Part One: X-Mas Special: The Heroes Who Ended The Slave Trade

Summary

Behind the Bastards – X-Mas Special: The Heroes Who Ended The Slave Trade (Part One)

Cool Zone Media & iHeartPodcasts | December 23, 2025
Host: Robert Evans | Guests: James Stout, Sophie

Episode Overview

This special Christmas episode of Behind the Bastards flips the show’s usual format, focusing not on history’s villains but on the inspiring story of how a group of British abolitionists helped end the Atlantic slave trade. Before getting to the heroes, the episode extensively covers the nightmarish realities of the slave trade’s rise and its centrality to Western wealth and imperialism—laying essential groundwork for understanding the scale of the achievement. The conversation is raw, darkly humorous, historically detailed, and ultimately setting up a story of hope for future installments.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Worst Institution in Human History (08:00 - 29:05)

• Global Context of Slavery

  • Slavery was common in many historical societies, but not all enslaving systems were equally horrifying.
  • Ancient Roman slavery was brutal but lacked the racial ideology of later chattel slavery and allowed social mobility for freed people.

• The Atlantic Slave Trade’s Unique Cruelty

  • Robert: “For all its horrors, nothing the Romans did came close to the level of sadistic cruelty that we saw in the slave ships of the Atlantic trade.” (11:26)
  • Atlantic slavery, especially as developed by European empires, stands out for its racism, industrial scale, and dehumanization.

• Origins and Expansion

  • Portuguese encounters with West Africa (Ghana, 1471) start as gold trade, quickly pivot to enslaved human trade as sugar cane farming booms.
  • Sugar is more lucrative than gold but “hell to farm,” leading to the import of enslaved labor from Africa after indigenous peoples are wiped out by disease and abuse (16:08).
  • “They could just pay locals to make it, but...they kill a lot of those local indigenous people quickly. So you need a shitload of slaves.” – Robert (16:08)
  • The “Triangular Trade” of Europe–Africa–New World explodes.

The Machinery of Brutality (19:22 - 38:24)

• Elmina Castle: The Model of Horror

  • Originally a gold fort, quickly converted to a slave dungeon with literal class stratification—luxury levels above, “dungeons” below (19:22).
  • Quote from PBS.org: “The floor of the dungeon, as a result of centuries of impacted filth and human excrement, is now several inches higher than it was when it was built.” (20:02)
  • Repeated rape and sexual violence were ‘perks’ for slavers and functionaries. (21:05)

• Routine Atrocities

  • Insurrections are met with starvation and public display of corpses to deter others: “Slaves were not given food or water and eventually died. The British displayed the corpses to the other slaves as an example of the consequences of resistance, after which the bodies were thrown into the ocean for the sharks.” (25:27)

• African and Arab Involvement

  • European traders rarely “raid the interior” directly—African and Arab traders capture and transport captives for European goods, notably guns.
  • “Slavery existed in Africa...but in a very different context. Enslaved Africans sold into the Atlantic trade became chattel – their only worth considered in monetary terms.” (Mike Kay via Robert, 28:24)

Slave Trade Economics and Global Impact (29:09 - 41:53)

• The Business of Death

  • British society becomes fundamentally intertwined with—and enriched by—the trade.
  • “By the late 1700s, British imports of sugar from Jamaica are worth five times as much as the combined value of all the imports from the thirteen colonies.” (32:24)
  • Maintenance of plantations required constant influx of enslaved people due to horrendous death rates; “about a third of enslaved Africans died within three years of reaching the Caribbean.” (37:34)
  • “It is no exaggeration to say that slaves were treated worse than animals in the Caribbean...” (38:01)

• Society Complicit

  • Political, economic, and religious establishment in Britain is deeply embedded.
  • “Every mayor of Liverpool has a financial interest in human trafficking.” – Robert (39:46)
  • The Church of England owned plantations and was financially involved in slavery. Only fringe groups (mainly Quakers) opposed it on moral grounds: “Hard to pick a group...who are more consistently right than the Quakers.” (41:53)

Emerging Moral Resistance and the Moment of Change (49:00 - 54:12)

• The Astonishing Pivot to Abolition

  • Despite slavery’s deep roots, British society rapidly turns toward abolition in the early 1800s—a major social shift.
  • The anti-slave trade movement is described as “the first social movement dedicated entirely to the recognition and protection of other people’s rights.” (50:20)
  • Robert critiques the modern racist myth that Europeans ending slavery is a unique moral achievement: “[It] has to be tempered by the acknowledgment that...they were fighting...against the uniquely Western chattel slave trade...” (51:17)

• The Zong (Zorg) Massacre—A Turning Point

  • The episode closes in on a case study: the massacre on the British slave ship Zong/Zorg, which was pivotal in sparking organized abolitionism.

Case Study: The Zong Massacre (54:12 - Episode End)

• Profile in Monstrosity: Robert Stubbs, Slave Captain

  • Chronicling the incompetent, cruel, and grasping figure of Robert Stubbs, who rises through British slaving circles despite a stunning record of failure and callousness.
    • “He’s got one move, and it’s slavery.” – Robert (64:39)
    • “People are trading [his] letters in the fort because they’re funny—they’re so badly written.” (66:26)
  • Comical yet chilling incompetence: “He brings his 12-year-old boy...makes him work and pockets the kid’s salary.” (63:44)

• The Zong Massacre: What Happened

  • Due to crowded conditions, poor navigation, and disease, the ship runs short on supplies. Captain and crew decide to throw enslaved women and children overboard to claim insurance.
    • “One by one, the crew picked 55 women and children and threw them...through the cabin windows into the sea and drowned.” (80:41)
  • Final toll: Of 442 enslaved people, approx. 220 die—123-133 thrown overboard, the rest from disease, and 10 by suicide.

• Legal Aftermath and the Birth of Mass Abolition

  • The ship’s owners file an insurance claim for the “loss of property.” The case, Gregson v. Gilbert, rules that the massacre is insurable loss—enslaved people are just cargo.
  • Public outrage over this ruling ignites England’s abolitionist movement: “It is the fallout from this court case that is going to inspire the birth of the organized abolitionist movement in England.” (85:19)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Robert Evans on the unique horror of Atlantic Slavery:
  “Nothing the Romans did came close to the level of sadistic cruelty that we saw in the slave ships of the Atlantic trade.” (11:26)

• On Elmina Castle’s horrifying structure:
  “Literally stratified society where you’ve just really, really made it pretty fucking obvious what you’re going for.” – James Stout (19:05)

• Regarding routine rape in the slave trade:
  “This is basically...their Christmas bonus in a way. Like this is one of the perks of the job.” – Robert (21:36)

• On mortality on slave ships:
  “We’re never gonna know precisely how many enslaved Africans were killed just as a byproduct of the slave trade. Most estimates are between 10 and 20%...In some voyages, it was like 30 or 40%.” – Robert (35:12)

• On social complicity:
  “The basic morality of slavery as a system was so unquestioned...if you were to go back with a time machine and pick random people on the street and tell them slavery should be abolished, nine out of ten listeners would reject you out of hand as a maniac.” – via Adam Hochschild (38:24)

• On the Quakers:
  “Hard to pick a group of people in western society in early modernity who were more consistently right than the Quakers.” – Robert (41:50)

• On the Zong case:
  “Stubbs comes back and is like, hey, we had to kill about 130 of these people, but we had to kill them because of an act of God, basically…That means their deaths are payable. Like your insurance company owes you for them, right?” (83:03)

  • [Robert and James emphasize the callousness by comparing insurance’s roots to slave trade risk management.]

• James, wryly, after the bleak revelations:
  “Well, not as Christmassy as I expected. Coming on the Happy Nice Guy Christmas episode.” (85:34)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 08:00–13:00 — Global contexts and brutality of Atlantic slavery
• 19:22–21:36 — Elmina Castle and routine sexual violence
• 25:27 — Punishments and resistance in the forts
• 29:09–38:24 — Slavery’s economic and social foundations in Britain
• 49:00–54:12 — The moral pivot and origins of abolitionism
• 54:12–80:41 — The Zong massacre in detail
• 83:03–85:19 — Legal aftermath and the emergence of the abolition movement

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Tone and Style

The episode, true to Behind the Bastards form, balances harrowing historical narrative with gallows humor, banter, and moments of dark irony. The hosts are frank about the overwhelming cruelty of the period, their own emotional responses, and the challenge—“I always have to go for a nice walk before I do bastards, you know.” (James, 06:46)

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Looking Ahead

The episode closes by promising a shift towards the actual heroes of abolition in the next installment. The detailed discussion of the Zong massacre sets the stage for the emergence of collective action that would force the British Empire, against its own interests and nearly everyone’s expectations, to significantly curtail and eventually abolish the slave trade.

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For Listeners

If you want to understand not just the evil that was, but also the genuinely hopeful history of how society can sometimes change against all odds—and the cost of that achievement—this episode is essential background. The story of abolitionists will follow in Part Two.

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Notable Guest Plug:
James Stout’s book, Against the State: A Story of Anarchists and Comrades at War in Spain, Myanmar and Rojava, is available for pre-order (02:29 / 86:24). Links in episode description.

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End of Summary

Transcript

[Sophie]

Call Zone Media.

[Robert Evans]

What's enslaving my, like, 10 million people over the course of 300 or so years? Welcome to behind the Best. Is that. Sophie, People have missed the old kind of introduction where I did like a what's xing my Y's sort of thing. Is there something inappropriate about how I did this intro?

[Sophie]

It was very inappropriate. Also, I liked my intro where I said, welcome to behind the Bastards. I'm not Robert Evans.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you didn't do a British accent last time, Sophie, which is a weird choice for the second line, but I was doing that.

[James Stout]

Borderline effect.

[Sophie]

I was doing that not because of our guests, but because of our topic.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, I thought you were doing that because of our guest.

[Sophie]

No, I would never mock James Stout.

[Robert Evans]

Sir James Stout.

[Sophie]

Sir James Stout.

[Robert Evans]

There it is. Yeah.

