James Stout

So that's where things ended in part one.

In part two, some people are going to get mad about this.

Now, there was no coverage of Gregson v. Gilbert at the time of the court case.

It was legally a minor civil trial over an insurance dispute, and there was really no reason to believe that anyone aside from the parties involved were paying attention to what happened in court or cared about what had happened aboard the Zorg.

But one anonymous person watched the proceedings that day, March 6th of 1783, and they were horrified by what they saw, right?

There's some theorizing in the book, the Zorg, about who this person might have been, but we don't really know.

It was just someone was there that day who had a conscience and who viewed Africans as human beings, right?

And a lot of stuff that happened, a lot of very important stuff is going to result from the fact that one person with a conscience was there that day.

Right.

Now, a little less than two weeks after the judge in this case issued his ruling, this person published an anonymous letter in two major newspapers, the Morning Chronicle and the London Advertiser.

The letter noted that the Zorg still had 420 gallons of water left when it put into port in Jamaica.

And thus, as the underwriters argued, there was, quote, no necessity for a conduct so shocking to humanity.

This is our only first-person account of the court proceedings, and the author of this anonymous letter claims that, quote, "...the narrative seemed to make every person present shudder."

He lamented that, in spite of this, the jury voted in favor of the Gregson Syndicate.

The letter then takes a more philosophical turn, with the author wishing, "...some man of feeling and genius would give poetical language to the last thoughts of one of the ten enslaved men who chose to kill themselves after seeing their little brothers and sisters hurled into the ocean."

whose indignation made him voluntarily share death with his countrymen, rather than life with such unheard-of English barbarians.

The letter then concludes with this paragraph.

It is certainly worthy of observation that our legislature can, every session, find time to inquire into and regulate the manner of killing a partridge, that no abuse should be committed, and that he should be fairly shot—

And yet it has never been thought proper to inquire into the matter of annually kidnapping above 50,000 poor wretches who never injured us by a set of the most cruel monsters that this country can send out.

Pretty unsparing.