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

In our annual holiday reverse episode, Robert introduces James Stout to the heroes who fought to end the Atlantic Slave trade.

(3 part series)

Against the State by James Stout available for preorder here: https://www.akpress.org/against-the-state.html 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, what enslaving my like ten million people over
the course of three hundred or so years, Welcome to
behind the Beast is then, Sophie, people have missed the
old kind of introduction where I'd like, what's xing my wis?

Speaker 2 (00:20):
There's something inappropriate about how I did this intro.

Speaker 3 (00:22):
It was very inappropriate. Also, I liked my intro where
I said, welcome to behind the Bostards. I'm not Robert Evans.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Yeah you didn't do a British accent last time, Sophie.

Speaker 4 (00:31):
Yeah, you joy for a second, but.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
I was doing I was doing that not because of
our guests, but because of our topic.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
Oh I thought you were doing that because of our guest. No,
I would sat stout, Sir James stout.

Speaker 4 (00:45):
Sir James stout. There it is, Yeah, absolutely not. I
don't think that's happening anytime in the near future. And
anyone touched me with a sword period, I'd have back
at them if they tried.

Speaker 3 (00:55):
H Well, Margaret told me the other day that I
would make a great queen.

Speaker 4 (00:59):
When we find we did.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
I was pretty drunk, I think, yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:04):
I was drunk too, and we were using those crucifixes.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
We were using crucifixes to face and island before this
is a podcast about the worst people in all of
his story.

Speaker 3 (01:14):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:22):
For pre order.

Speaker 5 (01:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
Well he had to introduce him before we did that, Sophie.

Speaker 3 (01:26):
We said his name, What else do you want?

Speaker 2 (01:28):
I was going to put a little bit more like,
you know, the spin on it, some oil you know,
on the vinegar by by all means, go ahead, James Stout,
podcaster and.

Speaker 6 (01:39):
Author and our friend.

Speaker 2 (01:42):
And our buddy. Yeah, you want to tell people about.

Speaker 4 (01:45):
Your book, I do. I would like that, And then
I'm excited to hear about Pedophile 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 Spainjava. Includes
some I've been with Robert and places I've been on
my own. It's a beautiful cover. It's a really Yeah.

(02:06):
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 This is Burmese Kurdish. This is English and Spanish
for those who aren't familiar with those languages. Yeah, it
comes out in the twenty sixth of January with ak Press.
We'll give you a pre order link if you'd like

(02:28):
to buy it, I hope in.

Speaker 3 (02:29):
The episode description friends.

Speaker 4 (02:32):
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 revolutions. I think I
studied for my PhD. That didn't spend time in that one.

(02:54):
I'm not that old.

Speaker 2 (02:55):
Buy the book, read the book, Overthrow the Government.

Speaker 3 (02:59):
You know, nothing would make me happier than you pre
ordering James Stout's book.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
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.

Speaker 4 (03:11):
Yeah, yeah to me, clam my book is not a
guide to how to do that.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
No, these are jokes, comedy bits, you know what's not funny, James.

Speaker 4 (03:23):
I'm trying to think what you're about saying, La, it's not.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
But today this is our 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,
We're 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

(03:50):
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.

Speaker 4 (04:09):
But it didn't do much of that.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
This isn't 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 that's our subject for this episode. Nice and we're
critically we're not quite getting into how slavery was ended

(04:33):
in the British Empire. Because the slave trade, the Atlantic
trade right where slave enslaved Africans were taken from Africa
over the West Indies the New World, and you know,
goods and stuff were taken to Africa to trade for
the slaves. Like that is 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

(04:55):
slavery in the United States inevitable. The US abolitionist cause
is directly tied to the 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 accomplished a really

(05:15):
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,

(05:39):
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 industry is

(06:01):
really like worth celebrating.

Speaker 4 (06:04):
It's a beautiful thing. I'm excited to learn more about it.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
Yeah, yeah, and it's you get a lot of this
is like a Battle of Britain kind of thing, where
it's a lot of like 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 like personal awakenings

(06:28):
that lead them to embrace this as like a crusade
for decades. Like there's guys who devote like forty or
fifty 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 gonna
be laying a lot of groundwork, so it's still mostly
about bastards.

Speaker 4 (06:46):
Yeah. I always have to like go for a nice
walk before before I do bastards, you know, like I
can't be reading the news and the mainlining this stuff.

Speaker 2 (06:54):
Yeah, 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 is an institution
and an industry has existed on every continent, well I
probably except Antarctica, and in most societies across the vast

(07:18):
band of human's history 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.

Speaker 4 (07:39):
Right.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
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 Latafundia or the slave driven Minds,
were as cruel as any slave plantations in the Caribbean. However,
Roman slavery was a legal condition, and no one believe
that slaves were like inherently racially inferior to other people.

(08:04):
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,
And in fact, a lot of the wealthiest Romans during
the height of the Republic were freedmen, because freed people
like if you were lucky enough to be enslaved in

(08:26):
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

(08:48):
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 evolved 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

(09:10):
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 that, there's just nothing that
compared to that.

Speaker 4 (09:20):
Right, It's kind of hard to think of what you
could do that's much was to a human being.

Speaker 2 (09:24):
Yeah, it's like, I mean, it's like an Auschwitz level
kind of torture right yere. People are being like starved
and murdered with their families and 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

(09:46):
anyone else in Europe did. And then they lost having
their shit together before anyone else in Europe did. That's
the story of Portugal in Spaine. Europeans did not have
much in the way of meaningful contact with Sub Saharan
Africa until Portuguese tr trading vessels made their way down
the continent's west coast to Ghana in fourteen seventy one,
and keeping with their well worn traditions, Portugal was at

(10:07):
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

(10:29):
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 per the terms of
the Treaty of Tortosilla.

Speaker 4 (10:39):
That's right, right, James told the Sis I think to Tordesius.

Speaker 2 (10:43):
Yeah, signed in fourteen ninety four, 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.

Speaker 4 (10:59):
Actually, CNNY, Iberia will be the center of the world forever, right, Yeah, yeah,
obviously their destined to get to rule the world for
a thousand years.

Speaker 2 (11:09):
They got boats slightly faster than anyone else.

Speaker 4 (11:11):
What else could they need?