[James Stout]

Absolutely not. I don't think that's happening anytime in the near future.

[Robert Evans]

I know.

[James Stout]

Anyone touched me with a sword, period, I'd have back at them if they tried.

[Sophie]

Well, Margaret told me the other day that I would make a great queen of mine.

[James Stout]

You did, Robert, when we fenced.

[Robert Evans]

We did. I was pretty drunk, I think.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I was drunk too. And we were using those crucifixes.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we were using crucifixes to fence in Thailand. Before we get to that, this is a podcast about the worst people in all of history.

[Sophie]

But before we get to that, Robert, I want to take a moment for our dear friend James Stout to plug his new book that's available for pre order.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I was trying to introduce him before we did that.

[Sophie]

Sophie, we said his name. What else do you want?

[Robert Evans]

I was gonna put a little bit more like, you know, spin on it some oil, you know, on the vinegar.

[Sophie]

By all means, go ahead, go ahead.

[Robert Evans]

This is James Stout, podcaster and author.

[Sophie]

And journalist, and our friend and our buddy.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. You wanna tell people about your book? I do.

[James Stout]

I would like that. And then I'm excited to hear about a pedophile or whatever we're gonna do. This is my book. It's called against the State, A story of anarchists and comrades at war in Spain, Myanmar and Rojava. Includes some places I've been with Robert and places I've been on my own.

[Sophie]

It's a beautiful cover.

[James Stout]

It's a really. Yeah. So a friend of Robert's and mine took this photograph and I was really happy to be able to share it with people. And I really like having it in.

[Sophie]

Gorgeous.

[James Stout]

This is Burmese, Kurdish. This is English and Spanish. For those who aren't familiar with those Languages. Yeah, it comes out on the 26th of January with AK Press. We'll give you a pre order link if you'd like to buy it, I.

[Sophie]

Hope in the episode description, Friends.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[James Stout]

You can also just search my name and the words against the state and you'll find it almost everywhere good books are sold. You can buy it from Jeff Bezos if you want, but I'd rather that you didn't. And yeah, I hope I've captured some of the beautiful elements of these revolutions that I've been lucky enough to spend some time with. And obviously the Spanish Revolution is something I studied for my PhD. I didn't spend time in that one. I'm not that old.

[Robert Evans]

Buy the book. Read the book. Overthrow the Government.

[Sophie]

You know, nothing would make me happier than you pre ordering James Stout's book.

[James Stout]

Mm.

[Robert Evans]

One thing would make me happier, and it's the government. The thing I said a little bit ago that I probably should only say once.

[James Stout]

To be clear. My book is not a guide to.

[Robert Evans]

How to do that. No, these are jokes, comedy bits. You know what's not funny, James?

[James Stout]

I tried to think what you're about to say from it.

[Robert Evans]

It's not. But today, this is our Christmas episode. Every year around Christmas, we do a reverse Bastards episode. Right. Where, I mean, we've used that term also to mean when someone else reads an episode to me, but in this context, it means we're talking about a hero. Right. Or a group of heroes. Right. This is an episode about a good thing that happened now because it's still behind the Bastards. We will largely be talking about terrible things. But I did bring you an episode for the end of the year. Cause we both needed a little bit of a break, James, that this is gonna be a little bit of a play against type. Because generally when we talk about the British Empire in this series, we're not talking about good people doing good things.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it didn't do much of that.

[Robert Evans]

This is not the British Empire doing good things, but it's people who were citizens of the British Empire who did something really, really good. We are talking about some of the greatest heroes in English history. History. The heroes who ended the Atlantic slave trade. That's. That's our subject for this episode. Nice. And we're critically. We're not quite getting into how slavery was ended in the British Empire, because the slave trade, the Atlantic trade. Right. Where slave, enslaved Africans were taken from Africa over the West Indies, the New World, and, you know, goods and stuff were taken to Africa to trade for the slaves like that is the end of that is what we're talking about. Because the end of that is what started and made inevitable the end of slavery in the British Empire. And as also made the end of slavery in the United States inevitable. The US abolitionist cause is directly tied to the, the, the quest first to end the slave trade and then to end slavery in the British Empire. And so the people we're talking about in these episodes are, I mean, some of the most impressive human beings who ever lived. And they, they accomplished a really incredible goal. And I think it's particularly important to talk about now because this is a story of hope. It's the story of how a ragtag group of intellectuals, lawyers, freed slaves, former slavers and other do gooders went up against the most evil and powerful industry in the world at the time and eventually brought it to its knees. And it's a story of how real change actually happens, which is unfortunately slower than we'd like it to be and messier than we'd like it to be. But at the same time, the stamina that was required to bring this, this industry down. Right, the amount of time, the amount of effort people had to put in consistently for decades, the same people, in order to kill this industry is really worth celebrating.

[James Stout]

It's a beautiful thing. I'm excited to learn more about it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. And you get a lot of. This is like a Battle of Britain kind of thing where it's a lot of like just English society at its very best. Like you have a lot of these people who kind of like come up in like London or come up in Liverpool and have these like personal awakenings that lead them to embrace this as like a crusade for decades. Like there's guys who devote like 40 or 50 years of their lives like incessantly to trying to kill slavery, which I think is pretty cool. So yeah, that's what we're talking about. Although episode one, we're gonna be laying a lot of groundwork, so it's still mostly about bastards.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I always have to like, go for a nice walk before I two bastards, you know, like I can't. Can't be reading the news and then mainlining this stuff.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. This is an iHeart podcast.

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[Robert Evans]

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[Sophia Bush]

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[Robert Evans]

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[James Stout]

And guess what? It's the holiday season.

[Robert Evans]

And you know what that means. Holiday parties. Beau holiday parties. They're the best. But there's always the stress of what to wear, what to bring.

[James Stout]

Easy solution.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, bring a bottle of Casamigos. Casamigos. Wow. That is the move you can make. Casamigos mules or Casamigos Espresso martinis or Casamigos cram. And don't forget about Casamigos margaritas. A Casamigos margarita is the perfect cocktail all year round. Casamigos is just the perfect gift that keeps on giving. And as the saying goes, anything goes with my Casamigos. On second, a holiday party might be in order. That's a great idea. Please drink responsibly. Imported by Casamigos Spirits Company, White Plains, New York. Casamigos Tequila. 40% alcohol by volume. Well, this is gonna be largely upbeat, largely inspiring. Although, again, a lot of bleak stuff to get through first. So I think everybody's aware that slavery as an institution and an industry has existed on every continent. Well, probably except Antarctica. And in most societies across the vast span of human history, not every society had Slavery, but like it's the norm for societies in human history to have some form of slavery, but all slavery is not considered equal. Every kind of slavery and every way slavery has been practiced is not an equivalent level of horrifying and is not an equivalent level of abusive. Right. Ancient Rome, for example, was a slave society and in a lot of ways a nightmarish one. And some of those methods of slavery practiced in Rome, like the vast slave funded plantations called Latifundia or the slave driven mines, were as cruel as any slave plantations in the Caribbean. However, Roman slavery was a legal condition and no one believed that slaves were like inherently racially inferior to other people. They were inferior because their legal condition was inferior. Right. But if that changed when people were freed, there was not really any stigma against a freed person in normal society. Right. Like, and in fact, a lot of the wealthiest Romans during like the height of the Republic were freedmen. Because freed people, like if you were, if you were lucky enough to be enslaved in such a way that you were like living in a city and being taught a trade, then you were effectively like having a free apprenticeship. And if you could get free fairly early in life, a lot of those guys started businesses and became very wealthy. Some of the wealthiest families in Roman society were descended from freed people. And there was no ongoing legal stigma, right. There was no attitude that like, because you were enslaved you can't breed with other people or whatever. Right. That would have been crazy to the Romans, you know, and likewise, and I really not trying to minimize the horrors of slavery in Rome. Cause it was a slave empire, they did genocides that involved slavery, right? The Roman Empire, a lot of bad stuff. But for all of its horrors, nothing the Romans did came close to the level of sadistic cruelty that we saw in the slave ships of the Atlantic trade. Like that is probably slavery at pretty much its worst in anywhere in history. Like there's just nothing that compared to that, right.

[James Stout]

It's kind of hard to think of what you could do that's much worse to a human being.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's like, I mean, it's like an Auschwitz level kind of torture, right? Where people are being like starved and murdered with their families in just the worst and most sadistic conditions imaginable. Now what became the Atlantic slave trade was initially a product of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires, right? Like they were the first people who really got this going. They got their shit together before anyone else in Europe did, and then they lost having their shit together before anyone else in Europe did it's the story of Portugal and Spain. Europeans did not have much in the way of meaningful contact with sub Saharan Africa Until Portuguese trading vessels made their way down the continent's west coast to Ghana in 1471. In keeping with their well worn traditions, Portugal was at first just interested in getting access to gold. Right. There's the gold coast. There's gold here. That's why we're in the area. And so they started building forts on, like, the coast of Ghana, mainly, and other facilities like, you know, to. To facilitate the mining and the transfer of gold. Right. And the loading it onto ships and the restocking those ships. This was part of, like, these are basically these forts or castles Were kind of like gas stations for the gold trade. Right. And they're going to turn into, like, gas stations for the slave trade.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Per the terms of the treaty of tordesilla. That's right. Right, James.

[James Stout]

Tordesillas, I think. Tordesillas.

[Robert Evans]

Tordesillas, yeah. Signed in 1494, Africa wound up in Portugal's sphere of influence. That was the Vatican being like, all right, Spain and Portugal, you're clearly going to run things forever. Let's split the world between you. Never will. Both of your empires collapse really fast, actually.

[James Stout]

Clearly, Iberia will be the center of the world forever.

[Robert Evans]

Right?

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Obviously they're destined to get to rule the world for a thousand years. They got boats slightly faster than anyone else.

