest.
No, I would do that. Jerry Moff James.
Jerry Stout.

Sir James Stout. Sir James Stout.
There it is.

Yeah, absolutely not. I don't think that's happening anytime in the near future.
I know anyone touched me with a sword, period. I'd have back at them if they tried.

Well, Margaret told me the other day that I would make a great queen. You did, Robert, when we fenced.

We did. I was pretty drunk, I think.
Yeah, I was drunk too. We were using those crucifixes.

We were using crucifixes to fence in Thailand.

This is a podcast about the worst people in all of history. But before we get to that, Robert,

I want to take a moment for our dear friend James Stout to plug his new book that's available for pre-order. Yeah, I was trying to introduce him before we did that, Sophie.
We said his name.

What else do you want? I was going to put a little bit more like you know the spin on it some oil you know on the vinegar by all means uh-huh go ahead

this is James Stout podcaster and author and drenaline and our friend and our buddy yeah yeah you want to tell people about your book I do I would like that

and then I'm excited to hear about a paedophile or whatever we're going to do

This is my book. It's called Against the State, a story of anarchists and comrades at war in Spain, Myanmar, and Rojava.

It includes some places I've been with Robert and some places I've been on my own.

It's a beautiful cover.

It's a really, yeah, so a friend of Robert's and mine took this photograph

and I was really happy to be able to like share it with people. And I really like having it in.
Gorgeous. This is Burmese, Kurdish.

This is English and Spanish for those who aren't familiar with those languages. Yeah, it comes out on the 26th of January with AK Press.
We'll give you a pre-order link if you'd like to buy it.

I hope in the the episode description, friends. Yep.
You can also just search my name and the words against the state, and you'll find it almost everywhere good books are sold.

You can buy it from Jeff Bezos if you want, but I'd rather that you didn't.

And yeah, I hope I've captured some of the beautiful elements of these revolutions that I've been lucky enough to spend some time with.

And obviously, the Spanish revolution is something I studied for my PhD. I didn't spend time in that one.
I'm not that old.

Buy the book. Read the book.
Overthrow the government, you know? Nothing would make me happier than you pre-ordering James Stout's book.

One thing would make me happier, and it's the government. The thing I said a little bit ago that I probably should only say once.

To be clear, my book is not a guide to how to do that. No.
These are jokes, comedy, bits.

You know what's not funny, James?

I'm trying to think what you're about to say to me.

It's not.

But today,

this is our Christmas episode. Every year around Christmas, we do a reverse bastards episode, right?

Where, I mean, we've used that term also to mean when someone else reads an episode to me, but in this context, it means we're talking about a hero, right?

Or a group of heroes, right? This is an episode about a good thing that happened.

Now, because it's still behind the bastards, we will largely be talking about terrible things.

But I did bring you an episode for the end of the year because we both needed a little bit of a break, James, that this is going to be a little bit of a play against type because generally when we talk about the British Empire in this series, we're not talking about good people doing good things.

But I didn't do much of that.

This is not the British Empire doing good things, but it's people who are citizens of the British Empire who did something really, really good.

We are talking about some of the greatest heroes in English history and world history, the heroes who ended the Atlantic slave trade.

That's our subject for this episode. Nice.
And critically, we're not quite getting into how slavery was ended in the British Empire because the slave trade, the Atlantic trade, right, where

enslaved Africans were taken from Africa over to the West Indies, the New World,

and goods and stuff were taken to Africa to trade for the slaves.

The end of that is what we're talking about, because the end of that is what started and made inevitable the end of slavery in the British Empire and has also made the end of slavery in the United States inevitable.

The U.S. abolitionist cause is directly tied to the

quest first to end the slave trade and then to end slavery in the British Empire. And so the people we're talking about in these episodes

are, I mean, some of the most impressive human beings who ever lived. And they, they accomplished a really incredible goal.

And I think it's particularly important to talk about now because this is a story of hope.

It's the story of how a ragtag group of intellectuals, lawyers, freed slaves, former slavers and other do-gooders went up against the most evil and powerful industry in the world at the time and eventually brought it to its knees.

And it's a story of how real change actually happens, which is unfortunately slower than we'd like it to be and messier than we'd like it to be. But at the same time,

the stamina that was required to bring this industry down, right?

The amount of time, the amount of effort people had to put in consistently for decades, the same people, in order to kill this this industry, is really worth celebrating. It's a beautiful thing.

I'm excited to learn more about it. Yeah, yeah.
And

you get a lot of, this is like a Battle of Britain kind of thing, where it's a lot of

just English society at its very best. Like you have a lot of these people who kind of like come up in

like London or come up in Liverpool and have these personal awakenings that lead them to embrace this as like a crusade for decades.

Like, there's guys who devote like 40 or 50 years of their lives, like incessantly, to trying to kill slavery, which I think is pretty cool.

So, yeah, that's what we're talking about. Although, episode one, we're going to be laying a lot of groundwork, so it's still mostly about bastards.

Yeah, I always have to like go for a nice walk before I, before I do bastards, you know, like I can't be reading the news and them mainlining this stuff. Yeah,

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Well, this is going to be largely upbeat, largely inspiring, although again, a lot of bleak stuff to get through first.

So I think everybody's aware that slavery as an institution and an industry has existed on every continent, well, I probably except Antarctica, and in most societies across the vast span of human

history. Not every society had slavery, but like it's the norm for societies in human history to have some form of slavery.
But all slavery is not considered equal.

Every kind of slavery and every way slavery has been practiced is not an equivalent level of horrifying and is not an equivalent level of abusive, right?

Ancient Rome, for example, was a slave society and in a lot of ways a nightmarish one.

And some of those methods of slavery practiced in Rome, like the vast slave-funded plantations called Latifundia or the slave-driven mines, were as cruel as any slave plantations in the Caribbean.

However, Roman slavery was a legal condition, and no one believed that slaves were like inherently racially inferior to other people.

They were inferior because their legal condition was inferior, right? But if that changed, when people were freed, there was not really any stigma against a freed person in normal society, right?

Like, and in fact, a lot of the wealthiest Romans during like the height of the Republic were freedmen because freed people, like if you were, if you were lucky enough to be enslaved in such a way that you were like living in a city and being taught a trade, then you were effectively like having a free apprenticeship.

And if you could get free fairly early in life, a lot of those guys started businesses and became very wealthy. Some of the wealthiest families in Roman society were descended from freed people.

And there was no ongoing legal stigma, right? There was no attitude that, like, because you were enslaved, you can't breed with other people or whatever, right?

That would have been crazy to the Romans, you know?

And likewise, and I'm really not trying to minimize the horrors of slavery in Rome because it was a slave empire. They did genocides that involved slavery, right? The Roman Empire, a lot of bad stuff.

But for all of its horrors, nothing the Romans did came close to the level of sadistic cruelty that we saw in the slave ships of the Atlantic trade.

Like that is probably slavery at pretty much its worst in anywhere in history. Like there's just nothing that compared to that.
Right.

It's kind of hard to think of what you could do that's much worse to a human being. Yeah.
It's like, I mean, it's like an Auschwitz-level kind of torture, right?

Where people are being like starved and murdered with their families in just the worst and most sadistic conditions imaginable.

Now, what became the Atlantic slave trade was initially a product of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires, right? Like they were the first people who really got this going.

They got their shit together before anyone else in Europe did, and then they lost having their shit together before anyone else in Europe did. It's the story of Portugal and Spain.

Europeans did not have much in the way of meaningful contact with sub-Saharan Africa until Portuguese trading vessels made their way down the continent's west coast to Ghana in 1471.

In keeping with their well-worn traditions, Portugal was at first just interested in getting access to gold, right? There's the gold coast. There's gold here.
That's why we're in the area.

And so they started building forts on like the coast of Ghana mainly and other facilities like, you know, to facilitate the mining and the transfer of gold, right?

And the loading it onto ships and the restocking those ships. This was part of like, these are basically these forts or castles were kind of like gas stations for the gold trade, right?

And they're going to turn into like gas stations for the slave trade. Yeah.
Per the terms of the Treaty of Tordesilla.

