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Murder on the Middle Passage
The Trial of Captain Kimber
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2020
About this book
How the death of a fifteen-year-old girl aboard the slave ship Recovery shook the British establishment.
On 2 April 1792, John Kimber, captain of the Bristol slave ship Recovery, was denounced in the House of Commons by William Wilberforce for flogging a fifteen-year-old African girl to death. The story, caricatured in a contemporary Isaac Cruikshank print, raced across newspapers in Britain and Ireland and was even reported in America. Soon after, Kimber was indicted for murder - but in a trial lasting just under five hours, he was found not guilty.
This book is a micro-history of this important trial, reconstructing it from accounts of what was said in court and setting it in the context of pro- and anti-slavery movements. Rogers considers contemporary questions of culpability, the use and abuse of evidence, and why Kimber was criminally indicted for murder at a time when kidnapped Africans were generally regarded as 'cargo'. Importantly, the book also looks at the role of sailors in the abolition debate: both in bringing the horrors of the slave trade to public notice and as straw-men for slavery advocates, who excused the treatment of enslaved people by comparing it to punishments meted out to sailors and soldiers.
The final chapter addresses the question of whether the slave-trade archive can adequately recover the experience of being enslaved.
NICHOLAS ROGERS is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at York University, Toronto.
On 2 April 1792, John Kimber, captain of the Bristol slave ship Recovery, was denounced in the House of Commons by William Wilberforce for flogging a fifteen-year-old African girl to death. The story, caricatured in a contemporary Isaac Cruikshank print, raced across newspapers in Britain and Ireland and was even reported in America. Soon after, Kimber was indicted for murder - but in a trial lasting just under five hours, he was found not guilty.
This book is a micro-history of this important trial, reconstructing it from accounts of what was said in court and setting it in the context of pro- and anti-slavery movements. Rogers considers contemporary questions of culpability, the use and abuse of evidence, and why Kimber was criminally indicted for murder at a time when kidnapped Africans were generally regarded as 'cargo'. Importantly, the book also looks at the role of sailors in the abolition debate: both in bringing the horrors of the slave trade to public notice and as straw-men for slavery advocates, who excused the treatment of enslaved people by comparing it to punishments meted out to sailors and soldiers.
The final chapter addresses the question of whether the slave-trade archive can adequately recover the experience of being enslaved.
NICHOLAS ROGERS is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at York University, Toronto.
Author / Editor information
Contributor: Nicholas Rogers
NICHOLAS ROGERS is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus in History at York University, Toronto and author of Murder on the Middle Passage: The Trial of Captain Kimber (Boydell, 2020) and (with Steve Poole) of Bristol from Below; Law, Authority and Protest in a Georgian City (Boydell, 2017).
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Frontmatter
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Contents
vii -
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List of illustrations
viii -
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Acknowledgements
ix -
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List of abbreviations
xi -
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Preface
xii -
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1 Ship shape, Bristol fashion
1 -
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2 The accusation
25 -
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3 The man and his crew
57 -
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4 The trial
87 -
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5 Abolition and revolution
121 -
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6 Afterthoughts
149 -
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Appendix
187 -
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Notes
191 -
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Bibliography
239 -
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Index
261
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
January 30, 2024
eBook ISBN:
9781787446946
Original publisher:
Boydell Press
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9781787446946
Keywords for this book
Slavery; Abolition; the Middle Passage; Britain and the Atlantic; Human rights and slavery; the Age of Revolution in the 18th century; violence and punishment; Bristol as a slave port; Micro-history; the slave archive; slavery and public memory
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