[James Stout]

What else could they need?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, earliest. Yeah, that would have been handy. Their earliest explorations in the region Were again focused on gold. And Africa's first major slave trading facility, which was a fort or castle called elmina, Started as a place to gather and store gold before it could be offloaded into merchant vessels. It was built in 1482. But right around this time, not long after they build this fort for gold, Portugal starts to realize gold's not the only treasure in the tropics. And it's actually maybe not even the most valuable treasure in the tropics because sugar exists. And it turns out once you start making actual straight up, like, granulated sugar, and people can just buy a bag of sugar. They don't want to, like, they never want to not have sugar. Like, they're addicted. It's a drug. It's an incredibly addictive drug. They called it sweet salt initially. And once they realized, like, oh, shit, this stuff grows really well here, and you can grow as much of it as you want, that, like, it becomes like, that's worth more than gold, potentially. You know, there's only so Much gold. Inflation is the thing, but you can sell sugar forever. People never don't want sugar. The only problem with sugar as a money making enterprise is, is that it sucks ass to farm. Right. It is absolute hell to grow.

[Sophie]

It's a nightmare.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why you don't see many people growing backyard sugar.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly. Nobody. None of the people with like homesteading dreams are like, yeah, I just want a couple of acres that I can just grow nothing but sugar cane on, you know, really work myself to death probably in five or ten years, you know.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, it's a shame. For whatever reason, some of the homesteading youtubers I would like to see, I would like, stop youtubing.

[Robert Evans]

Just get farm sugar.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, get in the sugar trade. That's what I will say.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, there's gotta be one of those, like, evil foster parents who adopts a bunch of kids to make them work their farm. Like, there's gotta be someone who's tried it with a sugar plantation, I'm sure. But yeah. So there's a problem with the sugar trade, which is they can tell all this money is just lying around waiting for them to grab the sugar trade they know will be worth a shitload of money. Everyone wants this stuff, but it only grows in the tropics, right? It does not. You can't transplant it back to Europe or wherever where you have established agricultural infrastructure. It's not going to do well.

[James Stout]

Nope. We do that with beetroot instead, right?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you do beetroot, you make shitty beet sugar if you want.

[James Stout]

Not the same.

[Robert Evans]

But you can't take European farmers in moss and transport them to the Caribbean or to the African coast because they die. They die really quickly. It's very. They don't do well in the climate, with the bugs, with the diseases, it's just not a good bet. And so the only way that you can farm a lot of sugar is slaves, Right? I mean, theoretically, they could have just paid locals to make it. But part of the problem is that especially in the Caribbean, they do initially start and they're not paying them, they're enslaving local laborers, but they kill a lot of those local indigenous people quickly. Right? So you, you need, one way or the other, you need a shitload of slaves if you're going to keep this, this sugar thing going and really spin it up to the kind of industry Portugal knows it can be. Now, the Portuguese had explored the guinea coast of Africa and they had found tribes who wanted the goods they had to trade Largely guns and gunpowder. That was a big thing for the tribes that they meet. And they were willing to exchange enslaved human beings. And these were generally captured members of enemy tribes. Right. That was the primary way. We'll talk about this a bit more. But, like, these are. These tribes are fighting their own wars, right? And like most cultures, including European cultures, a very common thing to do when you beat an enemy in war is take a bunch of them into slavery, right? And so they've got these slaves lying around, so to speak. And the Portuguese are like, we need people. Do you like guns? And a lot of these tribes are like, yeah, actually, guns sound great. So this trade kind of starts up, and the Portuguese begin taking captured African slaves and moving them to island plantations near the guinea coast. Right. They're not, you know, taking them to the West Indies at first. Right. Cause that's not part of Portugal's sphere of influence at the time. So around the same time, though, their Spanish rivals had started building sugar plantations in the Caribbean. And these were at first, as I said, manned by indigenous islanders. But the brutality of the work and the disease brought by Europeans quickly wiped out, wiped a lot of these people out. So many that there weren't enough to continue laboring. In 1518, the Spanish king ordered 4,000 African slaves imported to the Caribbean, paying Portugal for the human labor needed to fuel their sugar plantations and launching the Atlantic slave trade. So that's. That's kind of. This is sort of the generally agreed, like, start to the slave trade. A little bit of a soft start. Cause, like, when do you count that? But, like, probably when Portugal starts sending slaves to Spanish colonies in the Caribbean is a good start. El Mina, that fort first established as a hub for gold trading, was converted into a prison for enslaved Africans. The upper levels of the fort contained luxury housing for traveling Europeans, and the bottom levels consisted of a sprawling series of slave dungeons. Wow. This was the first big. Yeah, it's an ugly place still around. You can see it. It's a historical site. Yeah.

[James Stout]

Love to see a literally stratified society where you've just really, really made it pretty fucking obvious what you're going for.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, it's one of those. Sometimes you watch, like, Snowpiercer and you're like, well, that's not very subtle. But neither is history.

[James Stout]

Yeah, sometimes history can be that way.

[Robert Evans]

So this is the first, like, big slave trading post in Africa, and the mini that followed would be built in its image. Right. So Elmina is kind of the proof of concept. And the. The. The. The model off of which, like these future slave trading posts will be built. Every cell in the dungeon was meant to hold up to 200 people, crammed together so tight that they didn't even have room to lie down. One write up I found on PBS.org Slave Kingdom Series Notes quote the floor of the dungeon, as a result of centuries of impacted filth and human excrement, is now several inches higher than it was when it was built. Outbreaks of malaria and yellow fever were common. Staircases led directly from the governor's chambers to the women's dungeons below, making it easy for him to select personal concubines from amongst the women. And you know, I get why they use the term. That's how they would have framed it then. These aren't concubines. These are.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. Like this is raping people is what this is.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. There's obviously like a lot of concubines would have been technically weren't free people, but. But there's also many stories of like different concubines accumulating political power and influence and that is just not the kind of situation we're talking about here. Yeah. Historian Siddharth Kara goes into more detail about this particular aspect of the system. Quote. Women were displayed for the governor in a courtyard after he made a selection. The woman or girl was washed with well water and brought up a staircase through a trapdoor and into his quarters. If she resisted, she was shackled to cannonballs in the courtyard without food or water until she relented or died. Most Europeans also took winches from local villages with whom they fathered countless children.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that's not very nice.

[Robert Evans]

No. And this is like this is the norm anytime you're talking about the slave trade. This is happening not just in these castles as we'll talk about. It's happening on the slave ships. It's obviously happening in the plantations. Rape is not talked enough as like a major. This is like essentially how especially a lot of like the low level people facilitating the slave trade. This is like their Christmas bonus in a way. Like this is how they. Like this is one of the perks of the job, is Right.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Well, you're not paid well and it's dangerous, but you get to do all the rape you want.

[James Stout]

Fantastic. Yeah. This is like no wage, benefit, not taxable.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. Speaking of non taxable things. Yeah, that's ads.

[James Stout]

That's a fact. Rough ad pivot.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. That one wasn't easy.

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[Robert Evans]

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[Sophia Bush]

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[Robert Evans]

And we're back. So any slaves, male or female, who fought back or attempted to lead insurrections were locked in a condemned cell, which Kara describes as a small room on the ground level without ventilation or light. The slaves were not given food or water and eventually died. The British displayed the corpses to the other slaves as an example of the consequences of resistance, after which the bodies were thrown into the ocean for the sharks. Kara is talking about a little bit later period of this is happening under the Portuguese too. He's talking about the British period. But they're both doing this right, because slave uprisings start happening as soon as slavery does, and it scares the shit out of slavers. They're constantly terrified of this. Right. One of the justifications of the brutality as well. Otherwise they'll do an uprising. And it's like, have you tried just not enslaving them? I don't know.

[James Stout]

Yeah, maybe you should.

[Robert Evans]

Probably wouldn't be killing you then.

[James Stout]

Could just leave him alone.

[Robert Evans]

Could just leave them alone. So on the seaboard side of Elmina was the chillingly named Door of no Return. This is where enslaved people were offloaded into slave ships, right? Which would take them to their final destinations. While the Portuguese and the Spaniards whetted Europe's appetite for African slaves, other European powers were quick to involve themselves in the exploding industry. And as things kind of soured for the Portuguese and Spanish empires, other players are going to take over the slave trade. Now, as I noted, the money that fueled the slave trade is European, right? Slavery became central to the economy of New World possessions in places like the Caribbean. But it's not a purely European business. It is a partnership, and the people a crucial part of the slave trade. Cause it's not Europeans wandering into the center of the country generally to grab people. Right. Like, that's not how this is happening. These slaves are being taken and are being transported by kafl, which is like a chain of, basically, handcuffs and chains that keeps a line of people together. Right. Like, it's how you chain a bunch of slaves together and walk them from wherever in the country you're taking them to the coast where they're going to get onto a slave. Right? Yeah. They used coffles as well in the Americas. And what, like, once. Like, it's not just. But, like, yeah, that's how they're being transported. And the slaves are being gathered and taken generally by a mix of African and Arab slave traders. Right. These people are doing the dirty work of actually capturing the human beings who are then loaded on their ships and sold. And for these traders, their participation in what we know is the Atlantic slave trade wouldn't have seemed to them a huge departure from the kinds of slavery that had existed since antiquity. In a 2005 study for anti Slavery International, Mike Kay writes, quote, slavery existed in Africa and elsewhere before the intervention of Europeans, albeit in a very different context. People were enslaved as a consequence of being captured in war, as a punishment for committing a crime, or as a means of escaping famine. While enslavement in Africa could be extremely brutal, African slaves had a social as well as an economic value, and they brought prestige and status to their owner. Slaves held in Africa were still generally considered people and part of society. By contrast, those sold into the transatlantic slave trade were seen as chattel to be bought and sold. Their only worth was considered in monetary terms. As a consequence, enslaved Africans were routinely tortured, whipped, branded, beaten, chained, et cetera, separated from other family members, even deprived of their own names. Hardly any of the millions who were transported across the Atlantic ever returned to Africa. And that's important, which is that, like, yeah, it's a bad thing to be a slaver, but these slavers are not thinking of slavery in the same way as the Europeans who are taking the enslaved people from them. Right. That it's just a very different thing. And, you know, you could say they don't care because they're getting guns and stuff. And that's a fair. These are bad people.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