Speaker 2 (11:13):
Yeah, so Tomaso's earliest Yeah, 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 Elmina, started as a place to
gather and store gold before it could be offloaded into
merchant vessels. It was built in fourteen eighty two. But

(11:35):
right around this time, not long after they build 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

(11:57):
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 realize like, oh shit,
this stuff grows really well here and you can grow
as much of it as you want that really like,

(12:18):
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 selve 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 the nightmare.

Speaker 4 (12:38):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's where you don't see many people
growing backyard sugar exactly.

Speaker 2 (12:43):
Nobody. 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.

Speaker 3 (12:53):
You know.

Speaker 4 (12:53):
Yeah, it's a shame or whatever. Some of the homesteading
YouTubers I would like to see. I would like, stop,
I just got to farm sugar. Yeah yeah, yeah, getting
the sugar trade. That's what I will say.

Speaker 2 (13:06):
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. 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 we'll be worth a shitload
of money. Everyone wants this stuff, but it only grows

(13:29):
in the tropics, right, it does not. You can't transplant
it back to Europe or wherever where you have established
agricultural infrastructure.

Speaker 4 (13:36):
It's not going to do well.

Speaker 2 (13:40):
Right, Yeah, you get beat route, you make shitty beat
sugar if you want, but you can't, and you can't.
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 it's very there.

Speaker 4 (13:58):
They don't.

Speaker 2 (13:59):
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. Yeah, 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 labors, but they kill those a lot of those

(14:20):
local indigenous people quickly. Right, So 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.

(14:43):
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

(15:05):
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 stripes are like, yeah, actually,
guns sound great. So this trade kind of starts up,
and the Portuguese begin taking captured African slaves and moving

(15:26):
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 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.

(15:49):
Somebody that there weren't enough to continue laboring. In fifteen eighteen,
the Spanish king ordered four thousand 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 this
the generally agreed like start to the slave trade. A

(16:10):
little bit of a soft start because like when you
count that, but like probably when Portugal starts sending slaves
to Spanish colonies in the Caribbean is a good start.
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

(16:33):
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.

Speaker 6 (16:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (16:41):
I love to see a literally stratified society where you've
just really really made it pretty fucking obvious what you're
going for. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:49):
Yeah, it's one of those sometimes you watch like snow
Piercer and you're like, well, that's not very subtle, but
neither of his history.

Speaker 4 (16:54):
Yeah, sometimes history can be that way.

Speaker 2 (16:58):
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 Elmina 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 two
hundred people crammed together so tight that they didn't even

(17:19):
have room to lie down. One write up I found
on pbs dot org's Slave Kingdom series notes quote 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

(17:39):
for him to select personal concubines from amongst the women.
And you know, I get why they used the term.
That's how they would have framed it. Then these aren't concubines, Yes,
these are?

Speaker 4 (17:52):
Yeah, yeah, like this is raping people, It's what this is.

Speaker 2 (17:56):
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, historians saidharth Kara goes into more detail
about this particular aspect of the system. Quote, women were

(18:18):
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
relinted or died. Most Europeans also took winches from local villages,
with whom they fathered countless children.

Speaker 5 (18:37):
Yeah that's not very nice, no, And this is like,
this is the norm anytime you're talking about the slave trade.

Speaker 2 (18:47):
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, is right, Yeah, well, you're not

(19:08):
paid well and it's dangerous, but you get to do
all the rape you want.

Speaker 4 (19:12):
Fantastic. Again, this is like no wage benefit, no taxis.

Speaker 2 (19:16):
Yeah, yeah, right, exactly, speaking of non taxable things.

Speaker 4 (19:23):
Yeah, as rough Pavot.

Speaker 2 (19:29):
Yeah, that one wasn't easy, and we're back, so uh.
Any slaves, male or female, who fought back or attempted
to lead insurrections were locked in a condemned cell, which
Kura describes as a small room on the ground level

(19:51):
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 concept
of resistance, after which the bodies were thrown into the
ocean for the sharks. Car 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

(20:12):
slavery does, and it scares the shit out of slavers.
They're constantly terrified of this, right, one of the justifications
of the brutality as well. Otherwise they'll do an uprising
and it's like, have you tried just not enslaving.

Speaker 4 (20:24):
Them, I don't know, yeah, probably wouldn't be killing you
then get to leave them alone, could just leave them alone.

Speaker 2 (20:33):
So on the seaboard side of Elmina 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
wetted Europe's appetite for African slaves, other European powers were
quick to involve themselves in the exploding industry, and as

(20:53):
things kind of soured for the Portuguese and Spanish empires,
other players are going to take over the slave trade.

Speaker 4 (21:01):
Now.

Speaker 2 (21:01):
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

(21:24):
is happening. These slaves are being taken and are being
transported by kaufel, which is like a chain of basically
handcuffs and chains that keeps the 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 on into
a slave shape.

Speaker 6 (21:41):
Right.

Speaker 2 (21:42):
They used coffles as well in the Americas and what
like Once 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.

Speaker 4 (21:54):
Right.

Speaker 2 (21:55):
These people are doing the dirty work of actually capturing
the human beings who are then loaded on the ships
and sold. And for these traders, their participation in what
we know was 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 two thousand and
five study for Anti Slavery International, Mike Kay Wrights quote,

(22:15):
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

(22:36):
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.

(22:57):
Hardly any of the millions who were transported across the
Atlanta to ever return 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

(23:17):
don't care because they're getting guns and stuff, and that's
a very these are bad people, yeah, but the slavery
that existed and that they that exist existed in their
heads was very different from like the slavery that Europeans
were increasingly executing. It is a mark of how different
different African slavery was in Africa that it was not
uncommon for enslaved people to marry into the family that

(23:39):
owned them. They would keep their given names and their
family identity, and if freedware again unlikely to face lingering
stigma over their former status. So again you're just talking
about kind of a fundamentally different work of 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 detail to what that process looked like. John Newton,

(24:03):
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

(24:23):
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 amo just like a
little bit of a World War One 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

(24:43):
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 gonna happen to you the next time you have
a war? R Like inciting is as simple as that.
It's not necessarily some CIA skullduggery. It's just you start
selling guns to one kingdom and they're all going to
want guns, and the only thing you want in exchange.