That's right, right, James? Tord de Sillas, I think. Tord de Sillas.
Tordesillas, yeah. Signed in 1494, Africa wound up in Portugal's sphere of influence.

That was the Vatican being like, all right, Spain and Portugal, you're clearly going to run things forever. Let's split the world between you.

Never will both of your empires collapse really fast, actually.

Clearly, Iberia will be the center of the world forever, right? Yeah.

Yeah, obviously they're destined to rule the world for a thousand years.

They got boats slightly faster than anyone else. What else could they need?

Yeah. So tomato's earliest,

that would have been handy.

Their earliest explorations in the region were again focused on gold.

And Africa's first major slave trading facility, which was a fort or castle called El Mina, started as a place to gather and store gold before it could be offloaded into merchant vessels.

It was built in 1482, but right around this time, not long after they built this fort for gold, Portugal starts to realize gold's not the only treasure in the tropics, and it's actually maybe not even the most valuable treasure in the tropics because sugar exists and it turns out once you start making actual straight up like granulated sugar and people can just buy a bag of sugar they don't want to like they never want to have to not have sugar like they're addicted it's a drug it's an incredibly addictive drug

They called it sweet salt initially. And once they realized like, oh shit, this stuff grows really well well here.
And you can grow as much of it as you want,

that

like, it becomes very, like, that's worth more than gold potentially. You know, there's only so much gold.
Inflation is a thing, but you can sell sugar forever. People never don't want sugar.

The only problem with sugar as a money-making enterprise is that it sucks ass to farm, right? It is absolute hell to grow. It's a nightmare.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

That's where you don't see many people growing backyard sugar. Exactly.

Nobody, no, none of the people with like homesteading dreams are like, yeah, I just want a couple of acres that I can just grow nothing but sugar cane on, you know, really work myself to death probably in five or ten years, you know?

Yeah.

It's a shame. For whatever reason.
Some of the homesteading YouTubers, I would like to see

stop sugar tubing. Just go to farm sugar.
Yeah. Yeah.
Get into sugar trade. That's what I will say.

I mean, there's got to be one of those, one of those like evil foster parents who adopts a bunch of kids to make them work their farm.

Like there's, there's got to be someone who's tried it with a sugar plantation. I'm sure.

But yeah, so there's a problem with the sugar trade, which is they can tell all this money is just lying around waiting for them to grab. The sugar trade, they know will be worth a shitload of money.

Everyone wants this stuff, but it only grows in the tropics, right? It does not, you can't transplant it back to Europe or wherever where you have established agricultural infrastructure.

It's not going to do well. Nope, we do that with the same thing.
European

instead of

the beetroot. You make shitty beet sugar if you want.
Not to say.

But

you can't take European farmers in moss and transport them to the Caribbean or to like the African coast

because they die. They die really quickly.
It's very,

they don't do well in the climate, with the bugs, with the diseases. It's just not a good bet.
And so the only way that you can farm a lot of sugar. is slaves, right?

I mean, theoretically, they could have just paid locals to make it.

But part of the problem is that, especially in the Caribbean, they do initially start, and they're not paying them, they're enslaving local laborers, but they kill those, a lot of those local indigenous people quickly, right?

So, you, you need one way or the other, you need a shitload of slaves if you're going to keep this sugar thing going and really spin it up to the

kind of industry Portugal knows it can be. Now, the Portuguese had explored the Guinea coast of Africa, and they had found tribes who wanted the goods they had to trade, largely guns and gunpowder.

That was a big thing for the tribes that they meet. And they were willing to exchange enslaved human beings.
And these were generally captured members of enemy tribes, right? That was the primary way.

We'll talk about this a bit more, but like these are, these tribes are fighting their own wars, right? And like most cultures,

including European cultures, a very common thing to do when you beat an enemy in war is take a bunch of them. into slavery, right?

And so they've got these slaves lying around, so to speak. And the Portuguese are like, we need people.

Do you like guns? And a lot of these traps are like, yeah, actually, guns sound great.

So this trade kind of starts up. And the Portuguese begin taking captured African slaves and moving them to island plantations near the Guinea coast, right?

They're not, you know, taking them to the West Indies at first, right? Because that's not part of Portugal's sphere of influence at the time.

So around the same time, though, their Spanish rivals had started building sugar plantations in the Caribbean.

And these were at first, as I said, manned by indigenous islanders, but the brutality of the work and the disease brought by Europeans quickly wiped a lot of these people out, so many that there weren't enough to continue laboring.

In 1518, the Spanish king ordered 4,000 African slaves imported to the Caribbean, paying Portugal for the human labor needed to fuel their sugar plantations and launching the Atlantic slave trade.

So that's, that's kind of, this is sort of the, the, the, the generally agreed like start to the slave trade. A little bit of a soft start because like, when do you count that?

But like, probably when Portugal starts sending slaves to Spanish colonies in the Caribbean is a good start.

Uh, El Mina, that fort first established as a hub for gold trading, was converted into a prison for enslaved Africans.

The upper levels of the fort contained luxury housing for traveling Europeans, and the bottom levels consisted of a sprawling series of slave dungeons. Wow.
This was the first big.

Yeah, it's an ugly place. Still around.
You can see it. It's a historical site.
Yeah. Love to see a literally stratified society where you've just

really, really made it pretty fucking obvious what you're going for. Yeah.
Yeah.

It's one of those sometimes you watch like Snow Piercer and you're like, well, that's not very subtle, but neither is history. Yeah, sometimes history can be that way.

So this is the first like big slave trading post in Africa, and the many that followed would be built in its image, right? So El Mina is kind of the proof of concept and

the model off of which like these future slave trading posts will be built.

Every cell in the dungeon was meant to hold up to 200 people, crammed together so tight that they didn't even have room to lie down. One write-up I found on PBS.org's Slave Kingdom series notes:

The floor of the dungeon, as a result of centuries of impacted filth and human excrement, is now several inches higher than it was when it was built. Outbreaks of malaria and yellow fever were common.

Staircases led directly from the governor's chambers to the women's dungeons below, making it easy for him to select personal concubines from amongst the women. Um,

And, you know,

I get why they use the term con, that's what, how they would have framed it then. These aren't concubines.
Yeah.

These are.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like this is raping people is what this is. Yeah.

There's obviously like a lot of concubines would have been technically weren't free people, but there's also many stories of like different concubines accumulating political power and influence.

And that is just not the kind of situation we're talking about here. Yeah.

Historian Siddharth Kara goes into more detail about this particular aspect of the system. Quote: Women were displayed for the governor in a courtyard.

After he made a selection, the woman or girl was washed with well water and brought up a staircase through a trapdoor and into his quarters.

If she resisted, she was shackled to cannonballs in the courtyard without food or water until she relented or died.

Most Europeans also took winches from local villages with whom they fathered countless children.

Yeah,

that's not very nice.

No.

And this is like, this is the norm anytime you're talking about the slave trade. This is happening not just in these castles, as we'll talk about.
It's happening on the slave ships.

It's obviously happening in the plantations. Rape is not talked enough as like a major...

This is like essentially how, especially a lot of like the low-level people facilitating the slave trade, this is like their Christmas bonus in a way.

Like this is how they like, this is one of the perks of the job. Right.

Well, you're not paid well and it's dangerous, but you get to do all the rape you want.

Fantastic. Yeah.
This is like no wage benefit. No taxable.
Yeah. Yeah.

Right. Exactly.
Speaking of

non-taxable things.

Yeah.

Tax?

Rough ad paved.

Yeah.

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So,

any slaves, male or female, who fought back or attempted to lead insurrections were locked in a condemned cell, which Kara describes as a small room on the ground level without ventilation or light.

The slaves were not given food or water and eventually died.

The British displayed the corpses to the other slaves as an example of the consequences of resistance, after which the bodies were thrown into the ocean for the sharks.

Cara is talking about a little bit later period of, this is happening under the Portuguese too. He's talking about the British period, but they're both doing this, right?

Because slave uprisings start happening as soon as slavery does and it scares the shit out of slavers. They're constantly terrified of this, right?

One of the justifications of the brutality is, well, otherwise they'll do an uprising. And it's like, have you tried just not enslaving them? I don't know.
Yeah, maybe you should

probably wouldn't be killing you then.