But the slavery that existed and that they. That existed in their heads was very different from, like, the slavery that Europeans were increasingly executing. It is a mark of how different African slavery was in Africa. That it was not uncommon for enslaved people to marry into the family that owned them. They would keep their given names and their family identity, and if freed, were again, unlikely to face lingering stigma over their former status. So again, you're just talking about kind of a fundamentally different look at what slavery is. We'll talk later. In these episodes. We'll have an account of an African man who as a boy was captured by some of these slave traders. And we'll get some more details as to, like, what that process looked like. John Newton, who's a former slave captain who became an abolitionist. We'll talk about him later, suggested that the principal source of the slave trade at this time was the wars that prevail among the natives. And scholarship seems to back a good deal of this up. However, as Newton noted, the English and other Europeans have been charged with fomenting these wars. I verily believe that the far greater part of the wars in Africa would cease if the Europeans would cease to tempt them by offering goods for slaves. And you do have undeniably. It's almost like a little bit of a World War I situation where you've got all of these different tribes and kingdoms that are enemies that have been fighting for, in some cases for centuries. And Europeans come in and start offering guns and cannons in exchange for slaves. So now it becomes, not only do you want them if you're fighting a war, but if your neighbor is trading slaves to the Europeans for guns and cannons and you don't get guns and cannons, what's gonna happen to you the next time you have a war? Right. Like inciting is as simple as that. It's not necessarily some CIA skullduggery. It's just, well, you start selling guns to one kingdom and they're all going to want guns. And the only thing you want in exchange for guns is slaves. Right? Yeah.

[James Stout]

It's just like a class, like, vicious cycle thing.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Like one builds on the other.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And when we talk about like the great British fortunes, for example, that were built on slavery, people tend to focus on the people who were part of slave syndicates. But a huge number of the guns that are produced in Great Britain during the period like this 300 year period are sent immediately to Africa. Those are also slave fortunes, you know, and gunpowder too. Those are slave fortunes.

[James Stout]

Yep. Yeah, totally makes sense. You're contributing to that same cycle of death and enslavement.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly, exactly. The first English slave ship left Africa somewhere around 1555. In 1621, the Dutch West India Company was formed and it proved so efficient that it drank Portugal's milkshake. In about 20 years time, the Dutch West India. The Dutch become the major slavers in the guinea coast instead, like, and they take over from Portugal. They capture a lot of their coastal forts and start dominating the Atlantic slave trade for themselves. Now, they're not top shit of the slave trade for very long. Within the space of about a century, the majority of slave ships taking Africans to the New World are going to be British, right. It takes about 100 years. But England becomes the primary, like, movers and shakers of the Atlantic slave trade. And they will stay that way until it ends. England begins colonizing the Caribbean right around the same time the Dutch start pushing the Portuguese out of West Africa. In 1655, a century after their first slave ship departed the guinea coast, England captures Jamaica from Spain. In short order, it becomes the most profitable piece of their overseas empire. By the late 1700s, British imports of sugar from Jamaica are worth five times as much as the combined value of all of the imports from the thirteen colonies in North America.

[James Stout]

Jeez. Yeah, that's what happens. Yeah, I guess that's what happens when you enslave human beings.

[Robert Evans]

Right. It's a really efficient thing from a business point of view, when you enslave human beings to produce the most addictive drug yet known to. Well, I guess tobacco's up there. Yeah.

[James Stout]

Some other stuff going on. But yeah, like, I know people can consume sugar, like for more often than tobacco and probably for longer.

[Robert Evans]

And I think probably more people like sugar. Yeah.

[James Stout]

That is an acquired taste, tobacco.

[Robert Evans]

It's just. I mean, it's just impossible to look at how profitable this is, not be like, well, yeah, because it's fucking addictive as hell, you know. And it's also kind of where Americans, keeping in mind when we get up our own asses about, like the American Revolution, it's like, well, the British could kind of afford to cut bait. Cause the thirteen colonies, they were not that big a part of the economy. Empire, Right. Okay, guys, A lot of irons in the fire, okay.

[James Stout]

They had some other options. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Tobacco.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Good luck, everyone.

[Robert Evans]

Now, these vast profits could only be sustained by the constant import of new slaves to Jamaica. Because it's a very deadly business actually farming this stuff. Historian Siddharth Kara writes that quote, by the late 18th century, the slave trade had permeated almost every aspect of British society and helped transform the nation into an economic superpower. The importance of this trade to Great Britain almost exceeds calculation, stated one Liverpool ship captain, a royal African company official noted the Negro trade on the coast of Africa is the chief and fundamental support of the British colonies and plantations in America. This is funding British colonialism elsewhere. Right. Like, this is, in a lot of ways, what made it possible for them to start colonizing the Americas is the money that came from, you know, the slave trade.

[James Stout]

Enslaved people.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Enslaving people and working them to death.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And I guess stealing the land too, right? Like, it's a great.

[Robert Evans]

Stealing their land.

[James Stout]

Cause all your inputs are free.

[Robert Evans]

Like, stealing shit. Yeah. Who'd have thought? Yeah, yeah. There's a great movie Point Break about that, which I've been meaning to talk to you about. James, do you have a mat? Masks?

[James Stout]

I have a couple. Got a couple.

[Robert Evans]

Okay. Yeah. I got a Reagan mask. I don't know. We'll talk about this on.

[James Stout]

Okay. Yeah. Probably get this one off the Internet.

[Sophie]

It's like, are we doing this again?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, again. Sophie, we never did this. What are you talking about?

[James Stout]

Sophie?

[Robert Evans]

The listeners can't see me winking.

[James Stout]

Better say it out loud so everyone knows. Robert. That's my winking voice.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's my winking voice. So we're never gonna know precisely how many enslaved Africans were killed just as a byproduct of the slave trade. Most estimates are between 10 and 20% of people enslaved people who were, like, brought over the middle passage died during the journey. But, I mean, that's 10 to 20% is itself a pretty wide margin. We simply don't know. In some void, I mean, some ships, everyone died, but in some voyages, it was like 30 or 40%. You know, sometimes it's less. It really just depended on the captain. So these are rough. Average is right. The knowledge that this sort of human shrinkage was inevitable, that a lot of the people that you bring over are going to die, led slavers to cram ever more people into the boats. Right. It's like, well, if 10 or 20% are going to die, then we got to bring even more people, which means that the boats are even more deadly. You know, these holds are.

[James Stout]

Yeah. It only works if you see it there being an infinite supply of people who have almost no value. Right, Right, exactly. Jesus.

[Robert Evans]

And if you don't know about how germs work, Right. The fact that we just jam more people in the hold where everyone is going to the bathroom, all over. It's everywhere. You're in a hold, you're chained together and you're sick. A lot of people are too ill to have any control over when they go or not. Because they're dying. Right. You're jamming them into these nasty, disease riddled, tiny hell rooms. It's just, it's a nightmare everyone's in. It's a boo box from Hook, but like, everyone's in it. Right. For months. It's just incomprehensible suffering. Yeah. Around 10 million enslaved people survived the crossing to the New World during the course of the Atlantic slave trade, which suggests about 1 to 2 million people died over the same period of time. Right. Kind of. I think roughly that's the estimate. And that's not the end of how many people this fucking killed. Because about two thirds of the slaves who survived transit were immediately put to the task of cutting sugarcane in the Americas, the Caribbean, or doing other crops. But sugar plantations were the big one and they are hell on earth. Laborers worked 14 hours a day. The heat was intense. They're in an unfamiliar climate with unfamiliar diseases. And about a third of enslaved Africans died within three years of reaching the Caribbean. Yeah. Like you're just feeding people into the maw of this system of death. It's barely less lethal than a concentration camp, right?

[James Stout]

Yeah, marginally, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And the only reason is that they wanted these people to live for some period of time to extract value from them.

[James Stout]

Yeah, exactly.

[Robert Evans]

In his article for Anti Slavery International K ads, plantation owners in the British West Indies were initially unconcerned about this as they could simply buy more slaves and calculated that it, it was cheaper to buy than breed. It is no exaggeration to say that slaves were treated worse than animals in the Caribbean. Yeah.

[James Stout]

Jesus Christ.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's pretty rough, right? Yeah. The whole, like, why breed them? That's too much trouble. Yeah, right.

[James Stout]

Like a thing that we do routinely for like cows and they were doing right then for like cows and sheep and shit that they wanted to eat. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I think some of it may just have been that, like, well, when women are giving birth, they need like some degree of care. And even that is more effort than I want to put into thinking, thinking about these people. I just want them to work until they drop. Right. This attitude is going to change over time, but, you know, that's how a lot of people think for a significant chunk of it. For more than 300 years, the slave trade continued unabated. There is very little evidence that it was considered controversial at all by most people who lived back in the imperial core for a large chunk of this period of time. Adam Smith, the famous economist, gave a lecture at the University of Glasgow in 1763 in which he argued that slavery was foundational to human civilization. It existed in every culture throughout history and it had very little chance of ever being abolished. Historian Adam Hochschild makes the claim that the basic morality of slavery as a system was so unquestioned in the late 1700s in England that if you were to go back with a time machine and pick random people on the street and tell them slavery should be abolished, nine out of 10 listeners would reject you out of hand as a maniac. It was just not at all controversial up until the very end. Pretty much of the 1700s, pretty late in the 1700s. Almost every great fortune in England during this time was dependent on the slave trade. Between 1787 and 1807, every mayor of Liverpool, which at its peak was the major hub of the slave trade, about 40% of the entire European slave trade passes through Liverpool. Every mayor of Liverpool has a financial interest in human trafficking. The website recovered histories, notes that by the late 18th century, 50 to 60 members of parliament represented slave plantations. William Beckford, two time mayor of London, owned a 22,000 acre plantation in Jamaica. Great stuff. Yeah, cool. So, yeah, like the ruling class is all very much embedded with this stuff, right?