Speaker 4 (25:04):
For guns is safe.

Speaker 3 (25:06):
Right.

Speaker 4 (25:06):
Yeah, It's just like a classic like vicious cycle thing, right,
I won bills on the other Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:11):
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 three hundred
year period are sent immediately to Africa. Those are also
slave fortunes, you know, and gunpowder too, those are slave fortunes.

Speaker 4 (25:31):
Yes, yeah, totally makes sense. You're country reaching to that
same cycle of death right slaveman exactly exactly.

Speaker 2 (25:39):
The first English slave ship left Africa somewhere around fifteen
fifty five. In sixteen twenty one, the Dutch West India
Company was formed, and it proved so efficient that it
drank Portugal's milkshake. In about twenty years time, the Dutch
West India 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

(25:59):
to 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 one hundred years,
but England becomes the primary like movers and shakers of
the Atlantic slave trade, and they will stay that way

(26:21):
until it ends. England begins colonizing the Caribbean right around
the same time the Dutch start pushing the Portuguese out
of West Africa. In sixteen fifty five, 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 seventeen hundreds,

(26:41):
British imports of sugar from Jamaica are worth five times
as much as the combined value of all of the
imports from the thirteen colonies in North America.

Speaker 6 (26:49):
Geese.

Speaker 4 (26:50):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess that's what it is. You
enslave human beings.

Speaker 2 (26:56):
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.

Speaker 4 (27:04):
Up there some other stuff going on, but yeah, I
know people can consume sugar like for more often than tobacco.
Is probably falonga and I think probably more people like
sugar than Yeah, it isn't a quiet taste. It's just
I mean, it's just impossible to look at how profitable

(27:24):
this is not be like well, yeah, because it's fucking
addictive as hell, you know, and it's also kind of
worth Americans keeping in mind when we get up our
own asses about like the American revolutions, Like, well, the
British could kind of afford to cut bait because the
Thirteen Colonies, they were not that big a part of.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
The empire, right, Okay, I had a lot of irons
in the fire. Okay, they had some other options tobacco, good,
lack 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 said.

(28:03):
Hearth Kara writes that quote. By the late eighteenth century,
the slave trade had permitted almost every aspect of British
society and helped 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

(28:24):
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 colonize the start colonizing the Americas
is the money that came from you know, the slave
trade in slav Yeah, enslaving people and working them to death.

Speaker 4 (28:43):
Yeah, and I guess stealing the land too, right, like
it's a great land because all your impt philly like
stealing shit. Yeah, who'd have thought?

Speaker 2 (28:53):
Yeah, 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 Matt Do you want any asks?
I have a couple, got a good, good couple. Okay, yeah,
I got a Reagan mask.

Speaker 4 (29:05):
I don't know. We'll talk about this, okay, yeah, probably
you can probably.

Speaker 3 (29:07):
Get a swe off, like we are we doing this again?

Speaker 4 (29:10):
Yeah again, Sophie, we never did. What are you talking about? Sophie?

Speaker 2 (29:15):
The listeners can't see me winking.

Speaker 4 (29:19):
Better say it out loud so everyone knows. Ro But
that's my wink in voice.

Speaker 2 (29:24):
Yeah, that's my wink and voice. So we're never gonna
know precisely how many enslaved Africans were killed just as
a byproduct of the slave trade. Most estimates are between
ten and twenty percent of people enslaved people who were
like brought over the Middle Passage died during the journey.
But I mean that's ten and twenty percent is itself
a pretty wide margin. We simply don't know. In some

(29:46):
voy I mean some ships, everyone died, But in some
voyages it was like thirty or forty percent, you know,
sometimes it's less. Uh, it really just depended on the captain.
So these are rough averages, right. The knowledge that this
sort of human shrinkets 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, So, like, well,

(30:09):
if ten or twenty percent are going to die, then
we've got to bring even more people, which means that
the boats are even more deadly.

Speaker 4 (30:14):
You know, yeah, these holes are. Yeah, it only works
if you see it there being an infinite supply of
people who have almost no value, right like.

Speaker 2 (30:22):
Right exactly, Jesus, And if you don't know about how
germs work, right right back, Like, well, we just jamm
more people in the hold where like everyone is going
to the bathroom all over, like it's everywhere, like 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

(30:42):
right Like you're jamming them.

Speaker 4 (30:44):
Into these dizy, nasty, disease.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
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 ten 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

(31:09):
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 that's fucking killed. Because about two thirds
of the slaves who survived transit were immediately put to
the task of cutting sugarcane in the America as the
Caribbean or doing other crops, but sugar plantations were the
big one and they are hell on earth. Laborers worked

(31:30):
fourteen 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
this system of death. It could, it could. It's it's

(31:50):
barely less lethal than a concentration camp.

Speaker 4 (31:53):
Right, yeah, homogly.

Speaker 2 (31:55):
Yeah, And the only reason is that they wanted these
people to live for some period of time to extract
value from Yeah, exactly. In his article for Anti Slavery International,
k ADS 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

(32:17):
worse than animals in the Caribbean. Yeah, Jesus Christ, Yeah, yeah, Yeah,
that's pretty rough, right the whole Like why breed them?
That's too much trouble, Yeah, right.

Speaker 4 (32:27):
Like a thing that we do routine for like cows,
and they were doing right then for of cows and
sheep and shit that they wanted to eat.

Speaker 2 (32:35):
Yeah, I think some of it may just have been that, like, well,
when 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 three hundred years, the slave

(32:56):
trade continued unobated. 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 seventeen sixty
three in which he argued that slavery was foundational to
human civilization, It existed in every culture throughout history, and

(33:18):
it had very little chance of ever being abolished. Historian
Adam Hoschild makes the claim that the basic morality of
slavery as a system was so unquestioned in the late
seventeen hundreds 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

(33:40):
up until the very end, pretty much of the seventeen hundreds,
pretty late in the seventeen hundreds, Almost every great fortune
in England during this time was dependent on the slave trade.
Between seventeen eighty seven and eighteen oh seven, every mayor
of Liverpool, which at its peak was the major hub
of the slave trade. About forty percent of the entire
European slave trade passes through Liverpool. Every Mayor of Liverpool

(34:02):
as a financial interest in human trafficking. The website Recovered
Histories notes that by the late eighteenth century, fifty to
sixty members of Parliament represented slave plantations. William Beckford, two
time mayor of London, owned a twenty two thousand acre
plantation in Jamaica. Great, yeah cool, so yeah, Like the
ruling class is all very much embedded with this stuff, right,

(34:25):
It's the entire economy, right, And even the people who
aren't directly owning slaves are making money from the people
who owned 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, Brittan exported about one hundred and fifty
thousand firearms per year to Africa during this period of time,

(34:46):
and like the seventeen hundreds, 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, their training.
So again, it's really hard just not to be involved
in to some extent and profiting from the slave ye,
even if you don't want to.