Could just leave them alone.

Could just leave him alone.

So on the seaboard side of El Mina was the chillingly named door of no return. This is where enslaved people were offloaded into slave ships, right? Which would take them to their final destinations.

While the Portuguese and the Spaniards whetted Europe's appetite for African slaves, slaves, other European powers were quick to involve themselves in the exploding industry.

And as things kind of soured for the Portuguese and Spanish empires, other players are going to take over the slave trade. Now, As I noted, the money that fueled the slave trade is European, right?

Slavery became central to the economy of New World possessions in places like the Caribbean, but it's not a purely European business.

It is a partnership and the people, a crucial part of the slave trade, because it's not Europeans wandering into the center of the country generally to grab people, right?

Like, that's not how this is happening.

These slaves are being taken and are being transported by coffel, which is like a chain of basically handcuffs and chains that keeps a line of people together, right?

Like, it's how you chain a bunch of slaves together and walk them from wherever in the country you're taking them to the coast where they're going to get onto a slave ship, right?

Um, they used coffels as well in the Americas and what, like, once, like, it's not just, but like, yeah, that's how they're being transported.

And the slaves are being gathered and taken generally by a mix of African and Arab slave traders, right?

These people are doing the dirty work of actually capturing the human beings who are then loaded on their ships and sold.

And for these traders, their participation in what we know is the Atlantic slave trade wouldn't have seemed to them a huge departure from the kinds of slavery that had existed since antiquity.

In a 2005 study for Anti-Slavery International, Mike Kaye writes, quote, slavery existed in Africa and elsewhere before the intervention of Europeans, albeit in a very different context.

People were enslaved as a consequence of being captured in war, as a punishment for committing a crime, or as a means of escaping famine.

While enslavement in Africa could be extremely brutal, African slaves had a social as well as an economic value, and they brought prestige and status to their owner.

Slaves held in Africa were still generally considered people and part of society. By contrast, those sold into the transatlantic slave trade were seen as chattel to be bought and sold.

Their only worth was considered in monetary terms.

As a consequence, enslaved Africans were routinely tortured, whipped, branded, beaten, chained, etc., separated from other family members, even deprived of their own names.

Hardly any of the millions who were transported across the Atlantic ever returned to Africa.

And that's important, which is that, like, yeah, it's a bad thing to be a slaver, but these slavers are not thinking of slavery in the same way as the Europeans who are taking the enslaved people from them, right?

That it's just a very different thing. And, you know, you could say they don't care because they're getting guns and stuff.
And that's a very good, these are bad people. Yeah.

But the slavery that existed and that they that

existed in their heads was very different from like the slavery that Europeans were increasingly executing.

It is a mark of how different African slavery was in Africa that it was not uncommon for enslaved people to marry into the family that owned them.

They would keep their given names and their family identity, and if freed, were again unlikely to face lingering stigma over their former status.

So again, you're just talking about kind of a fundamentally different look at what slavery is. We'll talk later in these episodes.

We'll have an account of an African man who, as a boy, was captured by some of these slave traders, and we'll get some more details as to like what that process looked like.

John Newton, who's a former slave captain who became an abolitionist, we'll talk about him later, suggested that the principal source of the slave trade at this time was, quote, the wars that prevail among the natives.

And scholarship seems to back a good deal of this up. However, as Newton noted, the English and other Europeans have been charged with fomenting these wars.

I verily believe that the far greater part of the wars in Africa would cease if the Europeans would cease to tempt them by offering goods for slaves.

And you do have, undeniably, it's almost like a little bit of a World War I situation, where you've got all of these different tribes and kingdoms that are enemies, that have been fighting for, in some cases, for centuries, and Europeans come in and start offering guns and cannons in exchange for slaves.

So now it becomes not only, do you want them if you're fighting a war, but if your neighbor is trading slaves to the Europeans for guns and cannons and you don't get guns and cannons, what's going to happen to you the next time you have a war, right?

Right, right. Like inciting is as simple as that.
It's not necessarily some CIA skull buggery. It's just, well, you start selling guns to one kingdom and they're all going to want guns.

And the only thing you want in exchange for guns is slaves, right? Yeah, it's just like a classic, like vicious cycle thing, right? Like one builds on the other.

Yeah.

And when we talk about like the great British fortunes, for example, that were built on slavery, people tend to focus on the people who were part of slave syndicates, but a huge number of the guns that are produced in Great Britain during the period, like this 300-year period, are sent immediately to Africa.

Those are also slave fortunes, you know? Yeah. And gunpowder, too.
Those are slave fortunes. Yeah, it totally makes sense.
Like you're contributing to that same cycle of death and enslavement.

Exactly, exactly. The first English slave ship left Africa somewhere around 1555.

In 1621, the Dutch West India Company was formed and it proved so efficient that it drank Portugal's milkshake in about 20 years time.

The Dutch become the major slavers in the Guinea coast instead, like, and they take over from Portugal.

They capture a lot of their coastal forts and start dominating the Atlantic slave trade for themselves. Now, they're not top shit of the slave trade for very long.

Within the space of about a century, the majority of slave ships taking Africans to the New World are going to be British, right? It takes about 100 years, but England becomes the primary

movers and shakers of the Atlantic slave trade, and they will stay that way until it ends.

England begins colonizing the Caribbean right around the same time the Dutch start pushing the Portuguese out of West Africa.

In 1655, a century after their first slave ship departed the Guinea coast, England captures Jamaica from Spain. In short order, it becomes the most profitable piece of their overseas empire.

By the late 1700s, British imports of sugar from Jamaica are worth five times as much as the combined value of all of the imports from the 13 colonies in North America. Jeez.

Yeah, that's what happens.

Yeah. I guess that's what happens

when you enslave human beings.

Right, it's a really efficient thing from a business point of view. When you enslave human beings to produce the most addictive drug yet known to well, I guess tobacco's up there, too.
Yeah,

just some other stuff going on. But yeah, like I know, people can consume sugar

more often than tobacco and

probably for longer.

And I think probably more people like sugar than yet. Yeah, it is an acquired taste.
Tobacco.

It's just, I mean, it's just impossible to look at how profitable this is, not be like, well, yeah, because it's fucking addictive as hell.

And it's also kind of worth Americans keeping in mind when we get up our own asses about like the American Revolution.

It's like, well, the British could kind of afford to cut bait because the 13 colonies, they were not that big a part of

the economy of the empire. Right?

Okay, guys. They had a lot of irons in the fire.
Okay.

they had some other options, too. Tobacco.

Good luck, everyone.

Now, these vast profits could only be sustained by the constant import of new slaves to Jamaica because it's a very deadly business actually farming this stuff.

Historian Siddharth Kara writes that, quote, by the late 18th century, the slave trade had permeated almost every aspect of British society and helped to transform the nation into an economic superpower.

The importance of this trade to Great Britain almost exceeds calculation, stated one Liverpool ship captain.

A Royal African Company official, noted, the Negro trade on the coast of Africa is the chief and fundamental support of the British colonies and plantations in America.

This is funding British colonialism elsewhere. Right? Like, this is, in a lot of ways, what made it possible for them to

start colonizing the Americas is the money that came from, you know, the slave trade. Enslavement.

Yeah, enslaving people and working them to death. Yeah, and I guess stealing the land too, right? Like, it's a great

land because all your infants are really good. Like, stealing shit?

Yeah, who'd have thought?

Yeah.

Uh, yeah, there's a great movie, Point Break, about that, which I've been meaning to talk to you about, James. Do you have a mat? Do you want any masks?

I have a couple.

Got a couple. Okay.
Yeah, I got a Reagan mask. I don't know.
We'll talk about this on the mask. Okay, yeah, probably get this one off the end.
It's like, are we doing this again?

Yeah. Again, Sophie, we never did that.

What are you talking about, Sophie? The listeners can't see me winking.

Say it out loud so everyone knows, Robert. That's my winking voice.
Yeah, that's my winking voice.

So we're never going to know precisely how many enslaved Africans were killed just as a byproduct of the slave trade.

Most estimates are between 10 and 20% of people, enslaved people who were like brought over the middle passage died during the journey.