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's the entire economy.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

And even the people who aren't directly owning slaves are making money from the people who own slaves.

[Robert Evans]

Right, Right. It's just like a foundational underpinning of how everything works now, even outside of direct involvement in the plantation system, it's impossible to avoid. Like I said earlier, British Britain exported about 150,000 firearms per year to Africa during this period of time in like the 1700s. And these guns are being traded to locals in exchange for people. The city of Birmingham was a major copper powerhouse and much of that copper was also sent overseas to Africa where it was traded for people. Because it's not just guns they're trading. So again, it's really hard just not to be involved in some, to some extent in profiting from the slave trade, even if you don't want to. Right, yeah.

[James Stout]

And it seems like there's no one who didn't want to. Like, everyone was just fine with it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, very. It's, it's, it's pretty. Pretty much just the. Oh, shit. It's pretty much just the. Not Mennonites. What are they?

[James Stout]

Quakers?

[Robert Evans]

Yes, it's pretty much just the Quakers who don't want to be financially, like not all of the Quakers in this period of time, let's be clear, but like, the Quakers are fairly consistently a lot of Quakers, from a fairly early point in the slave trade are saying this is bad and we shouldn't do it. But they're also seen as kind of kooks to most people because they're saying crazy shit like it's bad to be in the military and fight and die for a king.

[James Stout]

Maybe we shouldn't be killing each other.

[Robert Evans]

They're saying crazy shit. These wacky Quakers.

[James Stout]

The term Quaker is one that they didn't prefer to use for themselves. Right. It's like a derogatory term that was put upon them and I guess.

[Robert Evans]

I think so. Yeah.

[James Stout]

They call themselves, I know they call themselves Friends.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, the Friends. And it's one of those, like, hard to pick a group of people in like Western society in early modernity who are more consistently right. Than the Quakers.

[James Stout]

They really called it quite a few times.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

You can go back and be like, yep, yep.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, still go to bat on everything, but a lot.

[Sophie]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

This very morning I was out with a Quaker friend and we were helping some migrants get groceries because they can't get them otherwise and they need to feed their kids over the holidays. Like they're, they're still, still doing a pretty good job.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. You know, we could talk about religion and all of the things I don't agree with, but if you're, if, if you're pretty, if you're hewing pretty close to the idea that, like, it's bad to kill people and it's bad to own people and it's good to feed people, you're gonna be right more than you're wrong.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. You're doing, you're beating the average, especially back then.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. You're gonna beat the average. Average in your society now. You know what church didn't have a problem with slavery, James? Any of them, really.

[James Stout]

Most of them.

[Robert Evans]

Most of them, yeah. But the Church of England, Right.

[James Stout]

That's shocking to me. Wow.

[Robert Evans]

Church of England, big fans of slavery, deeply financially involved.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Now there is a sect, like a radical Anglican sect that are anti slavery from like, I think fairly early in the 1700s. But like the mainstream of the Church of England is fine with this stuff. And in fact, the Anglican Church owns vast plantations in Barbados and other Caribbean islands. When anyone bothered to discuss the morality of the slave trade, the default assumption was that it represented a kindness to Africans. Liverpool merchant Michael Sargent gave a representative version of this argument. We ought to consider whether the Negroes in a well regulated plantation under the protection of a kind master, do not enjoy as great, nay, even greater advantages than when they are under their own despotic government.

[James Stout]

Fuck's sake.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. What?

[James Stout]

He pulled that directly out of his ass. Like, what knowledge does he have of governance in the interior of Africa?

[Robert Evans]

Well, and like, yeah, they live under a despot as opposed to you, who lives under a king in a state that makes all of its money from slavery.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And they're dying after three years. Like, how could it be better than whatever the situation was back home?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's.

[James Stout]

People will just make shit up.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. It's just to make themselves feel better. Like, who knows how much he even cared? Like, this is just a pri. This is like. Well, you know, we just don't know if cigarettes are bad for people. There's conflicting evidence or, you know, we can't really predict the climate. So who's to say if all these gasoline emissions are bad? You know, like it's that kind of argument. Right. It's like maybe they're better off, you know, you don't know how bad things are in Africa. Yeah. Yeah.

[James Stout]

Let's just hope it's that way. Otherwise face the guilt of what they're doing.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah. Otherwise I'm a world historic monster.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yeah. I'm a piece of shit on like a centuries wide scale. Better.

[Robert Evans]

Speaking of world historic monsters, I was.

[Sophie]

Hoping you would do this as an ad transition.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, some of them. Right. Maybe. We don't know.

[James Stout]

Yeah, we never know.

[Robert Evans]

We don't know.

[James Stout]

Be sure to DM Sophie and let her know if you don't like the advertisers. It's iWriteok.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Anyway, here's ads. This podcast is sponsored by Liverpool. Liverpool. We were the slave trading hub of the world for a period of time. Maybe we could do it again. Visit Liverpool. Sorry, I don't know why I'm throwing shade at Liverpool.

[James Stout]

My mom's from Liverpool, man.

[Sophie]

What did Liverpool do to you, motherfucker?

[Robert Evans]

I mean, they did a lot to.

[James Stout]

So a lot of people.

[Robert Evans]

So they've done some bad shit to you, these Liverpudians. I'm. I'm offended on their behalf. On behalf of the. The, you know, the world.

[James Stout]

10 million people who were enslaved.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Sophie]

I was offended by when Ro. When Robert said, I'm winking. That's for the people that can't see me.

[Robert Evans]

All I'm going to say is if you know anyone from Liverpool, hit him again. My mother is from Liverpool.

[Sophie]

If you know anyone from Liverpool, wink at.

[James Stout]

My entire mother's side of the family is from Liverpool.

[Sophie]

This is behind the bastards, James. It's Not a good time.

[James Stout]

No, it's not. No, no, no. That's what we left Liverpool in opposition.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Around the 1960s.

[Robert Evans]

If you know anybody from Richmond, hit them too, you know, and maybe wink. Hit people if they come. Yeah, Wink while you're hitting them.

[Sophie]

Wink while you're hitting them. Exactly.

[James Stout]

So they know it's a good. It's not a crime. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

It's just a joke. It's a bit.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, it's a bit.

[Robert Evans]

Don't hit people.

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[Robert Evans]

And we're back. Given how central slavery was to the British economy and how unquestioned the morality of the institution was to most Britons in this period, it is remarkable that only a few Decades into the 19th century, Great Britain would put an end to its part in the slave trade. Right. I mean, it's less than that to the slave trade. Sorry, it's like 1807 that the slave trade ends and like, like 1830, something. We'll talk about that later. Where slavery is made illegal in the British Empire and given the fact that like in the 1760s, even up to the 1770s, you would have been hard pressed to find a person on the street who would be like, yeah, slavery's bad. Like, that would have been a weird take not long before this. So it's kind of remarkable how quickly things turn around. And that's why I wanna tell this story, is that one of the things that's so impressive is how much like, this seems like a hopeless cause. If you're an abolitionist in like 1760, 1770, the idea that you might get the entire country on board ending slavery, ending the slave trade alone is wild. Right. And they did. So, yeah, that's pretty important for us here staring at an insurmountable mountain of problems to pay attention to how this happened. Yeah. And it's worth noting the abolitionist movement is often described by historians, specifically the abolitionist movement that starts in England and first ends the slave trade and then slavery in the British Empire. The first social movement dedicated entirely to the recognition and protection of other people's rights. Right. That's kinda cool. The movement is not fighting for their own rights. They are fighting for the rights of a separate group of people, of outsiders, people who aren't even their countrymen, generally.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is. Yeah. That's a really interesting way to frame it.

[Robert Evans]

It's significant. Right. It's a meaningful. And that deserves to be celebrated. There's also this kind of annoying thing today, and I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that a loud minority of racists today will argue that the Atlantic slave trade isn't something Westerners should be ashamed of. It's something that we should be proud of because we ended slavery and nobody else ever tried to do that. Right. It's an example of how good our culture is that we're the only ones who tried to end slavery. White Europeans are the first people to decide slavery should be banned. You know, Jesus.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Fucking nonsense.

[Robert Evans]

Like, it's not true for one thing. But yeah, yeah, there were societies that banned kinds of slavery. At least, you know, they still had things that we might say is problematic, but like, anyway, whatever. Any acknowledgement of how remarkable the pan abolitionist cause was, and it was, has to be tempered by the acknowledgment that it came into being not to be. Not like the abolitionists that we're talking about were not fighting against slavery as the general concept that had existed since time immemorial. They were fighting specifically against the uniquely terrible and uniquely Western chattel slave trade that existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The nightmarish horrors of that system, which was so much worse than the very bad slavery that existed forever is what inspired this movement.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's. Unfortunately, I'm a person who teaches at college right now and we are living in the era of chatbots.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

And I have noticed a certain number of chatbot generated essays arguing this point that you are making. And it doesn't get any less upsetting even after reading it hundreds of times. That, or like, yeah, there was slavery elsewhere.

[Robert Evans]

It's like if at some point in the future America got a complete handle on the whole gun thing and did whatever we had to do to make sure that nobody dies from guns in the United States again. And then people like a hundred years after that were like, yeah, America's the greatest culture ever. Cause we were the only ones who realized guns were bad. It's like you're leaving out a really big part of the story. You're really cutting out some important facts.

[James Stout]

There's some bits there that you probably don't want to gloss over.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we solved gun violence in that society. Like, shit talking. A country that allows hunting rifles. And it's like, wait a second. Yeah, hold on, buddy, you're forgetting something. Some stuff.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's pretty bad shit.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, there's. There's a lot of history you're ignoring here. Yeah, the intellectual underpinnings of the abolitionist movement have a history that itself goes back centuries. And we'd have to discuss everything from the Quakers to the French Revolution and the Scottish Enlightenment to adequately address all of that. But what we're talking about specifically is not kind of the ideologies that led people, small groups and individuals, to believe slavery was wrong as much as, as how a small number of those people came together to create a massive movement that actually ended this horrible, horrible institution. Right. And that story starts if you're, if you're looking for what the best origin point for how that. That movement came together. It starts due to events that transpired on a specific slave ship near the end of 1781. Right. We're going to tell the story of a ship called the Zong or the Zorg. You'll.