Speaker 4 (35:07):
Right, Yeah, And it seems like there's no one who
didn't want to, Like everyone was just fine with this.

Speaker 2 (35:11):
Yeah, very it's it's it's pretty much just the uh
oh shit, it's pretty much just the uh not Mennonites,
but the Quakers. Yes, it's pretty much just the Quakers
who don't want to be financially like, 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 trader

(35:32):
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 I should it's bad
to be in the military and fight and die for
a king.

Speaker 4 (35:43):
Yeah, yeah, and maybe you shouldn't be.

Speaker 2 (35:44):
Ging saying crazy shit. I think these wacky Quakers.

Speaker 4 (35:51):
The term Quaker is one that like they didn't prefer
to use for themselves, right, It's like a derogatory term
that was put upon them that I guess I think so. Yeah,
they called themselves flat. I know, they called themselves friends.

Speaker 2 (36:05):
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.

Speaker 4 (36:15):
Than the they're really cold quite a few times. Yeah,
you can go back and be like yep, yep, I
mean still.

Speaker 2 (36:24):
To bad on everything, but a lot.

Speaker 1 (36:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (36:26):
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 the
kids of the holidays. Like they're they're still still doing
a pretty good job.

Speaker 2 (36:40):
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.

Speaker 4 (36:54):
Yeah, you've got to be right more than you're wrong. Yeah. Yeah,
you're beaten the average, especially back then.

Speaker 2 (36:59):
Yeah, you're gonna be the average in your society.

Speaker 4 (37:04):
Now.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
You know what church didn't have a problem with slavery, James,
any of them really.

Speaker 1 (37:09):
But.

Speaker 4 (37:10):
Most of them.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
Yeah, but the anglic the Church of England right to
the Church of England, big fans of slavery. Yeah, you're
deeply financially involved. Now there is there is a sect,
like a radical Anglican sect that are anti slavery from
like a I think fairly early in the seventeen hundred.
But like the mainstream of the Church of England is
fine with this stuff. And in fact, the English Anglican

(37:33):
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

(37:54):
not enjoys great, nay even greater advantages than when they
are under their own despotic government.

Speaker 4 (37:59):
Fuck fuck's sake. Yeah, just what pulled that directly out
of his ass? Like what knowledge does he have of
governance in the interior of Africa?

Speaker 2 (38:10):
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.

Speaker 4 (38:17):
Yeah, and they're dying after three years. Like how how
could it be better than whatever the situation was back home?

Speaker 2 (38:26):
Yeah, it's people will just make shit up. Yeah, it's
just to make themselves feel better. Who knows how much
he even cared, Like this is just a p 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?

Speaker 4 (38:45):
You know, Like it's that kind of.

Speaker 2 (38:46):
Argument, right, like maybe they're better off you know things
are in Africa.

Speaker 4 (38:52):
Yeah, that's just let's just hope it's that way. Otherwise
to face the guilt of what they're doing.

Speaker 2 (38:56):
Yeah, yeah, otherwise I'm a worldless directs.

Speaker 4 (39:01):
Yeah, I'm a piece of shit on like a Centuri's
wide style.

Speaker 2 (39:05):
Speaking of world historic monsters.

Speaker 3 (39:09):
I was hoping you would do this as an ad transition.

Speaker 4 (39:12):
Yeah, but some of them, right, maybe we don't know. Yeah,
we never know. I don't be sure to DM Sophie
and let them know. If you don't have the advertisers,
it's I write, okay.

Speaker 2 (39:25):
Hmm, Yeah, anyway, here's ads. This podcast is sponsored by Liverpool.
Liverpool who were the slave trading hub of the world
for a period of time. Maybe we could do it again.
Visit Liverpool.

Speaker 4 (39:40):
My mom's from Liverpool. What did Liverpool do to your mother?
I mean they did a lot to some.

Speaker 2 (39:48):
They've done to you, These liver Puddians. I'm offended on
their behalf, on behalf of the you know, the world.

Speaker 4 (39:56):
About ten million people who were enslave.

Speaker 3 (40:00):
Yeah, I was offended by when Robert said, I'm winking
that's for the people that can't see me.

Speaker 2 (40:08):
All I'm going to say is, if you know anyone
from Liverpool, hit them again.

Speaker 3 (40:13):
From you know, if you know anyone from Liverpool, we
get them.

Speaker 4 (40:18):
My entire on the side of the family is from Liverpool.

Speaker 6 (40:21):
This is behind the bastards, James.

Speaker 4 (40:23):
It's not a good time. No, it's not. No, no, no,
that's why it's when we let we left Liverpool in
opposition around the nineteenth.

Speaker 2 (40:31):
If you know anybody from Richmond, hit them too, you know,
and maybe wink hit people if they come, Yeah, while
you hit them.

Speaker 3 (40:39):
Wink while you're hitting them exactly.

Speaker 4 (40:43):
Yeah, it's just a joke.

Speaker 2 (40:44):
It's a bit.

Speaker 4 (40:44):
Yeah, yeah, it's a bit. Don't hit people and we're back.