But I mean, that's... 10 and 20% is itself a pretty wide margin.
We simply don't know.

And some voyage, I mean, some ships, everyone died, but in some voyages, voyages, it was like 30 or 40%, you know.

Sometimes it's less.

It really just depended on the captain. So these are rough averages, right?

The knowledge that this sort of human shrinkage was inevitable, that a lot of the people that you bring over are going to die, led slavers to cram ever more people into the boats, right?

It's like, well, if 10 or 20% are going to die, then we got to bring even more people, which means that the boats are even more deadly. You know,

these holds are. Yeah.
It only works if you see it there being an infinite supply of people who have almost no value, right? Like, right, exactly.

Jesus, and if you don't know about how germs work, right? In fact, whoa, we just jam more people in the hold where like everyone is going to the bathroom all over, like it's everywhere, right?

You're in a hold, you're chained together, you have, and you're sick. A lot of people are too ill to have any control over when they go or not because they're dying, right?

Yeah, like you, you're jamming them into these disease, nasty, disease-riddled, tiny hell rooms. It's just it's a nightmare.

Everyone's in, it's a boo box from the hook, but like everyone's in it, right? For months. It's just incomprehensible suffering.
Yeah.

Around 10 million enslaved people survived the crossing to the new world during the course of the Atlantic slave trade, which suggests about one to two million people died over the same period of time, right?

Kind of, I think roughly. That's the estimate.

And that's not the end of how many people this fucking killed because about two-thirds of the slaves who survived transit were immediately put to the task of cutting sugar cane in the Americas or the Caribbean or doing other crops.

But sugar plantations were the big one, and they are hell on earth. Laborers worked 14 hours a day.

The heat was intense. They're in an unfamiliar climate with unfamiliar diseases.
And about a third of enslaved Africans died within three years of reaching the Caribbean.

Yeah, like you're just feeding people into the maw of this

system of death.

It's barely less lethal than a concentration camp, right? Yeah, like a margin.

Yeah.

And the only reason is that they wanted these people to live for some period of time to extract value from it. Yeah, exactly.

In his article for Anti-Slavery International, Kay adds, plantation owners in the British West Indies were initially unconcerned about this as they could simply buy more slaves and calculated that it was cheaper to buy than breed.

It is no exaggeration to say that slaves were treated worse than animals in the Caribbean. Yeah, Jesus Christ.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. That's pretty rough, right? Yeah.
The whole like, why breed them?

That's too much trouble. Yeah, right.
Like a thing that we do routinely for like cows and they were doing right then for like cows and sheep and shit that they wanted to eat.

Yeah. I think some of it may just have been that like, well, when people women are giving birth, they need like some degree of care.

And even that is more effort than I want to put into thinking about these people. I just want them to work until they drop.
Right.

This attitude is going to change over time, but, you know, that's how a lot of people think for a significant chunk of it. For more than 300 years, the slave trade continued unabated.

There is very little evidence that it was considered controversial at all by most people who lived back in the imperial core for a large chunk of this period of time.

Adam Smith, the famous economist, gave a lecture at the University of Glasgow in 1763, in which he argued that slavery was foundational to human civilization.

It existed in every culture throughout history, and it had very little chance of ever being abolished.

Historian Adam Hosschild makes the claim that the basic morality of slavery as a system was so unquestioned in the late 1700s in England that if you were to go back with a time machine and pick random people on the street and tell them slavery should be abolished, nine out of ten listeners would reject you out of hand as a maniac.

It was just not at all controversial up until the very end, pretty much of the 1700s, pretty late in the 1700s. Almost every great fortune in England during this time was dependent on the slave trade.

Between 1787 and 1807, every mayor of Liverpool, which at its peak was the major hub of the slave trade, about 40% of the entire European slave trade passes through Liverpool.

Every mayor of Liverpool has a financial interest in human trafficking.

The website Recovered Histories notes that by the late 18th century, 50 to 60 members of parliament represented slave plantations.

William Beckford, two-time mayor of London, owned a 22,000-acre plantation in Jamaica.

Great stuff. Cool.
So yeah, like the ruling class is all very much embedded with this stuff, right? It's the entire economy, right?

And even the people who aren't directly owning slaves are making money from the people who own slaves. Right, right.
It's just like a foundational underpinning of how everything works.

Now, even outside of direct involvement in the plantation system, it's impossible to avoid, like I said earlier, Britain exported about 150,000 firearms per year to Africa during this period of time in like the 1700s.

And these guns are being traded to locals in exchange for people.

The city of Birmingham was a major copper powerhouse and much of that copper was also sent overseas to Africa where it was traded for people because it's not just guns they're trading.

So again, it's really hard just not to be involved in some extra to some extent in profiting from the slave trade, even if you don't want to. Right.
Yeah.

And it seems like there's no one who didn't want to. Like everyone was just fine with it.
Yeah.

It's pretty much just the, oh shit. It's pretty much just the not Mennonites, but are they fucking? Quakers.

Yeah, sorry, it's pretty much just the Quakers who don't want to be financially like, yeah, not all of the Quakers in this period of time, let's be clear.

But like, the Quakers are fairly consistently, a lot of Quakers from a fairly early point in the slave trade are saying this is bad and we shouldn't do it.

But they're also seen as kind of kooks to most people because they're saying crazy shit like,

it's bad to be in the military and fight and die for a king. Yeah, yeah, maybe we shouldn't be killing each other.
They're saying crazy shit.

I think these wacky Quakers.

The term Quaker is one that they didn't prefer to use for themselves, right? It's like a derogatory term that was put upon them. And I guess I think so.
Yeah. They called themselves.

I know they called themselves friends. Yeah, the friends.

And it's one of those like...

Hard to pick a group of people in like Western society in early modernity who were more consistently right than the Quakers.

I mean, they really called it quite a few times. Yeah, you can go back and be like, yep, yep.
I mean, still having to go to bat on everything, but a lot. Yeah.

This very morning, I was out with a Quaker friend and we were helping some migrants get groceries because they can't get them otherwise and they need to feed their kids over the holidays. Like

they're still

doing a pretty good job.

Yeah, you know, we could talk about religion and all of the things I don't agree with, but if you're if you're pretty, if you're hewing pretty close to the idea that like it's bad to kill people and it's bad to own people and it's good to feed people,

you're going to be right more than you're wrong. Yeah, yeah.
You have to beat the average, especially back then. Yeah, you're going to beat the average in your society.
Yeah.

Now, you know what church didn't have a problem with slavery, James.

Any of them really, yeah. Most of them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Most of them.

But

the Church of England, right? That's shocking to me.

Wow. Church of England, big fans of slavery.

Deeply financially involved. Yeah.
Now, there is a sect, like a radical Anglican sect, that are anti-slavery from like, I think, fairly early in the 1700s.

But, like, the mainstream of the Church of England is fine with this stuff. And in fact, the Anglican Church owns vast plantations in Barbados and other Caribbean islands.

When anyone bothered to discuss the morality of the slave trade, the default assumption was that it represented a kindness to Africans.

Liverpool merchant Michael Sargent gave a representative version of this argument.

We ought to consider whether the Negroes in a well-regulated plantation under the protection of a kind master do not enjoy as great, nay, even greater advantages than when they are under their own despotic government.

Fuck's sake.

Yeah,

just what? It pulled that directly out of his ass. Like, what knowledge does he have of governance in the interior of Africa? Well,

and like, yeah, they live under a despot as opposed to you who lives under a king in a state that makes all of its money from slavery. Yeah, and they're dying

after three years. Like, how could it be better than whatever the situation was back home?

Yeah, it's people will just make shit up.

Yeah, it's just to make themselves feel better. Like, who knows how much he even cared.
Like, this is just a problem. This is like, well, you know, we just don't know if cigarettes are bad for people.

There's conflicting evidence. Or, you know, we can't really predict the climate.
So who's to say if all these gasoline emissions are bad? You know, like, it's that kind of argument, right?

It's like, well, maybe they're better off, you know?

You know how bad things are in Africa. Yeah.
Let's just, let's just hope it's that way. Otherwise,

face the guilt of what they're doing. Yeah.