[James Stout]

There's.

[Robert Evans]

Both names are fine, actually, technically, to use. Have you ever heard of this boat? No, I haven't.

[James Stout]

Actually. I'm excited to learn more about this boat. Love a boat story.

[Robert Evans]

It is a good boat story. There's a very good book.

[Sophie]

James, you're so pure. I love a good boat story.

[Robert Evans]

You're not beating the British allegations, though. I know.

[James Stout]

That's my epigenetic expression of loving boats. Boats. Yeah, it's tea.

[Sophie]

I love a boat story.

[Robert Evans]

Boats.

[James Stout]

Cricket. I didn't give a fuck about cricket.

[Robert Evans]

I've got a friend who comes from the Martha's Vineyard area and I was like, so you're into boats? Right? And she was like, first off, that's really, like. You can't just assume everyone from Martha's Vineyard has a boat. But. Yeah, my dad is building me a boat. It's like, yeah, okay. I knew it.

[James Stout]

Yeah. As it happens. Yeah. No, boats. All kinds of good stories about boats. Pirates.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Boat peoples. Pirates live on boats. Mm. That pirate radio station in the movie. Pirate radio.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Is that on a. Those were British oil rig. Yeah. I mean, it was an oil rig at some point. I forget.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Pirate radio gave us, like, punk music and ska music. Right. Which is, you know.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly, exactly. It's why I am the way I am. Yeah.

[James Stout]

So I'm going to take.

[Robert Evans]

Take my savings and invest in a ska boat cruise. You know, ska and sailing together again at last.

[James Stout]

I've just thought about the little domino meme. And at the bottom end, it's like, you know, somebody starts broadcasting from an oil rig in the Atlantic, and at the top, it's the mighty Bostone to release their memorial song for George Floyd.

[Robert Evans]

Okay. Now I'm no longer making it seem like a bad idea.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Now I'm no longer so into boats. Yeah. Not quite at Pete Hegseth level, but.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, no, not yet. And there's a couple of good books. There's a book called the Zong. And there's another book that came out more recently called the Zorg. I haven't read the first one. I read the Zorg. It's a very good book. It's by Siddharth Kara, and I do recommend it. That'll be a big source for this episode in particular. We'll have some quotes from it elsewhere. But the story of this boat begins with the story of a slaver. A guy named Robert Stanley Stubbs. By 1781, Stubbs was an experienced slave trader, albeit an unlucky one. His first recorded journey was as first mate on a ship called the Black Joke, which he abandoned within months of taking the job due to having a. I'd have abandoned it before when I.

[James Stout]

Found the fucking name out.

[Robert Evans]

Like, yeah, not a great name.

[James Stout]

No.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Jesus.

[James Stout]

They can come up with a better one. All the other words been taken.

[Robert Evans]

Nope, nope, nope. Just the Black Joke.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

He testified in defense of the vessel's owner against the captain during a subsequent lawsuit because the voyage does not go well. And this is what starts his career, because even though he had abandoned the ship because he helps the vessel's owner out by testifying, he gets made captain of the Black Joke the next year, right? So a year later, he's a captain of the boat that he had abandoned. And under his command, the ship takes on 230 enslaved people in Barbados, but. Or, sorry, takes on 230 slaves and tries to take them to Barbados. But it was captured by the French before it could like, you know, it could make any money off of that, right? So these become slaves the French get.

[James Stout]

To profit off of, right?

[Robert Evans]

Two years later, Stubbs captains a slaver that makes it to Virginia. So he has a successful voyage. Finally, his third voyage in 1760, sees him captured yet again by a French privateer. And then he's captured a third time the next year. So, Jesus, out of four, five voyages, he's abandoned ship once, been captured three times, and had one successful trip. Yeah, yeah.

[James Stout]

Stubbsy isn't really delivering on the investment there.

[Robert Evans]

Not the best Stubbsy's. Not the best ever.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. You don't wanna. Just thinking like, you know, you're a young wannabe boat person and then you find out you're gonna be on the Stubbs boat. It's gotta be. Gotta be a rough fucking.

[Robert Evans]

Well, I guess I better brush up on my French. Bonjour.

[James Stout]

Everyone's got like one of those blue and white striped shirts underneath their, like, English red jacket, you know, just for when the moment arises.

[Robert Evans]

Just gotta get ready to change ownership. So given his history, it's not surprising that by 1765, Old Stubsy could not get hired to clean the privies on a sailing vessel. So he takes the money he has had. He does have two successful trips. Trips after this. But his failure to success rate is high enough that he has trouble getting anyone to take a bet on him. So he takes the money that he's made and he starts working as a ships broker in London. And that basically he is buying goods to sell on merchant vessels and then taking his profits and investing in slave ships so that he gets a profit off of like whatever they make when they sell the people that they're going to take. Right. He's not good at this. And he declares bankruptcy in 1771. Now, somewhere in between during this whole period where he's failing at being a captain and then failing at being an investor in slave ships, he starts a family and has six children who he is not in the least bit interested in raising or caring for.

[James Stout]

He sounds like a bit of a bad dude.

[Robert Evans]

He's not a good man. The slave captain thing, that's.

[James Stout]

Yeah, fat. Yeah, fat.

[Sophie]

Stubbsy said, fuck them kids.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, fuck them kids. Now, in order to provide for his family while being as far away from them as possible, at the end of 1779, he applies for a job as a governor with the cmta, or the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa. This is the corporation because slavery is a capitalist enterprise. Right. In the very literal sense of the word. It is a corporation, a chartered corporation that is managing the logistics of the Atlantic slave trade for the British Empire. Right. Because corporations are just more efficient than governments, obviously. Now, we don't know why. As evidence that they're more efficient, they made Stubbs a governor. Great.

[James Stout]

Didn't have background checks.

[Robert Evans]

We don't know why. Yeah, it seems like. I think it's that he had friends in the company and he was a really good ass kisser. One of the things you see from it is that he is very charming to certain kinds of idiot. And I think he just talks his way into by licking boots.

[Sophie]

Are we sure you want to go and are we sure he didn't want to go into government politics?

[Robert Evans]

No, no, not. Not at all. He wants to be a slave governor. He wants to be the governor of one of these slave forts. You know, we talked about Elmina at the start of the episode. There's more by now. And one of them that the British is operating is a fort called Anamaybu on the Gold Coast. Right. And that's what he's governing. He's not governing like a colony, he's governing a slave castle.

[Sophie]

They were like, well, you're really great at abandoning the ship. And he's like, yeah, he's like, you said, I was abandoning the ship, but I was going down with it.

[Robert Evans]

What do you mean?

[Sophie]

Yeah, that was a joke. That was a joke for the girlies. You're welcome. Okay, that went over both of your heads.

[Robert Evans]

It sure did. Sophie. Yeah, no, beautiful. The bit I would make is that they looked at how he's raising his family and they're like, look, Stubbs, you're great at abandoning your kids. Can you abandon a bunch of enslaved African people to a fate worse than death too? Is that something you'd be good at? And Stubbs said, absolutely, yeah.

[James Stout]

Yes I can.

[Sophie]

He's like, honey, where do I sign?

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So this is a perfect job for him. Yeah. He can profit from the slave trade and he has very little personal risk. Right. Theoretically, if he wasn't a giant asshole, he'd have very little personal risk. But as Siddharth Kara writes in the Zorg, things started to go wrong as soon as Stubbs departed England. Quote, from the moment the ship departed England, Captain Lewin reported vexation often arising between me and my passengers, occasioned by malicious information and other bait insinuations. All of which were spread by Robert Stubbs. Stubbs directed much of his ire towards one of his fellow CMTA officials, Stuart Beard. He accused Beard of destroying the ship's stores and of hurting his son by tying his legs together. Lewin investigated the accusations and concluded them to be false and ill grounded. And by the way, he's brought his 12 year old boy with him. That's the son.

[James Stout]

Oh great.

[Robert Evans]

He's accusing the scare of dying. Stubbs then accused Beard of being a pimp at a bawdy house and that he and John Roberts were highway robbers. To top it off, Stubbs accused Roberts of trying to breed a mutiny, which Lewin also found to be an ill designed falsehood. The bickering, discord and wild accusations led Captain Lewin to describe Stubbs as a wicked and treacherous character. Another official on the ship said Stubbs was inclined towards malice and wicked enough to say what he cannot justify. So again, these guys are all slave traders and they're like, this dude's a fucking dick. An asshole. Among the worst people in history. It's like when other billionaires are like, Elon Musk, what a fucking prick.

[James Stout]

What's wrong with that dude?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you really have to be on another level of asshole.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Now, as noted in that above passage, they said he brought his son, his 12 year old boy George on the trip with him and this was not normal. Kara notes that there are no records of any other governor bringing a child that young to Africa with them. In fact, what Stubbs did was so weird that the company puts rules in place to ban any other officials from bringing kids under 15 with them in the future. They're like, what is he doing? A 12 year old.

[Sophie]

Do we know why?

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Yes we do, Sophie. As soon as they reach the fourth, he gives his son George a job working for the fort as like a copywriter. I think he's like keeping track of accounts or something. And he pockets his son's salary. That's what he brought his kid so he could make him. He's kind of enslaving his 12 year old boy.

[James Stout]

What a turd.

[Robert Evans]

He's got one move and it's slavery. Yeah.

[Sophie]

That takes fuck them kids to another level.

[James Stout]

Oh, it's so fucking.

[Robert Evans]

And the thing is, George is not even making much money. He's getting about 80 pounds a year, equivalent to less than $25,000 a year. And fucking Stubbs is a governor. He's making better money than that. He's just like.

[James Stout]

He just likes to do it. He just loves to abuse a child.

[Robert Evans]

The love of the game.