Speaker 2 (40:55):
Given how central slavery was to the British economy and
how one questioned the morality the institution was to most
Britains in this period, it is remarkable that only a
few decades into the nineteenth century, Great Britain would put
an end to this. It's part in the slave trade, right,
I mean, it's less than that to the slave trade. Sorry,
it's like eighteen oh seven that the slave trade ends
in like eighteen thirty something, we'll talk about that later,

(41:17):
where slavery is made illegal in the British Empire. And
given the fact that like in the seventeen sixties, even
up to the seventeen seventies, you'd have been a hard
press to find a person on the street who would
be like, yeah, slavery's 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 is that one of

(41:37):
the things that's so impressive is how much like this
seems like a hopeless cause. If you're an abolitionist in
like seventeen sixties, seventeen seventy, the idea that you might
get the entire country on board ending slavery in the
slave trade alone is wild, right, Like, and they did. So, Yeah,
that's pretty important for us here staring at an insurmountable

(42:00):
mountain of problems, to pay attention to how this happened. Yeah,
And it's worth noting. The abolitionist movement is often described
by historians 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

(42:25):
you are the movie is not fighting for their own rights.
They are fighting for the rights of a separate group
of people with outside of people aren't even their countrymen generally.

Speaker 4 (42:33):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a really interesting way to
frame it.

Speaker 2 (42:37):
It's significant, right, and that deserves to be celebrated. 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

(42:59):
example of how our culture is that we're the only
ones who tried to end slavery. Is the first fans
are the first people to decide slavery should be banned,
you know.

Speaker 4 (43:08):
Yeah, fucking nonsense, Like it's.

Speaker 2 (43:11):
It's not true for one thing, but there were societies
that banned kinds of slavery at least, you know, they
still had things that we might say is problematic. But
like anyway, whatever any acknowledgment of how remarkable the pan
abolitionist cause was, and it was has to be tempered
by the acknowledgment that it came into being, not to

(43:33):
be Not like the abolitionists that we're talking about. We're
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
from the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The nightmarish hors
of that system, which was so much worse than the

(43:55):
the very bad slavery that existed forever, is what inspired
this movement.

Speaker 4 (44:02):
Yeah, it's unfortunately. I'm a personal who teaches at a
college right now, and we are we're 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

(44:23):
after reading it hundreds of times that or like, yeah,
there was slavery elsewhere.

Speaker 2 (44:27):
And it's like if at some point in the future
America got a complete handle on the whole gun thing
and whatever we did, whatever we had to do to
make sure that nobody dies from guns in the United
States again, and then people like one hundred years after
that were like Yeah, America's America is the greatest culture
ever because we were the only ones who realized guns
were bad.

Speaker 4 (44:47):
It's like you're leaving.

Speaker 2 (44:48):
Out a really big part of the story.

Speaker 4 (44:52):
You're really cutting out.

Speaker 7 (44:54):
Some important facts bit there that you probably probably don't
want to gloss over. We solved an American in that society,
like shit talking a country that allows hunting rifles and
it's like, wait.

Speaker 4 (45:06):
A second, Yeah, you're forgetting some stuff. It's pretty bad. Shit. Yeah,
there's a lot of history.

Speaker 2 (45:15):
You're ignoring here. 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 addically 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

(45:36):
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

(45:58):
near the end of seventeen eighty one.

Speaker 1 (46:00):
One.

Speaker 2 (46:00):
Right, we're going to tell the story of a ship
called the Song or the Zork. There's both names are fine. Actually, technically,
have you ever heard of this boat?

Speaker 4 (46:09):
No?

Speaker 5 (46:09):
Haven't.

Speaker 4 (46:09):
Actually I'm excited to learn more about his boat. Love
a boat story.

Speaker 2 (46:13):
It is a good boat story. It's a there's a
very good book.

Speaker 4 (46:21):
I love a good boat.

Speaker 2 (46:24):
You're not beating the British allegations.

Speaker 4 (46:28):
So that's my epigenetic expression of loving boats. Yeah, it's
it's t love a boat story, boats, cricket about cricket.

Speaker 2 (46:37):
I've got a friend who comes from like the Martha's
Vineyard area, and I was like, so you're you're in
the 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.

Speaker 4 (46:51):
Yeah, yeah, as it has. Yeah, boats, kinds of good
stories about boats. Pirates, people's boats.

Speaker 2 (47:04):
Mmm, that pirate radio station and the movie Pirate Radio. Yeah,
it's not based on those were British oil rig.

Speaker 4 (47:12):
Yeah, I mean it oil.

Speaker 2 (47:14):
Rig at some point I forget.

Speaker 4 (47:15):
Yeah, Pirate Radio gave us like punk music and sca music, right,
which is you.

Speaker 2 (47:19):
Know, exactly exactly.

Speaker 4 (47:20):
It's why I am the way I am.

Speaker 2 (47:23):
Yeah, that's why I try to take might take my
savings and invest in a scar boat cruise, you know,
scars and sailing together again.

Speaker 4 (47:34):
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 Bostones release a memorial song
for George Floyd. Okay, now I'm now you're thinking it's
like a bad idea. Now I'm no longer. Now I'm
no longer so into boats. Yeah, not quite at pete

(47:55):
hexth level.

Speaker 2 (47:56):
But no, no, no, not yet. And there's there's a
couple of good books. There's this book called The Song
and there's another book that came up more recently called
The Zorg. I haven't read the first one. I read
The Zorg. It's a very good book that's by Sidharth Karra,
and 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

(48:18):
of a slaver, a guy named Robert Stubbs. By seventeen
eighty one. Stubbs was an experienced slave trader, albeit an
unlucky one. His first recorded journey was his first mate
on a ship called the Black Joke, which he abandoned
within months of taking the job due to having.

Speaker 4 (48:35):
When I found the fucking name out, like, yeah, yeah,
that a great name. Yeah, he can come up with
a one of all the other words been taken.

Speaker 2 (48:46):
Nope, nope, nope, just 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 as 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

(49:09):
he's a captain of the boat that he had abandoned,
and under his command, the ship takes on two hundred
and thirty enslaved people in Barbados. But or sorry, it
takes on two hundred thirty 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 he's become slaves the
French get to profit off of. Two years later, stubbs

(49:31):
captain's a slaver that makes it to Virginia, so he
has a successful voyage. Finally, his third voyage in seventeen
sixty sees him captured yet again by a French privateer,
and then he's captured a third time the next year.
So Jesus five voyages. He's abandoned ship once, been captured
three times and had one successful trade.

Speaker 1 (49:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (49:51):
Yeah, Stubbsy isn't really delivering on the investment the best.

Speaker 2 (49:56):
Yeah all, Stubsy's not the best.

