James Stout

The insurers and their counsel benefited from Granville Sharpe's lobbying and legal mind, but they're not on the same side precisely.

The insurers are slavery profiteers.

They don't want the trade to end.

They don't want abolition.

They're making money off of it, right?

They just don't want to pay money in this case.

Sharpe is on board with them because he also doesn't want Gregson to get a bunch of money for killing these – or for his people killing these people.

But he also sees this case fundamentally as a way to set further precedents on the road to ending the slave trade, right?

He is thinking about this from the jump, that I am doing this because it's a step to something better.

Now, Judge Mansfield tries to deny that possibility from the outset of the trial, insisting that this case is purely regarding the insurance policy on the Zong or the Zorg.

Mansfield insists the case of the slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard.

And for the most part, the actual arguments in the case do not rely on enslaved Africans having more rights than a horse, right?

That is kind of what's going on here.

The central legal question is not, was it bad that they killed these people?

It's,

Did these people have to die because disasters that the Zorg's crew were not in control of had caused a situation where it was impossible to keep them alive, right?

Is this a situation where there was no other option, where people were going to die one way or the other and they were trying to save a portion of the crew and the cargo?

Right.

Or was this a case where the people operating the ship had fucked up constantly and

and unnecessarily murdered a bunch of people, and we're now trying to get insurance money to cover up the fact that they fucked up, right?