Yeah. Otherwise, I'm a world historic monster.
Yeah. I'm a piece of shit on like a centuries-wide scale.

Speaking of world historic monsters.

I was hoping you would do this as an ad transition. Yeah.
Sponsors of our some of them, right? Maybe. We don't know.
Yeah, we never know. We don't know.

Be sure to DM Sophie and let her know if you don't like the advertisers. It's at IriteOK.

Yeah. Anyway, here's ads.
This podcast is sponsored by Liverpool. Liverpool.
We were the slave trading hub of the world for a period of time. Maybe we could do it again.
Visit Liverpool.

Sorry, I don't know why I'm throwing shade at Liverpool. My mom's from Liverpool.

What did Liverpool do to you, motherfucker? I mean, they did a lot to some

people.

They've done some bad shit.

To you. These liver puddings.
I'm offended on their behalf, on behalf of

the world about 10 million people who were enslaved.

I was offended by when Rob when Robert said, I'm winking. That's for the people that can't see me.

All I'm going to say is, if you know anyone from Liverpool, hit them. Again, my mother is from Liverpool.
Anyway, here's an example.

If you know anyone from Liverpool, wink at them. My entire mother's side of the family is from Liverpool.
This is behind the bastards, James. It's not a good time.
No, it's not. No, no, no.
That's why

we left Liverpool in opposition

around the 1960 fair. If you know anybody from Richmond, hit them too.
You know?

And maybe wink. Hit people if they come to you.
Yeah, wink while you're hitting them. Wink while you're hitting them, exactly.
Yeah, and then

I guess it's not a crime. Yeah.
It's just a joke. It's a bit.
Yeah, it's a bit. Don't hit people.

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And we're back.

Given how central slavery was to the British economy and how unquestioned the morality of the institution was to most Britons in this period, it is remarkable that only a few decades into the 19th century, Great Britain would put an end to its part in the slave trade, right?

I mean, it's less than that to the slave trade.

Sorry, it's like 1807 that the slave trade ends and like 1830 something, we'll talk about that later, where slavery is made illegal in the British Empire.

And given the fact that, like, in the 1760s, even up to the 1770s, you would have been hard pressed to find a person on the street who would be like, yeah, slavery is bad.

Like, that would have been a weird take not long before this. So it's kind of remarkable how quickly things turn around.
And that's why I want to tell this story:

one of the things that's so impressive is

how much, like, this seems like a hopeless cause.

If you're an abolitionist in like 1760, 1770, the idea that you might get the entire country on board ending slavery, ending the slave trade alone, is wild, right? Like, and they did.

So, yeah, that's pretty important for us here staring at an insurmountable mountain of problems to pay attention to how this happened.

Yeah, and it's worth noting, the abolitionist movement is often described by historians

as specifically the abolitionist movement that starts in England and first ends the slave trade and then slavery in the British Empire is the first social movement dedicated entirely to the recognition and protection of other people's rights.

Right?

Where's kind of cool? You are the movement's not fighting for their own rights.

They are fighting for the rights of a separate group of people, of outsiders, people who aren't even their countrymen generally. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's a really interesting way to frame it. It's significant, right? It's a meaningful thing.
And that deserves to be celebrated. Um,

there's also this kind of annoying thing today, and I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that a loud minority of racists today will argue that the Atlantic slave trade isn't something Westerners should be ashamed of, it's something that we should be proud of because we ended slavery, and nobody else ever tried to do that, right?

It's an example of how good our culture is: that we're the only ones who tried to end slavery.

White Europeans were the first people to decide slavery should be banned, you know? Jesus, yeah, it's fucking nonsense. Like, it's It's not true for one thing.

There were societies that banned kinds of slavery, at least. They still had things that we might say is problematic, but like anyway, whatever.

Any acknowledgement of how remarkable the pan-abolitionist cause was, and it was, has to be tempered by the acknowledgement that it came into being not to be not to they like the abolitionists that we're talking about were not fighting against slavery as the general concept that had existed since time immemorial.

They were fighting specifically against the uniquely terrible and uniquely Western shadow slave trade that existed in the 16th to the 19th centuries.

The nightmarish horrors of that system, which was so much worse than the very bad slavery that existed forever, is what inspired this movement.

Yeah, it's

unfortunately.

I'm a person who teaches at a college right now, and

we are living in the era of chatbots right

and I have noticed a certain number of chatbot generated essays arguing this point that you are making and it doesn't get any less upsetting even even after reading it hundreds of times that or like yeah there was slavery elsewhere and and it

It's like if at some point in the future, America got a complete handle on the whole gun thing and

did whatever we had to do to make sure that nobody dies from guns in the United States again.

And then people like a hundred years after that were like, Yeah, America's, America's the greatest culture ever because we were the only ones who realized guns were bad.

It's like, you're leaving out a really big part of the story.

You're really cutting out some important facts.

That's some bitch there that you probably don't want to gloss over. Yeah.
Yeah, we solved gun violence. America in that society, like

shit talking a country that allows hunting rifles. And it's like, wait a second.
Oh, yeah. Hold on, buddy.
You're forgetting some stuff.

Yeah, it's pretty bad shit.

Yeah, there's a lot of history you're ignoring here. Yeah.

The intellectual underpinnings of the abolitionist movement have a history that itself goes back centuries.

And we'd have to discuss everything from the Quakers to the French Revolution and the Scottish Enlightenment to adequately address all of that.

But what we're talking about specifically is not kind of the ideologies that led people, small groups and individuals to believe slavery was wrong, as much as how a small number of those people came together to create a massive movement that actually ended this horrible, horrible institution, right?

And that story starts,

if you're looking for what the best origin point for how that movement came together, it starts due to events that transpired on a specific slave ship near the end of 1781, right?

We're going to tell the story of a ship called the Zong or the Zorg.

Both names are fine, actually, technically to use it. You ever heard of this boat? No, I haven't actually.

I'm excited to learn more about this this boat i have a boat story it is a good boat story it's a there's a very good boat

james you're so pure i love a good boat story

you're not beating the british allegations

i know yeah it's just it's that's my epigenetic expression of loving boats yeah it's it's till you love a boat story boats

cricket I don't give a fuck about cricket.

I've got a friend who comes from like the Martha's Vineyard area. And I was like, so you're into boats, right?

And she was like, First off, that's really like you can't just assume everyone from Martha's Vineyard has a boat, but yeah, my dad is building me a boat. It's like, yeah, okay,

I knew it.

Yeah, as it happens,

yeah, no boats, all kinds of good stories about boats. Pirates and

boat peoples, I'll risk

on boats.

That pirate radio station and the movie Pirate Radio. Yeah,

based on true. Those were British

oil rig. Yeah, I mean, it was an oil rig at some point.
I forget. Yeah, Pirate Radio gave us like punk music and ska music, right? Which is, you know,

exactly. It's why I am the way I am.

Yeah, so you can take boats. I'm going to try to

take my savings and invest in a ska boat cruise, you know, ska and sailing together again at last.

I've just thought about the little domino meme, and at the bottom end, it's like, you know, somebody starts broadcasting from an oil rig in the atlantic and the top it's the mighty bosson to release a memorial song for george floyd

okay now i'm no longer making it seem like a bad idea now i'm no longer now i'm no longer so into boats yeah

yeah not quite at pete hegseth level but no no no not yet and there's there's a couple of good books there's this a book called the zong and there's another book that came out more recently called the zorg i haven't read the first one i read the zorg it's a very good book um it's by siddharth kara um and i i do recommend it that'll be a big source for this episode in particular.

We'll have some quotes from it elsewhere. But the story of this boat begins with the story of a slaver, a guy named Robert Stubbs.

By 1781, Stubbs was an experienced slave trader, albeit an unlucky one.

His first recorded journey was as first mate on a ship called the Black Joke, which he abandoned within months of taking the job due to having

a huge when I found the fucking name out.

Yeah,

that a great name.

Yeah,

he can come up with a better one. Has all the other words been taken? Nope, nope, nope, just the black joke.
Yeah,

he testified in defense of the vessel's owner against the captain during a subsequent lawsuit because the voyage does not go well.