Speaker 4 (49:59):
Yeah yeah, just thinking like you know, you're you're a younger,
want to be boat person, and then you find out
you're going to be on the stubs voat.

Speaker 2 (50:06):
It's going to be got to be a rough yeah.
Ah fuck, he guess a bit of brush up on
my French.

Speaker 4 (50:12):
I'm sure everyone's got like one of those blue and
white striped shirts underneath their like English red jacket, you know,
just for when the moment rises, just gotta get ready
to change ownership.

Speaker 2 (50:25):
So given his history, it's not surprising that by seventeen
sixty five, old Stubbs he 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 ship's broker

(50:46):
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.

Speaker 4 (50:58):
Right.

Speaker 2 (50:59):
He's not good at this, and he declares bankruptcy in
seventeen seventy one. Now, somewhere in between, during this whole
period where he's failing at being a captain and then
failing it being an investor in slave ships, he starts
a family and has six children who he is not
in the least but interested in raising or caring for.

Speaker 4 (51:17):
It's a bit of a bit of a bad dude.
He's not a good man. He's a slave captain thing.
That's yeah.

Speaker 3 (51:27):
Stubbsy said fuck them kids, yeah, fuck.

Speaker 2 (51:30):
Them kids now, in order to provide for his family
while being as far away from them as possible. At
the end of seventeen seventy nine, he applies for a
job as a governor with the CMTA, or the Company
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

(51:52):
corporation that is managing the logistics of the Atlantic slave
trade for the British Empire, right because corporations are just
more efficient than governments. Now, we don't know why. As
evidence that they're more efficient, they made Stubs a governor. Great,
it didn't have background checks.

Speaker 4 (52:10):
I don't know why.

Speaker 2 (52:11):
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 the
shop by licking.

Speaker 3 (52:25):
Boots I want to go And are we sure he
didn't want to go into government politics.

Speaker 2 (52:32):
Uh 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
Elmina at the start of the episode. There's more by you,
and one of them that the British is operating is
a fort called Animebu 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.

Speaker 3 (52:54):
They were like, well, you're really great at abandoning the ship,
and he's like yeah, He's like you said, I was
abandoning the ship, but I was going down with it.

Speaker 4 (53:03):
What do you mean? Yeah, that was a joke.

Speaker 3 (53:06):
That was a joke for the girlies.

Speaker 6 (53:07):
You're welcome.

Speaker 3 (53:08):
Oh okay, that one over both of your head.

Speaker 2 (53:11):
It sure did, Sophie, Yeah, no, beautiful. The bit I
would make is that they looked at how he's raising
his family and they're like, look, Stubs, you're graded at
abandoning your kids. Can you abandon a bunch of enslaved
African people to a fate worse than death?

Speaker 4 (53:25):
Too?

Speaker 2 (53:26):
Is that something you'd be good at, and Stubbs said absolutely.

Speaker 3 (53:30):
He's like, honey, where do I sign?

Speaker 2 (53:33):
Yeah, so this is a perfect job for him. Yeah,
he can profit from the slave trade and he has
very little personal risk. Right theoretically, if he wasn't a
giant asshole, he'd have very little personal risk. But as
said Hearth Kara writes in the Zorg, things started to
go wrong as soon as Stubs departed England. Quote from

(53:53):
the moment the ship departed England, Captain Lewin reported vexation
often arising between me and my passengers, occasioned by malicious
and information and other base insinuations, all of which were
spread by Robert Stubbs. Stubbs directed much of his ire
towards one of his fellows 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

(54:15):
accusations and concluded them to be false and ill grounded.
And by the way, he's brought his twelve year old
boy with him, that's the sun he's accusing this guy.
Stubbs then accused Beard of being a pimp and 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

(54:37):
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 was 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, an asshole, among the worst

(55:01):
people in history. It's like when other billionaires are like
Elon Musk, what a fucking.

Speaker 4 (55:05):
Prap, what's wrong with that? Dude? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (55:08):
You really have to be on another level of asshole.

Speaker 4 (55:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:11):
Now is noted in that above passage. They said he
brought his son, his twelve 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

(55:31):
kids under fifteen with them in the future.

Speaker 4 (55:33):
They're what is he doing a twelve year old?

Speaker 3 (55:36):
Do we know why?

Speaker 4 (55:40):
Yes, yes we do, Sophie say. As soon as they reach.

Speaker 2 (55:45):
The fort, he gives his son, George, a job working
for the fort as like a copywriter, I think. But
he's like keeping a track of accounts or something, and
he pockets his son's salary. That's why he brought his kid,
so that could make him he's kind of year old child.

Speaker 4 (56:06):
He's got one move and it's yeah.

Speaker 3 (56:08):
Right, yeah, that takes fuck them kids to another level.

Speaker 4 (56:12):
Oh, it's so funny.

Speaker 2 (56:14):
And the thing is, George is not even making much money.
He's getting about eighty pounds a year equivalent to less
than twenty five thousand dollars a year, and his fucking
Stubbs is a governor. He's making better money than that.
Like he's just like.

Speaker 4 (56:27):
He just likes to do it. He just loves to
abuse a child.

Speaker 2 (56:30):
The love of the game. 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

(56:52):
the job, which raises his son sound. He writes about
one hundred and twenty pounds a year, which Stubs pockets.

Speaker 4 (56:57):
Jesus Christ brought the other five kids.

Speaker 2 (57:01):
You'd really be making bank.

Speaker 4 (57:02):
I can have the mold out that bombing. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (57:05):
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 profits. Try to do.

Speaker 4 (57:22):
He sucks so fat sucks. He's one of the shittiest
people we've ever I know.

Speaker 2 (57:27):
This is like our reverse episodes about this guy was
getting the heroes. But this guy sucks so hard. He
may be the shittiest slave captain of all of the
slave captains, which is a high ball. 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 twelve year old son.

Speaker 4 (57:51):
Yeah, for a mild profit.

Speaker 3 (57:54):
Yeah, I'll do it.

Speaker 2 (57:57):
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

(58:17):
in the fort because they're funny.

Speaker 4 (58:19):
They're such a scats. Can't even read.

