James Stout

The dark question that hovered over the whole proceeding was this.

If not out of necessity, why would Stubbs and the crew have thrown 130 people overboard?

And the answer that people kept thinking was probably the obvious one is this.

After a too long journey on a slave ship crammed with twice its maximum occupancy, without enough food or enough water and disease endemic, many of the enslaved people on board were too sick and visibly ailing to fetch much of a price at auction.

So if you just kill them, the insured value is higher than what they would sell for.

We don't know that that's what was going on, but this is what people start talking about.

And it's not an unreasonable proposition.

Yeah, no, it's not.

It lines up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But everything else they've done is ghastly.

Right.

And this changes the thinking of a lot of people like Mansfield who are not abolitionists, but who are like, oh shit, but if like, if we establish this precedent, people might just start murdering ships full of enslaved people to just get the insurance money.

And that seems like a nightmare.

Like that's even bad to me.

And I kind of suck ass.

You know?

So this fact is shaking even to guys like Judge Manfield.

And he ruled, quote, to be sure, what Mr. Haywood has observed is a very material circumstance.