And this is what starts his career because even though he had abandoned the ship, because he helps the vessel's owner out by testifying, he gets made captain of the black joke the next year, right?

So a year later, he's a captain of the boat that he had abandoned. abandoned, and under his command, the ship takes on 230 enslaved people in Barbados.

Um, but or sorry, takes it takes on 230 slaves and tries to take them to Barbados, but it was captured by the French before it could, like, you know, it could make any money off of that, right?

So, it's become slaves the French get to profit off of, right? Two years later, Stubbs captains a slaver that makes it to Virginia, so he has a successful voyage finally.

His third voyage in 1760 sees him captured yet again by a French privateer, and then he's captured a third time the next year. So

out of four voyage five voyages, he's abandoned ship once, been captured three times and had one successful crew.

Yeah, Stubbsy isn't really delivering on the investment.

Oh, Stubsy is not the best ever. Yeah, yeah, you don't want to.

Just thinking, like, you know, you're a young wannabe boat person, and then you find out you're going to be on the Stubbs boat. It's got to be got to be a rough one.
Yeah,

fuck.

I listen to brush up on my French for journey.

Everyone's got like one of those blue and white striped shirts underneath their English red jacket, you know, just for the when the moment arises.

Just got to get ready to change ownership.

So, given his history, it's not surprising that by 1765, old Stubbsy could not get hired to clean the privies on a sailing vessel. So he takes the money.

He has had, he does have two successful trips after this, but his failure to success rate is high enough that he has trouble getting anyone to take a bet on him.

So he takes the money that he's made and he starts working as a ships broker in London.

And that basically he is buying goods to sell on merchant vessels and then taking his profits and investing in slave ships so that he gets a profit off of like whatever they make when they sell the people that they're going to take, right?

He's not good at this and he declares bankruptcy in 1771.

Now, somewhere in between during this whole period where he's failing at being a captain and then failing at being an investor in slave ships, he starts a family and has six children who he is not in the least bit interested in raising or caring for.

He sounds like a bit of a bad dude.

He's not a good man. Did the slave captain thing?

Yeah, yeah, fat. Yeah, fat.

Stubbs, he said, fuck them kids.

Yeah, fuck them kids.

Now, in order to provide for his family while being as far away from them as possible, at the end of 1779, he applies for a job as a governor with the CMTA or the Company of of Merchants Trading to Africa.

This is the corporation because slavery is a capitalist enterprise, right? In the very literal sense of the word.

It is a corporation, a chartered corporation that is managing the logistics of the Atlantic slave trade for the British Empire, right?

Because corporations are just more efficient than governments, obviously.

Now, we don't know why, as evidence that they're more efficient, they made Stubbs a governor.

Great.

It didn't have background checks. We don't know why.

Yeah. It seems like I think it's that he had friends in the company and he was a really good ass kisser.
One of the things you see from it is that he is very charming to certain kinds of idiot.

And I think he just talks his way into French by licking boots. Are we sure he didn't want to go in? Are we sure he didn't want to go into government politics?

No, no, not at all. He wants to be a slave governor.
He wants to be the governor of one of these slave forts. You know, we talked about El Mina at the start of the episode.

There's more by now, and one of them that the British is operating is a fort called Anamebu on the Gold Coast, right? And that's what he's governing. He's not governing like a colony.

He's governing a slave castle. They were like, well, you're really great at abandoning the ship.
And he's like,

he's like, you said I was abandoning the ship, but I was going down with it. What do you mean? Yeah.
That was a joke. That was a joke for the girlies.
You're welcome.

Okay.

That went over both of your heads.

it sure did sophie yeah no beautiful what the bit i would make is that they looked at how he's raising his family and they're like look stubbs you're great at abandoning your kids can you abandon a bunch of enslaved african people to a fate worse than death too is that something you'd be good at and stubbs said absolutely yes i can he's like honey where do i sign like

um it's dream true so this is a perfect job for him yeah he can profit from the slave trade and he has very little personal risk right right?

Theoretically, if he wasn't a giant asshole, he'd have very little personal risk.

But as Siddharth Kara writes in the Zorg, things started to go wrong as soon as Stubbs departed England.

Quote: From the moment the ship departed England, Captain Lewin reported vexation often arising between me and my passengers, occasioned by malicious information and other base insinuations, all of which were spread by Robert Stubbs.

Stubbs directed much of his ire towards one of his fellow CMTA officials, Stuart Beard. He accused Beard of destroying the ship's stores and of hurting his son by tying his legs together.

Lewin investigated the accusations and concluded them to be false and ill-grounded. And by the way, he's brought his 12-year-old boy with him.

That's the son

who's giving me accusing this guy of tying his legs together.

Stubbs then accused Beard of being a pimp at a body house and that he and John Roberts were highway robbers.

To top it off, Stubbs accused Roberts of trying to breed a mutiny, which Lewin also found to be an ill-designed falsehood.

The bickering, discord, and wild accusations led Captain Lewin to describe Stubbs as a wicked and treacherous character.

Another official on the ship said Stubbs was inclined towards malice and wicked enough to say what he cannot justify.

So, again, these guys are all slave traders and they're like, this dude's a fucking dick.

He's like.

An asshole among the worst people in history. It's like when other billionaires are like, Elon Musk, what a fucking prick.
What's wrong with that dude? Yeah.

You really have to be on another level of asshole. Yep.
Now, as noted in that above passage, they said he brought his son, his 12-year-old boy George, on the trip with him. And this was not normal.

Kara notes that there are no records of any other governor bringing a child that young to Africa with him.

In fact, what Stubbs did was so weird that the company puts rules in place to ban any other officials from bringing kids under 15 with them in the future. They're like, what is he doing?

A 12-year-old?

Do we know why?

Yes. Yes, we do, Sophie.

As soon as they reach the fort, he gives his son George a job, working for the fort as like a copywriter, I think. He's like keeping a track of accounts or something.
And he pockets his son's salary.

So that's why he brought his kid. So he could make him when he's kind of enslaving his 12-year-old child.

He's got one move, and it's

yeah, that takes fuck them kids to another level oh it's so funny and the thing is george is not even making much money he's getting about 80 pounds a year equivalent to less than 25 000 a year and his he fucking stubbs is a governor he's making better money than that like he's just like he just likes to do it he just loves to abuse a child

the love of the game

yeah yeah wow yeah so It becomes increasingly clear that all this guy cares about is money.

He's not interested in his kid and he's not interested in the other human beings around him and he's going to treat them like shit.

As soon as he arrives, Stubbs accuses his second in command at the fort of theft and fires him and then promotes his son to the job, which raises his son's salary to about £120 a year, which Stubbs pockets.

Jesus Christ.

You'd have brought the other five kids. You'd really be making banks.
You can have them all out that farming. Yeah.
Jesus. Now, outside of this, he refuses to do the actual job.

He calls in sick whenever he has meetings to attend, and he uses public supplies meant to provide for the fort to trade for slaves that he then sells for his personal profit.

He's got this side does try to do this guy's guy.

Yeah,

he sucks so bad.

He's one of the shittiest people we've ever. I know this is like our reverse episodes about

heroes, but this guy sucks so hard.

Um, he may be the shittiest slave captain of all of the slave captains, which is a high ba. Yeah.

It's a high, they're all shitty, but I think it's the mix of being actually bad at the job and also being willing to casually kind of enslave his own 12-year-old son.

Yeah, it's uniquely bad for a mild profit. That'll do it.

So when he does, and he does not like actually work. He kind of refuses to do his job.
He calls in sick whenever he has meetings to attend.

So when he does try to do his job, it becomes clear to his subordinates that he can't read or write.

In fact, his letters that he sends subordinates are so badly written that they become like a currency people are trading them in the fort because they're funny

disgust

can't even fucking read jesus man wow it's probably a good thing

that ran can you imagine if she needed it written down otherwise Yeah, if he could, if he could actually write.

The local tribe that ran things, because the British have a small presence here. They are mostly reliant upon local allies, as is generally the case with the British Empire to do things.

And the local tribe that is largely running things around the fort are the Fantae, right?

And the British slavers are dependent on these people, both for the regular supply of slaves and for the raw materials, the food and whatnot, that they need to keep the fort operational and to stock the ships.