Speaker 2 (58:24):
Jesus, Wow, it's from a tribe that Rantaine written down otherwise, Yeah,
if he could, if if he could actually write the
local tribe that ran things in it. 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 fonte Right

(58:48):
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 stalk the ships. Ships come into
port to offload goods that are going to be traded
to Africans and to take and slaved Africans. But they
need like food and water and stuff, right, and the
fonte are a crucial part of that too. And so

(59:09):
everyone else who has this job is very nice to
these people because they outnumber you, and you've given them guns,
and you reliant on them for food.

Speaker 4 (59:18):
You can see why this is going reven It's just
a bad idea to piss them off.

Speaker 2 (59:23):
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. It's like a it's
like a good will thing, right, here's some liquor. Keep
being our friends, you know. Stubbs just stops this, I
think because he wants to sell the alcohol for himself,

(59:43):
and when they complain he threatens them with armed men.

Speaker 4 (59:47):
Wow stuff. Yeah, at least he's very bad at being evil.

Speaker 2 (59:54):
He sucks so bad at this now. I think part
of what's happening here is that he's so raised. He
can't even deal respectfully with the Africans that his entire
life in 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. Yeah right, we've sold
them guns. I can't emphasise enough. We've sold them guns.

(01:00:19):
In October of seventeen eighty, Stubbs has a meeting with
an emissary of the King of the Ashanti Empire and
that 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

(01:00:40):
over the signing of a treaty with the Ashanti. After
signing the treaty, it was his job to give gifts
that King George the Third had sent over for the
King of the Empire.

Speaker 4 (01:00:49):
Right, Can I guess what happened?

Speaker 2 (01:00:51):
He keeps the gifts.

Speaker 4 (01:00:54):
That's exactly. It was like.

Speaker 3 (01:00:56):
I was like, nobody has one somebody, Yeah, he his
one move steal things and less slaves.

Speaker 4 (01:01:06):
Yeah yeah, get captured by the friend.

Speaker 2 (01:01:08):
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 him immediately, like we're in danger.
Now he's kissing off like there's so many more of

(01:01:28):
them than us. And again they have guns, you know. Yeah,
So they 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 one hundred and five thousand dollars
in modern money worth of gold. And Stubbs is furious
both that he has been deposed as governor and that

(01:01:50):
they took his money. And he keeps being like, at
least give me my money back, and they're like.

Speaker 4 (01:01:53):
No, he stole that shit. Yeah, he stole out of it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:58):
Luckily for Stubs, a slaving vessel named the William arrives
at the fort not long after he gets taken into custody,
and you know, they the crew of the boat goes
into the fort and one of the members of the
crew was a high ranking crew member, the ship's surgeon,
a guy named Luke Collings would meet Stubbs, and again
Stubbs just has some sort of charm for a certain

(01:02:21):
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 England, right like, we
got to put him on the boat with us, you know,
get him out of here. He's being unfairly treated. It's
a bad situation for him.

Speaker 4 (01:02:42):
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. Very poor. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:02:53):
So and again he's just gotta this is gonna be
the He's got to continue having like the worst record
on a boat. Now. I think he probably Stubbs probably
promises Collings with some of his money that he's totally
going to get back. I don't know what they say,
but Stubbs' his 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

(01:03:14):
reappointed as governor of the fort, which is totally.

Speaker 4 (01:03:17):
Going to happen. You know. Yeah, we's George.

Speaker 2 (01:03:20):
He stole from two Kings.

Speaker 4 (01:03:23):
Describe what's happened to George is little George on the
boat like great, great, great great guard.

Speaker 2 (01:03:31):
You would think, you would think hell Stubbsy departing the
fort where he had been imprisoned, would take his twelve
year old with him. He does not, and we don't
know what then the twelve year old.

Speaker 4 (01:03:45):
Yeah, he abandons his twelve year old.

Speaker 2 (01:03:47):
That's 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 just forgets he has a son. God,
cool guy, I guess optimistic. Maybe George is like, fuck, no,

(01:04:07):
I'm not getting on a boat with you.

Speaker 4 (01:04:09):
Yeah yeah, yeah, hopefully George, I would love to be
on enough continent from my father. Yes, I'm hoping.

Speaker 2 (01:04:18):
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 that was
my dad told me was illegal for kids to make money,
goes on an apology tour and recovers the stubs name

(01:04:39):
maybe so elsewhere kind of at the same period of time,
Stubbsy's 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

(01:04:59):
that are bas 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 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

(01:05:19):
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 Que is also common, but Sidhartha 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.

(01:05:42):
I don't know why that name was picked for a
slave lationship. Seems like not a well fitting name, but okay, Uh.
The owner of the Williams so this gets taken by privateers,
and this, you know, this privateer with all these Dutch
ship 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

(01:06:04):
representative of this syndicate, the Gregson Syndicate. So the Gregson
Syndicate is basically a major slave owning a 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

(01:06:26):
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 auction. It was loaded with two
hundred and forty four people like enslaved people in the
hole in the hold at the time that they buy it,
and because they don't have that many sailors, they're kind

(01:06:48):
of just sticking a minimal crew on it, so that
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 reas, 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 into captain. But the captain

(01:07:10):
of the William makes Luke Collingswood, the ship's surgeon, the
captain of the Zorg. Right, we don't know why Collingswood
is not. He's 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.

Speaker 4 (01:07:28):
Yeah, he doesn't know rogate for shit, Like, yeah, he's
not a particularly good at leadership.

Speaker 2 (01:07:34):
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 captain 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 Collingswood does not get along with this guy,

(01:07:54):
and he's confined to quarters for a sizeable chunk of
the journey to make Yeah, yeah, yeah, put the guy
who knows that to fine stuff in the hole. Yeah,
I will work it out to make matters worse. Before
leaving the coast of Africa to sale for Jamaica, the
Zorg takes on even more enslaved people. The boat was
meant to hold a maximum of two hundred and forty

(01:08:15):
slaves in the hold, four hundred and forty two 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,

(01:08:35):
so everyone's going to be getting sick. There's not going
to be enough food and water, right, yeah, great decisions.

Speaker 4 (01:08:42):
Illness is going to be everywhere yeaheah yeah. Maybe too
heavy also, like it's sitting turn in the water or whatever.
Maybe too heavy.

Speaker 2 (01:08:49):
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 Callings would very quickly get 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

(01:09:10):
puking and shitting himself to death while he's trying to
like work a sextant and figure out longitude or whatever.

