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It rained while captives drowned
A letter about murder
The first trial ended with the insurers ordered to pay, but one person in the room could not stop thinking about murder. Stubbs had just described 130 people thrown overboard to drown, and the court had discussed only compensation. That person wrote an anonymous letter to London's largest newspaper asking why nobody had been charged.
Olaudah Equiano, a former slave living in London who had bought his own freedom, carried the letter to Granville Sharp, who had spent two decades building a legal case against slavery. Sharp urged a motion for a retrial and hired someone to take down the hearing in shorthand, which is why a transcript exists.
The retrial
This time the barristers argued something new in a Western court: the Africans had the same right to water and to life as the ship's crew. Chief Justice Mansfield had already summed up the case as no different from horses thrown overboard, which are property, so nobody speaks of murder. Stubbs was again the only witness. The barrister kept him talking until he admitted that it rained in the middle of the drownings.
Who wrote the letter
No one knew who wrote that letter for 240 years. Siddharth Kara, who wrote a book on the ship, traced it to James Ramsay, an abolitionist who had been to the Caribbean.
How did Equiano buy his own freedom?
Equiano was enslaved as a child and later sold to Robert King, a Quaker merchant in the Caribbean. His 1789 autobiography describes how he saved money by trading small goods between ports while working on King's ships. King agreed to sell him his freedom for 40 pounds, and Equiano paid it in 1766. The book went through multiple editions in his lifetime and became a bestseller in Britain.
Why did a shorthand writer matter in court?
Courts in the 1780s kept no official verbatim record, and published reports usually rested on a lawyer's handwritten notes. A shorthand writer could capture testimony word for word at speaking speed. Thomas Gurney had been recording Old Bailey trials in shorthand since 1748, and his family kept that work for generations. The method gave later readers the exact exchange between barrister and witness.
How did the Somerset case change English law?
In 1772 Lord Mansfield ruled on James Somerset, an enslaved man whom his owner had brought to England and planned to ship to Jamaica. Sharp had organized the legal effort on Somerset's behalf. Mansfield held that the owner could not forcibly remove Somerset from England, because no positive law there supported such an act. The ruling was narrow, and slavery stayed legal across the British colonies.
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