Ships come into port to offload goods that are going to be traded to Africans and to take enslaved Africans, but they need like food and water and stuff, right?

And the Fantae are a crucial part of that, too.

And so everyone else who has this job is very nice nice to these people because they outnumber you and you've given them guns yeah and you're reliant on them for food you can see where this is going rubbish it's just a bad idea to piss them off stubbs refuses to treat them with respect and for no reason like they had one of the things the fort would do is they would regularly like once a week i think give out alcohol to these people as like a it's like a goodwill thing right to keep like here's some liquor keep being our friends you know stubbs just stops this i think because he wants to to sell the alcohol for himself

and when they complain he threatens them with armed men

wow just genius stuff yeah

he at least he's very bad at being evil he sucks so bad at this yeah now i think i think part of what's happening here is that he's so racist he can't even deal respectfully with the africans that his entire life and business depends on right which most of these other slavers are they're perfectly willing to be nice to these guys because they need them you know Right.

It's just an academic thing. We've sold them guns.
I can't emphasize enough. We've sold them guns.

In October of 1780, Stubbs has a meeting with an emissary of the king of the Ashanti Empire.

And this empire is the greatest power in the region, and they are the people upon whom British trade in West Africa is most dependent, right?

You really need these folks in your corner if you're not going to deal with some serious problems.

And Stubbs is supposed to preside over the signing of a treaty with the ashante after signing the treaty it was his job to give gifts that king george iiii had sent over for the king of the empire right can i guess what happens he keeps the gifts he asks them to buy slaves that's exactly right i was like i was like nobody's getting this

he has one move somebody

Yeah,

he has one move, steal things and buy slaves.

And get captured by the French, I guess. This is, yeah, I guess he has another move.
This spells the end of his career as governor.

He was deposed violently and robbed of most of his ill-gotten possessions. Like the other white people don't even wait to get the order to depose him.

Like, we got to get this guy out of him immediately. Like, we're in danger now.
He's pissing off. Like, there's so many more of them than us.
And again, they have guns.

Yeah. So they depose him.
They lock him in a cell.

They take all of his ill-gotten gains, which includes a bunch of gold that he'd put together based on his fraudulent transactions, about $105,000 in modern money worth of gold.

And Stubbs is furious, both that he has been deposed as governor and that they took his money. And he keeps being like, at least give me my money back.
And they're like, no, you stole that shit.

You stole all of it.

Luckily for Stubbs, a slaving vessel named the William arrives at the fort not long after he gets taken into custody.

And, you know, the crew of the boat goes into the fort, and one of the members of the crew is a higher ranking crew member the ship's surgeon a guy named luke collingswood meets stubbs and again stubbs just has some sort of charm for a certain kind of person because within it sounds like hours maybe days of meeting stubbs collingswood is so charmed that he convinces the captain we got to take this guy back with us as a passenger to to england right like we got to put him on the boat with us you know and get him out of here he's being unfairly treated it's a bad situation for him um if there's one human being at that time you don't want on your slave vessel surely it's stubbs absolutely not the last man his passing average is very poor

yeah

so and again he's just gonna this is gonna be the he's gonna continue having like the worst record on a boat um now i think he probably stubbs probably promises collings with some of his money that he's totally gonna get back i don't know what they say but stubbs's plan seems to have been get on this boat get back to london and then fight in court to have his gold returned and ideally have himself reappointed as governor of the fort, which is totally going to happen.

Where's George at this point? Stole from two kings.

Jesus Christ.

Yeah. What's happened to George? Is little George on the boat?

Great, great, great question, George. You would think.
You would think

Stubbsy, departing the fort where he had been imprisoned, would take his 12-year-old with him. He does not.

He does not imagine

the 12-year-old.

He abandons his 12-year-old at the fort.

Never sees him again. Never writes about it.

Says nothing to anyone about why he's left this kid behind. As far as we know, doesn't even explain it to his wife.

Just forgets he has a son. God.

Cool guy. I guess

the optimistic, maybe George is like, fuck, no, I'm not getting on a boat with you. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, hopefully.

George is like, I would love to be on another continent from my father. Like,

I'm hoping that it's ideal for me.

Maybe the guys who overthrew his dad were like, hey, George, we've got no issue with you. Do you want to actually get paid for working? Because we can do that.
You can just make money to have a job.

And he's like, what, really?

Really? That's an option? I didn't know how that works.

My dad told me it was illegal for kids to make money.

Goes on an apology tour and

recovers the Stubbs name, maybe. So elsewhere, kind of at the same period of time Stubbs is being deposed as governor, a British privateer, right? Because the British are fighting the Dutch.

They've got a war going on of some sort. And, you know, one of the things that happens is they start,

the government starts giving, you know, licenses to privateers, which are private boats that are basically pirates that are endorsed by the government, right?

And one of these privateers in the area succeeds in capturing a couple of different Dutch vessels around the same time. These are Dutch, like slaving ships mostly.

And one of them is is a slave ship called the Zong or the Zorg. Depending on the source, you'll see a bunch of different names attributed to this boat.
I think the Zong is the one you generally see.

And I think that's what the British called it once they took it over. The Zork, Z-O-R-Q-U-E, is also common.

But Siddhartha uses the Zorg, which I think is its original name.

So that's what I'll generally be calling it throughout these episodes, even though, again, you're not wrong calling it the Zong. And the name Zorg itself is Dutch.
It means care.

I don't know why that name was picked for a slave ship. Seems like not a well-fitting name, but okay.

The owner of the William, so this gets taken by privateers.

And this, you know, this privateer with all these Dutch ships he's captured in tow kind of shows up at the port when the William is at port taking on slaves.

And the owner of the William, who's a representative of this syndicate, the Gregson Syndicate. So the Gregson Syndicate is basically a major slave owning, trading company, right?

And the captain of the boat is like, well, I've got some petty cash here. If I buy the Zorg at auction, I can take even more slaves back and basically double the profitability of this voyage.

And I'll just throw some of my crew. I'll put a skeleton crew on the Zorg from the William,

and we can take even more enslaved people back, right? So that's what happens. He buys the Zorg at auction.
It was loaded with 244 people,

like enslaved people

in the hold at the time that they buy it.

And because they don't have that many sailors, they're kind of just sticking a minimal crew on it. So the Zorg is not going to be crewed by enough people, right? Like

it's not an ideal load. And they don't have like...

For whatever reason, there is a really, the guy who becomes the first mate on the Zorg is a really experienced sailor who's like an excellent navigator and knows how to do everything you'd want in a captain.

But the captain of the William makes Luke Collingswood, the ship's surgeon, the captain of the Zorg.

We don't know why

Collingswood is not

good at this. He's actually going to be terrible at this.
And there's no reason to think he would have been good at it. He's a doctor.
Yeah. He doesn't know how to navigate for shit.
Like, yeah.

He's not particularly good at leadership, you know? He's good at cutting into people, you know?

I don't even think he's a very good doctor, right?

And he's never captained a vessel before. And again,

the first mate that he's put with on this skeleton crew is an experienced seaman and navigator, but the two of a falling out.

Collinswood does not get along with this guy, and he's confined to quarters for a sizable chunk of the journey.

To make, yeah, yeah, yeah, put the guy who knows how to find stuff in the hold. Yeah, we'll work it out.

To make matters worse, before leaving the coast of Africa to sail for Jamaica, the Zorg takes on even more enslaved people. The boat was meant to hold a maximum of 240 slaves in the hold.

442 are crammed into the lightless, reeking hold as they begin their journey, right? So this is just everything done to create a worst-case scenario. Skeleton crew up top.

Captain doesn't know what he's doing. Only skilled navigators locked in his room.
Twice as many people in the hold as you're supposed to have. So everyone's going to be getting sick.

There's not going to be enough food and water, right?

Great. Cool decisions.
Illness is going to be everywhere. Yeah.

Maybe too heavy, also. Like it's sitting too down in the water or whatever.
Maybe too heavy. It's got to be slower.

The ship encounters bad weather immediately. Illness spreads rampantly throughout the crew and the enslaved people in the hold.
Collingswood very quickly gets sick.