Speaker 4 (01:09:16):
Right now.

Speaker 2 (01:09:19):
Because he's fucking up, the ship keeps getting lost, and
you know, the weather being bad hurts with that, so
they're not getting into Jamaican 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, it's just
what stops you from getting scurvy, So everyone starts getting scurvy,

(01:09:41):
concluding the sailors who are supposed to be manning the.

Speaker 4 (01:09:44):
Ship right perfect. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:09:48):
By November, Collinswood 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 cap hubs
his back. He's so the first mate. Kelsol protests, and

(01:10:11):
again one of the last command decisions collins would make
is he forces Kelsal to be confined confined to quarters
and also orders him to stop updating his log book,
which suggests that he and he and like Stubs and
colleagues woo 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

(01:10:33):
Kelsol 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 Kelsol
from confinement because they're like someone who knows what they're
doing is we're gonna die. We're literally gonna 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,

(01:10:55):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:11:13):
Geez.

Speaker 2 (01:11:14):
So, if you were 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,
so they're less likely to survive the journey anyway.

Speaker 3 (01:11:28):
Yeah, they're throwing enslaved women and children into the ocean
to die horrific drowning death.

Speaker 2 (01:11:35):
Yeah, that's the that's their first plan is to break
into the chunk of the hold where they keep the
women and children and grab a bunch of them and
throw them into the sea. Perkara'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,

(01:11:57):
plant her feet and hands against the window frame, bite
her cap 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, Collingswood, 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

(01:12:19):
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 fifty five women and
children and threw them quote alive, singly through the cabin
windows into the sea and drowned.

Speaker 4 (01:12:35):
That's r effect. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:12:37):
One of the I mean, one of the women and
one of the children they throw it 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 twenty second, seventeen eighty one, between two hundred

(01:12:57):
and twenty four and two hundred and forty of the
more four hundred slaved Africans aboard had died sixty two
from sickness during the journey, and between one hundred and
twenty three under one hundred and thirty three thrown overboard.
Ten more and these were men threw themselves overboard committing suicide.
Maybe it was just in solidarity with the people who
were being murdered. Maybe it was to spare themselves more agony.

(01:13:18):
We don't know, but they like ten people actually just
kill themselves, right, which hard to like, yeah, nice mare, 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,

(01:13:38):
they're monsters. Like maybe any death is better than spending
any amount of time with demons like this, right yeah,
Like yeah, with the knowledge that's just going to keep
doing it, yeah yeah, and that you have to that
whatever you're doing is benefiting these fucking monsters, right yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:13:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:13:57):
After they within like a daze of land and Jamaica,
Luke Collingwood dies, but Robert Stubbs survives and he makes
his way back to London for he brings the tail
of what had happened Stubbsy, He's like a kill it, yeah,
And he takes the tail 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,

(01:14:22):
rich off this journey because he's not part of the crew, right,
But he sees as 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 cut of it and a job, right,

(01:14:43):
Like you're going to help me, you know, get back
and good and start making money off the slave trade again.

Speaker 4 (01:14:48):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:14:48):
And the deal that he talks at is, so I
need to set something up. Do you know where insurance
comes from? James as an industry?

Speaker 4 (01:14:56):
Hey, boats, slavery, okay, specifically slavery cool. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:15:01):
Look.

Speaker 2 (01:15:01):
Voids of London, which started as a coffeehouse really gets
going as a business insuring slave ships.

Speaker 5 (01:15:06):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:15:07):
Now, boats in general, that is a big part of insurance,
but ensuring the ensuring the slave trade is a huge
part of the birth of insurance as an industry, right,
because it's an expensive proposition. Right, you're filling this boat up,
you're buying all of the you're buying all of the
goods to trade for these people, and if they all
get captured the boats saying, you're out a shitload of money. Right,

(01:15:29):
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 slaves die on the boat, because it's assumed
that they will, right, you're jamming them in. Their illness
is gonna some crew, We're going to die, right, But
catastrophes like a boat sinking in a storm or a

(01:15:52):
slave uprising are insured, and so stuff comes back and
it's like, hey, we had to kill about one hundred
and thirty of these people, but we had to kill
them because of an act of the sea, an act
of God basically because like whoa, this disaster hit us
and we were going to run out of water. We
had no option but to throw them overboard. That means

(01:16:13):
their deaths are payable, like your insurance company owes you
for them, right, because it was an unavoidable necessity. So yeah, yeah,
that's that stubs this 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 thirty pounds each these

(01:16:34):
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 this
shit it shouldn't be covered. And the court in this

(01:16:55):
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

(01:17:18):
in the US owes a lot to what happens in
the wake of this horrifying case.

Speaker 4 (01:17:22):
Right, So we're going to talk.

Speaker 2 (01:17:23):
About all that and more in parts two and three.

Speaker 4 (01:17:26):
James, how are you feeling? Well? Not, it's Christmas, as
I expected, coming coming on the happy nice guy Christmas episode.
There's good guys in the other parts. Okay, Yeah, I'm
glad to hear that. Yeah, yeah, I know. Good to
talk about the way that British people have come themselves
in glory throughout history.

Speaker 2 (01:17:46):
Yeah, well, we'll get some better British representation in the Arctic.
You got a book, though, James, speaking of representation, Yeah, it's.

Speaker 4 (01:17:57):
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 me and mar Rejava and the
Spanish Civil War. A bit less depressing than this episode
was that you're going to find some really inspiring people
who I think have done really beautiful things. What's it

(01:18:17):
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 kind of doesn't do well. It doesn't
do well on the camera, does it.

Speaker 3 (01:18:27):
The pre order link will be in our episode Depe.

Speaker 4 (01:18:30):
Just go and click that. It's quite reasonable. It's quite
affordable right now. I think it's eighteen dollars, so if
you buy it now, it would arrive in late January.
It's released on the twenty sixth 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.

Speaker 2 (01:18:50):
Excellent, Well, everybody will see you for part two.

Speaker 4 (01:18:54):
Goodbye.

Speaker 6 (01:18:58):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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Speaker 3 (01:19:10):
Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes
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Speaker 4 (01:19:16):
Subscribe to our

Speaker 3 (01:19:17):
Channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards