James Stout

He also starts barraging influential figures in the country with letters demanding the Admiralty Court charge the crewmen of the Zorg with murder.

He's going to do this the rest of his life.

It never works, but he does keep trying, right?

Most of his efforts don't bear fruit, but he succeeds in getting a hearing over a motion to set a new trial.

And this hearing is scheduled for May 21st, 1783, less than two months after the first trial.

Gregson v. Gilbert, which is the hearing, is not going to be a tiny, largely ignored case.

It's going to be a major court thing with exacting notes taken on court proceedings and a huge amount of media attention covering every twist and turn.

Sharp is not technically the lawyer here, but he's basically acting as an advisor to the defense counsel, which consisted of three lawyers.

Right.

Um, the most important of these was a fellow named Samuel Haywood and Haywood's a really interesting person.

He was born in Liverpool in the 1750s.

He went to Cambridge.

Um, and he comes from like a very rich family, right?

I mean, he goes to Cambridge, right?

And he's rich because his dad, Benjamin is a slave merchant in Liverpool and his younger brother, also Benjamin, Benjamin Arthur is a slave merchant in Liverpool and

And over like the years they'd been doing this, something like 130 different slave voyages had been financed and operated by the Haywood family, right?

They transported – at least according to Siddharth Kara, they had transported something like 42,000 enslaved people like over the course of their time in this industry.

And in fact, the Haywoods had invested in at least one slave ship with William Grigson, with like the Grigson Syndicate, right?

Oh, wow.

Yeah.