He's going to die ultimately of this. And he is deliriously ill most of the journey.
And he's still captain.

So he's just fucking up navigating because he's like hallucinating and puking and shitting himself to death while he's trying to like work a sextant and figure out longitude or whatever. Right.

Now, because he's fucking up, the ship keeps getting lost and you know, the weather being bad hurts with that. So they're, they're not getting into Jamaica.

Like it takes months longer than it should have taken. And because there's twice as many people on board as there should, the ship runs out of its stock of dried citrus.
Right.

Which is what stops you from getting scurvy. So everyone starts getting scurvy, including the sailors who are supposed to be manning the ship.
Right? Perfect.

Yeah.

By November, Collingswood is so ill that he has to step down from command of the vessel.

And instead of, again, appointing the guy who knows how to sail to run a boat, he makes Robert Stubbs the captain. Stubbs is back.
And of course,

he's back in charge. He's like,

so the first mate, Kelsall, protests.

And again, one of the last command decisions Collingswood makes is he forces Kelsall to be confined to quarters and also orders him to stop updating his logbook, which suggests that he and like Stubbs and Collingswood don't want a record of what's going to happen next, which suggests that they're kind of pre-planning what's going to happen, actually.

We don't really know if that's the case, but it's a weird order to give Kelsall, right?

Now, for weeks, the Zorg sails without a real captain, going increasingly off course as the water supplies dwindle.

Things get so bad that they have to free Kelsall from confinement because they're like someone who knows what they're doing.

We're going to die. We're literally going to die.
And the crew starts to panic that they're going to run out of water.

right now they're not actually out of water they're not even really that on the verge of being out of water but they have no idea where they are and water supplies are low right and they kind of realize they've got a little less than they thought they had and so they start panicking and a decision is made to stretch their supplies by throwing dozens of enslaved passengers into the ocean.

So

if you're thinking about this the way they're thinking about this, these people are money, and the women and children are worth less at market than the men.

And they're less likely to survive the journey anyway. Yeah.

They're throwing enslaved women and children into the ocean to die a horrific drowning death. Yeah,

that's their first plan is to break into this chunk of the hold where they keep the women and children and grab a bunch of them and throw them into the sea.

Per Cara's book, The Zorg, quote, The cabin windows on a typical frigate like the Zorg were no larger than five to six square feet.

Once the woman slave realized she was being thrown out, she would have resisted. She could pull her body weight down, plant her feet and hands against the window frame, bite her captors, or scream.

To force a resistant adult female through a small cabin window would have required a great deal of violence.

It is possible that Stubbs, Collingwood, Kelsall, and the crew of the Zorg first stabbed her with a cutlass, or punched and kicked her, cracked her bones, or otherwise beat her into submission before forcing her through the window.

The crew members returned to the slavehold, selected another woman, and threw her from the same cabin window. Next was a child, another woman, another child, another woman.

One by one, the crew picked 55 women and children and threw them, quote, alive singly through the cabin windows into the sea and drowned.

That's horrific.

Yeah. One of the chill, one of the, I mean, one of the women and one of the children they throw out is a newborn baby who was born on the vessel.
They throw her and her mom into the sea.

And yeah, I mean, it's just a nightmare. The Zorg ultimately docks in Jamaica on December 22nd, 1781.

Between 224 and 240 of the more than 400 enslaved Africans aboard had died, 62 from sickness during the journey, and between 123 and 133 thrown overboard.

10 more, and these were men, threw themselves overboard, committing suicide. Maybe it was in solidarity with the people who were being murdered.
Maybe it was to spare themselves more agony.

We don't know, but they, they, like, 10 people actually just kill themselves, right?

Um, which hard to

like, yeah, to

like, yeah, there's no good option for you here, right? Like, and these you, it's become clear to you when you see them throwing babies into the water.

Whoever these people are, they're monsters. Like, maybe any death is better than spending any amount of time with demons like this right yeah yeah like

yeah with the knowledge that they're just gonna keep doing it yeah yeah and that you have to that whatever you're doing is benefiting these fucking monsters right yeah yeah uh after they within like a days of landing in jama jamaica luke collingwood dies uh but robert stubbs it survives and he makes his way back to london where he brings the tale of what had happened stubbsy he's like a fucking cockroach you can't kill him.

Yeah. Yeah.
And he takes the tale of what had happened to the boat, to the owner of the syndicate that had employed them, William Gregson.

And basically, Stubbs doesn't get, you know, rich off this journey because he's not part of the crew, right? Right.

But he sees this like, okay.

And this has kind of happened to him before, right? He testified on behalf of the owner that slave should be got made captain.

So he goes to the owner of the syndicate that owns the boat and he's like, hey, I have an idea. And I think the idea is if this works out, I get a a cut of it and a job, right?

Like, you're going to help me, you know, get back in good and start making money off the slave trade again, right? And the deal that he talks about is, so I need to set something up.

Do you know where insurance comes from, James? As an industry?

Boats?

Slavery. Oh, okay.
Specifically, slavery. Cool.
Yeah. Lloyds of London, which started as a coffee house, really gets going as a business insuring slave ships, right? Now,

boats in general, that is a big part of insurance, but

insuring the slave trade is a huge part of the birth of insurance as an industry right perfect um because it's an expensive proposition right you're filling this boat up you're buying all of the you're buying all the goods to trade for these people and if they all get captured or the boat sinks you're out a shitload of money right um so the insurance industry provides a degree of security to the owners of slave syndicates like gregson now some deaths are expected as a result of the brutality of the middle passage right you're not going to get money just because some some slaves die on the boat, because it's assumed that they will, right?

You're jamming them in there, illness is going to, some crew are going to die, right? But catastrophes like a boat sinking in a storm or a slave uprising are insured. And so

Stubbs comes back and he's like, hey,

we had to kill about 130 of these people,

but we had to kill them because of an act of the sea, an act of God, basically, because like, well, this disaster hit us and we were going to run out of water.

We had no option but to throw them overboard. That means their deaths are payable.
Like, your insurance company owes you for them, right?

Because it was an unavoidable necessity.

So,

yeah, that's that's Stubbs's move. And Gregson's like, all right, yeah, I'll try to make more money.
And so, he puts in a claim for the value of these people.

I think he values them at about 30 pounds each, these people who were murdered. The insurers fight back, not because they're good people, because they don't want to pay out any money.

And there's a court case over this, Gregson v.

Gilbert, right, over whether or not this really was basically an act of God that is covered by insurance, or if they didn't need to kill these people, and thus it shouldn't be covered.

And the court in this case finds for the Gregson syndicate.

It rules that enslaved people are property, that this was an act of God, effectively, and that the insurance company has to compensate the syndicate for their loss. And that's the first court case.

It is the fallout from this court case that is going to inspire the birth of the organized abolitionist movement in England, right?

This is, I mean, really, I mean, the abolitionist movement in the U.S. owes a lot to what happens in the wake of this horrifying case, right?

So we're going to talk about all that and more in parts two and three. James, how you feeling?

Well,

not as Christmassy as I expected coming on the happy nice guy Christmas episode. There's good guys in the other parts.
Okay, good. I'm glad to hear that.

Sorry. Yeah, I know.
Yeah. Good to talk about the way that British people have covered themselves in glory throughout history.
Yeah, we'll get to some better British representation in part two.

You get a book, though, James. Speaking of British representation.

It's not a book about British people, particularly. I am in it.

So is Robert. But yeah, I've written a book about anarchists at war.

from Myanmar, Rojava, and the Spanish Civil War. A bit less depressing than this episode was.
You're going to find some really inspiring people who I think have done really beautiful things.

What's it called? It is a good call, Sophie. I'm not very good at this.
It's called Against the State.

You can see it there. It kind of doesn't do well.

Doesn't do well on the camera, does it?

The pre-order link will be in our episode description. Just go and click that.
It's quite reasonable. It's quite affordable right now.
I think it's $18.

So if you buy it now, it will arrive in late January. It's released on the 26th of January.

So maybe you'll forget and it will be a nice little surprise for you at a time when otherwise, you know, the nights are long and it's cold and raining all the time.

Excellent. Well, everybody, we'll see you for part two.
Goodbye.

Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

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