[James Stout]

Jesus.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So it becomes increasingly clear that all this guy cares about is money. He's not interested in his kid and he's not interested in the other human beings around him. And he's going to treat him them like shit. As soon as he arrives. Stubbs accuses his second in command at the fort of theft and fires him. And then promotes his son to the job. Which raises his son's salary to about £120 a year. Which Stubbs pockets.

[James Stout]

Jesus Christ.

[Robert Evans]

Should have brought the other five kids. You'd really be making bank.

[James Stout]

Gotta have them all out there farming. Yeah. Jesus.

[Robert Evans]

Now outside of this, he refuses to do the actual job. He calls in sick whenever he has meetings to attend attend. And he uses public supplies meant to provide for the fort to trade for slaves that he then sells for his personal profit. He does try to do.

[Sophie]

This guy sucks.

[Robert Evans]

He sucks so bad. He's one of the shittiest people we've ever. I know this is like our reverse episodes about we're getting to the heroes, but this guy sucks so hard. He may be the shittiest slave captain of all of the slave captains.

[James Stout]

It's a high bar.

[Robert Evans]

It's a high. They're all shitty. But I think it's the mix of being actually bad at the job and also being willing to casually kind of enslave his own 12 year old son. Yeah. It's uniquely bad for a Mild profit.

[Sophie]

That'll do it.

[Robert Evans]

So when he does, and he does not, like, actually work, he kind of refuses to do his job. He calls in sick whenever he has meetings to attend. So when he does try to do his job, it becomes clear to his subordinates. Subordinates that he can't read or write. In fact, his letters that he sends subordinates are so badly written that they become like a currency. People are trading them in the fort because they're funny.

[James Stout]

That's such a sketch.

[Robert Evans]

Can't even fucking read.

[James Stout]

Jesus, man.

[Robert Evans]

Wow.

[James Stout]

It's probably a good thing. Can you imagine the shit he'd have written down otherwise? Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

If he could. If. Yeah, if he could actually write.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

The local tribe that ran things, because the British have a small presence here, they are mostly reliant upon local allies, as is general the case with the British Empire, to do things. And the local tribe that is largely running things around the fort are the Fonte. Right. And the British slavers are dependent on these people both for the regular supply of slaves and for the raw materials, the food and whatnot that they need to keep the fort operational and to stock the ships. Ships come into port to offload goods that are going to be traded to Africans and to take enslaved Africans. But they need, like, food and water and stuff. Right. And the Fonte are a crucial part of that. And so everyone else who has this job is very nice to these people because they outnumber you and you've given them guns and you're reliant on them for food.

[James Stout]

Can see where this is going, Robert.

[Robert Evans]

It's just a bad idea to piss them off. Stubbs refuses to treat them with respect and for no reason. Like they had. One of the things the fort would do is they would regularly, like, once a week, I think, give out alcohol to these people as like. Like a goodwill thing. Right. To keep. Like, here's some liquor. Keep being our friends, you know? Stubbs just stops this, I think, because he wants to sell the alcohol for himself. And when they complain, he threatens them with armed men. Wow. Just genius stuff.

[James Stout]

Yeah. At least he's very bad at being evil.

[Robert Evans]

He sucks so bad at this.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Now, I think part of what's happening here is that he's so racist, he can't even deal respectfully with the Africans that his entire life and business depends on. Right. Which most of these other slavers are. They're perfectly willing to be nice to these guys. Cause they need them, you know?

[James Stout]

Right. It's just an economic thing.

[Robert Evans]

We've sold Them guns, I can't emphasize enough. We've sold them guns. In October of 1780, Stubbs has a meeting with an emissary of the king of the Ashanti Empire. And this empire is the greatest power in the region. And they are the people upon whom British trade in West Africa is most dependent. Right. You really need these folks in your corner if you're not going to deal with some serious problems. And Stubbs is supposed to preside over the signing of a treaty with the Ashanti. After signing the treaty, it was his job to give gifts that King George III had sent over for the king of the empire. Right.

[Sophie]

Can I guess what happens?

[Robert Evans]

He keeps the gifts, uses them to buy slaves.

[Sophie]

That's exactly what I was like. I was like, nobody's getting those gifts.

[Robert Evans]

He has one move. Yeah. He has one move. Steal things and buy slaves.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And get captured by the French.

[Robert Evans]

I guess this is. Yeah, I guess he has another move. This spells the end of his career as governor. He was deposed violently and robbed of most of his ill gotten possessions. Like the other white people. Don't even wait to get the order to depose him. Like, we gotta get this guy out immediately. Like we're in danger now. He's pissing off like there's so many more of them than us. And again, they have guns, you know. Yeah. So they, they depose him, they lock him in a cell, they take all of his ill gotten gains, which includes a bunch of gold that he'd put together based on his fraudulent transactions, about $105,000 in modern money worth of gold. And Stubbs is furious both that he has been deposed as governor and that they took his money. And he keeps being like, at least give me my money back. And they're like, no, he stole that shit. You stole all of it. Luckily for Stubbs, a slaving vessel named the William arrives at the fort not long after he gets taken into custody. And you know, the crew of the boat goes into the fort and one of the members of the crew is a higher ranking crew member, the ship's surgeon, a guy named Luke Collingswood meets Stubbs. And again, Stubbs just has some sort of charm for a certain kind of person because. Because within it sounds like hours, maybe days of meeting Stubbs, Collingswood is so charmed that he convinces the captain. We gotta take this guy back with us as a passenger to England. Right? Like we gotta put him on the boat with us, you know, get him outta here. He's being unfairly treated. It's A bad situation for him.

[James Stout]

If there's one human being at that time you don't want on your slave vessel, surely it's Stubsy.

[Robert Evans]

Absolutely not. The last man, his batting average is very poor. Yeah. So. And again, he's just gotta. This is gonna be the. He's gotta continue having like the worst.

[James Stout]

Record on a boat.

[Robert Evans]

Now, I think he probably. Stubbs probably promises Collings with some of his money that he's totally gonna get back. I don't know what they say, but Stubbs's plan seems to have been get on this boat, get back to London and then fight in court to have his gold returned and ideally have himself reappointed as governor of the fort, which is totally gonna hit, you know.

[James Stout]

Where's George at this point?

[Robert Evans]

He stole from two kings. Jesus Christ. Yeah.

[James Stout]

What's happened to George? Is little George on the boat? Like.

[Robert Evans]

Great question, James. You would think. You would think. Hell, Stubsy departing the fort where he had been imprisoned, would take his 12 year old with him. He does not. And we don't know.

[Sophie]

He abandoned the 12 year old.

[Robert Evans]

He abandoned. Abandons his 12 year old at the fort. Never sees him again. Never writes about it. Says nothing to anyone about why he's left this kid behind as far as we know. Doesn't even explain it to his wife. Just forgets he has a son. God.

[Sophie]

Cool guy.

[Robert Evans]

I guess I'm optimistic. Maybe George is like, fuck, no, I'm not getting on a boat with you. Yeah, okay.

[James Stout]

Yeah, hopefully George is like, I would love to be on another continent from my father. Ideal for me.

[Robert Evans]

Maybe the guys who overthrew his dad were like, hey, George, we got no issue with you. Do you want to actually get paid for working? Because we can do that. You can just make money to have a job.

[James Stout]

And he's like, what? Really?

[Robert Evans]

Really? That's an option?

[James Stout]

He had to know how that worked.

[Robert Evans]

Shit. My dad told me it was illegal for kids to make money.

[James Stout]

Goes on an apology tour and. Yeah, recover Stubbs name, maybe.

[Robert Evans]

So elsewhere, kind of at the same period of time, Stubbs is being deposed as governor. A British privateer, right, because the British are fighting the Dutch. They've got a war going on of some sort. And, you know, one of the things that happens is they start. The government starts giving, you know, licenses to privateers, which are private boats that are basically pirates that are endorsed by the government. Right. And one of these privateers in the area succeeds in capturing a couple of different Dutch vessels around the same time. These are Dutch, like Slaving ships mostly. And one of them is a slave ship called the Zong or the Zorg. Depending on the source. You'll see a bunch of different names attributed to this boat. I think the Zong is the one you generally see. And I think that's what the British called it once they took it over. The Zorq. Z O R Q U E is also common, but Siddhartha uses the Zorg, which I think is its original name. So that's what I'll generally be calling it throughout these episodes. Even though again, you're not wrong calling it the Zong. And the name Zorg itself is Dutch. It means care. I don't know why that name was picked for a slave. Seems like not a well fitting name, but okay. The owner of the William, so this gets taken by privateers and this privateer with all these Dutch ships he's captured in tow, kind of shows up at the port when the William is at port taking on slaves. And the owner of the William, who's a representative of this syndicate, the Gregson Syndicate. So the Gregson Syndicate is basically a major slave owning trading company. Right. And the captain of the boat is like, well, I've got some petty cash here. If I buy the Zorg at auction, I can take even more slaves back and basically double the profitability of this voyage. And I'll just throw some of my crew, I'll put a skeleton crew on the Zorg from the wild William and we can take even more enslaved people back. Right. So that's what happens. He buys the Zorg at auction. It was loaded with 244 people, like enslaved people in the hold at the time that they buy it. And because they don't have that many sailors, they're kind of just sticking a minimal crew on it. So the Zorg is not going to be crewed by enough people. Right. Like it's not an ideal load. And they don't have like. Like for whatever reason there is a really. The guy who becomes the first mate on the Zorg is a really experienced sailor who's like an excellent navigator and knows how to do everything you'd want in a captain. But the captain of the William makes Luke Collingswood the ship's surgeon, the captain of the Zorg.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

We don't know why Collingswood is not. He's not good at this. He's actually going to be terrible at this. And there's no reason to think he would have been good at this. He's a doctor. Yeah. He doesn't Know how to navigate for shit. He's not particularly good at leadership. You know, he's good at cutting into people, you know.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

I don't even think he's a very good doctor. Right. And he's never captained a vessel before. And again, the first mate that he's put with on this skeleton crew is an experienced seaman and navigator. But the two have a falling out. Collingswood does not get along with this guy. And he's confined to quarters for a sizable chunk of the truck journey to make. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Put the guy who knows how to find stuff in the hole.

[James Stout]

Yeah, we'll work it out.

[Robert Evans]

To make matters worse, before leaving the coast of Africa to sail for Jamaica, the Zorg takes on even more enslaved people. The boat was meant to hold a maximum of 240 slaves in the hold. 442 are crammed into the lightless, reeking hold as they begin their journey. Right. So this is just, just everything done to create a worst case scenario. Skeleton crew up top. Captain doesn't know what he's doing. Only skilled navigators locked in his room. Twice as many people in the hold as you're supposed to have. So everyone's gonna be getting sick. There's not gonna be enough food and water. Right. Great. Good decisions.

[Sophie]

Illness is gonna be everywhere.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Maybe too heavy also, like it's sitting too low in the water or whatever.

[Robert Evans]

Maybe too heavy. It's gotta be slow. The ship encounters bad weather immediately. Illness spreads rampantly throughout the crew and the enslaved people in the hold. Collingswood very quickly gets sick. He's going to die ultimately of this. And he is deliriously ill most of the journey. And he's still captain. So he's just fucking up navigating because he's like hallucinating and puking and shitting himself to death while he's trying to like work a sextant and figure out longitude or whatever.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Now, because he's fucking up, the ship keeps getting lost. And you know, the weather being bad hurts with that. So they're not getting into Jamaica. Like it takes months longer than it should have taken. And because there's twice as many people on board as there should, the ship runs out of its stock of dried citrus. Right. Which is what stops you from getting scurvy. So everyone starts getting scurvy, including the sailors who are supposed to be manning the ship. Ship, right.

[James Stout]

Perfect.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. By November, Collingswood is so ill that he has to step down from command of the vessel. And instead of again appointing the Guy who knows how to sail to run a boat. He makes Robert Stubbs the captain.

[James Stout]

Stubbs is back. Fucking of course he is.

[Robert Evans]

He's back in charge.

[James Stout]

He's like a boomerang.

[Robert Evans]

So the first mate, Kelsall probes and again, one of the last command decisions Collingswood makes is he forces Kelsall to be confined. Confined to quarters. And also orders him to stop updating his logbook. Which suggests that he and he and like Stubbs and Collingswood don't want a record of what's going to happen next. Which suggests that they're kind of pre planning what's going to happen. Actually, we don't really know if that's the case. But it's a weird order to give Kelsall right now. For weeks, the Zorg sails without a real captain, going increasingly off course as the water supplies dwell, dwindle. Things get so bad that they have to free Kelsall from confinement because they're like someone who knows what they're doing. We're gonna die. We're literally gonna die. And the crew starts to panic that they're going to run out of water. Right now they're not actually out of water. They're not even really that on the verge of being out of water. But they have no idea where they are. And water supplies are low, right. And they kind of realize they've got a little less than they thought they had. And so they start panicking and a decision is made. Made to stretch their supplies by throwing dozens of enslaved passengers into the ocean. So if you're thinking about this the way they're thinking about this, these people are money. And the women and children are worth less at market than the men. And they're less likely to survive the journey anyway.

[Sophie]

Yeah, they're throwing enslaved women and children into the ocean to die a horrific drowning death.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's, that's their immediate. That's their first plan, is to break into this chunk of the hold where they keep the women and children and grab a bunch of them and throw them into the sea. Per Kara's book, the Zorg quote, the cabin windows on a typical frigate like the Zorg were no larger than 5 to 6 square feet. Once the woman slave realized she was being thrown out, she would have resisted. She could pull her body weight down, plant her feet and hands against the window frame, bite her captors or scream. To force a resistant adult female through a small cabin window would have required a great deal of violence. It is possible that Stubbs Collingwood Kelsall and the crew of the Zorg first stabbed her with a cutlass or punched and kicked her, cracked her bones or otherwise beat her into submission before forcing her through the window. The crew members returned to the slavehold, selected another woman and threw her from the same cabin window. Next was a child. Another woman. Another child. Another woman. One by one, the crew picked 55 women and children and threw them a lot of singly through the cabin windows into the sea and drowned.

[Sophie]

That's horrific.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. One of the, one of the. I mean one of the women and one of the children they throw. It is a newborn baby who was born on the vessel. They throw her and her mom into the sea and. Yeah, I mean it's just a nightmare. The Zorg ultimately docks in Jamaica on December 22, 1780. Between 224 and 240 of the more than 400 enslaved Africans aboard had died. 62 from sickness during the journey. And between 123 and 133 thrown overboard. 10 more and these were men threw themselves overboard committing suicide. Maybe it was in solidarity with the people who were being murdered. Maybe it was to spare themselves more agony, we don't know. But they, they like 10 people actually just kill themselves. Yeah, right. Which hard to like, yeah, you're in a nightmare. Like, yeah, there's no good option for you here. Right. Like, and these you. It's become clear to you when you see them throwing babies into the water, whoever these people are, they're monsters. Like, maybe any death is better than spending any amount of time with demons like this. Right? Like, yeah.

[James Stout]

With the knowledge that they're just going to keep doing.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. And that you have to. That whatever you're doing is benefiting these fucking monsters. Right?

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

After the within like days of landing in Jamaica, Luke Collingwood dies. But Robert Stubbs survives. And he makes his way back to London where he brings the tale of what had happened. Stubbsy, he's like a fucking cockroach.

[James Stout]

You can't kill him.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. And he takes the tale of what had happened to the boat to the owner of the syndicate that had employed them, William Gregson. And basically Stubbs doesn't get rich off this journey because he's not part of the crew. Right, Right. But he sees this like, okay, and this has kind of happened to him before. Right. He testified on behalf of the owner that slave should be got made captain. So he goes to the owner of the syndicate that owns the boat and he's like, hey, I have an idea. And I think the idea is if this works out, I get a cut of it and a job. Right. Like you're gonna help me, you know, get back in. Good. And start making money off the slave trade again. Right. And the deal that he talks out is. So I need to set something up. Do you know where insurance comes from, James? As an industry?

[James Stout]

Boats.

[Robert Evans]

Slavery. Oh, okay. Specifically slavery. Cool. Yeah. Lloyd's of London, which started as a coffee house, really gets going as a business, insuring slave ships right? Now, boats in general, that is a big part of insurance, but insuring the slave trade is a huge part of the birth of insurance as an industry.

[James Stout]

Right, perfect.

[Robert Evans]

Because it's an expensive proposition, right? You're filling this boat up, you're buying all of the goods to trade for these people. And if they all get captured or the boat sinks, you're out of shitload of money. Right? So the insurance industry provides a degree of security to the owners of slave syndicates like Gregson. Now, some deaths are expected as a result of the brutality of the middle passage, right? You're not gonna get money just because. Because some slaves die on the boat because it's assumed that they will. Right? You're jamming them in there. Illness is gonna. Some crew are going to die, right? But catastrophes like a boat sinking in a storm or a slave uprising are ensured. And so Stubbs comes back and is like, hey, we had to kill about 130 of these people, but we had to kill them because of an act of the sea, an act of God, basically. Because, like, whoa, this disaster hit us and we were gonna run out of water. We had no option but to throw them overboard. Board. That means their deaths are payable. Like your insurance company owes you for them, Right? Because it was an unavoidable necessity. So, yeah, sure, yeah, that's Stubbs. Move. And Gregson's like, all right, yeah, I'll try to make more money. And so he puts in a claim for the value of these people. I think he values them at about 30 pounds each. These people who were murdered, the insurers fight back, not because they're good people, because they don't wanna pay out any money. And there's a court case over this, Gregson v. Gilbert, right? Over whether or not this really was basically an act of God that is covered by insurance or if they didn't need to kill these people, and thus it shouldn't be covered. And the court in this case finds for the Gregson Syndicate, it rules that enslaved people are property, that this was an act of God, effectively. And that the insurance company has to compensate the syndicate for their loss. And that's the first court case. It is the fallout from this court case that is going to inspire the birth of the organized abolitionist movement in England. Right. This is. I mean, really. I mean, the abolitionist movement in the US owes a lot to what happens in the wake of this horrifying case. Right. So we're gonna talk about all that and more in parts two and three. James, how you feeling?

[James Stout]

Well, not as Christmassy as I expected. Coming on the Happy Nice Guy Christmas episode.

[Robert Evans]

There's good guys in the other parts.

[James Stout]

Okay, good. I'm glad to hear that. Sorry. Yeah. Good to talk about the way that British people have covered themselves in glory throughout history.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Well, we'll get to some better British representation in part two. You get a book, though, James, speaking of British representation.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's not a book about British people particularly.

[Robert Evans]

I am in it.

[James Stout]

It so is Robert. But yeah, I've written a book about anarchists at war from Myanmar, Rojava and the Spanish Civil War. A bit less depressing than this episode was. Like, you're gonna find some. Some really inspiring people who I think have done really beautiful things.

[Sophie]

What's it called?

[James Stout]

It is good call, Sophie. I'm not very good at this. It's called against the State. You can see it there. Kind of doesn't do well. Doesn't do well on the camera, does it?

[Sophie]

The pre order link will be in our episode description.

[James Stout]

Just go and click that.

[Robert Evans]

It's quite reasonable.

[James Stout]

It's quite affordable right now. I think it's $18. So if you, if you buy it now, it will arrive in late January. It's released on the 26th of January. So maybe you'll forget and it will be a nice little surprise for you at a time when otherwise, you know, the nights are long and it's cold and raining all the time.

[Robert Evans]

Excellent. Excellent. Well, everybody, we'll see you for part two. Goodbye.

[Sophie]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or.

[Sophia Bush]

Wherever you get your podcasts.

[Sophie]

Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube.

[Robert Evans]

New episodes every Wednesday and Friday.

[Sophie]

Subscribe to our channel YouTube.com behindthebastards.

[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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