01 MANY GOLDEN DREAMS When peoplr dream of riches, their imaginations follow the shape of the economy. As the twentieth century ended, for instance, dot-com billionaires inspired envy, for it was their private jets that waited on the tarmac at Aspen and Sun Valley. In late-nineteenth-century America, railroads seemed the quickest path to wealth, for it was their robber-baron owners whose luxurious private cars sat on sidings at resorts like Newport. In the England of the eighteenth century, the luxury vehicles were the carriages of Caribbean sugar planters, and the imagined road to riches led through the cane fields of the New World. At his favorite seaside resort of Weymouth, the story goes, King George III once encountered an absentee owner of a Jamaican plantation whose coach and liveried outriders were even more resplendent than his own. “Sugar, sugar, eh?” the King exclaimed. “All that sugar!”

The pursuit of wealth from the West Indian plantations, or from the ships that supplied them with slaves and brought their produce back to Britain, shaped the lives of many a young Englishman. Few have left us a more vivid record of this quest than John Newton. Born in London in 1725, he was only eleven years old when his sea captain father first took him on a voyage. As a crewman on his father’s ship, Newton made trips to ports in England, Holland, Spain, and Portugal. But Captain Newton had bigger plans for him. When he was sev enteen, Newton wrote in his memoirs, “a merchant in Liverpool, an intimate friend of my father’s . . . proposed to send me for some years to Jamaica, and to charge himself with the care of my future fortune.” However, a week before he was to embark, while visiting relatives in Kent, Newton fell in love with their daughter, Mary Catlett. “None of the scenes of misery and wickedness I afterwards experienced,” he wrote, “ever banished her a single hour . . . from my waking thoughts.” He stayed on so long that the ship for Jamaica sailed without him. Newton’s father, furious at the opportunity lost, found his son a seaman’s berth under a fellow captain, on a voyage to the Mediterranean. Returning to England, Newton again visited Mary in Kent, but this time, soon after departing his beloved’s house in a daze, he suffered the fate feared by every young man living near England’s seaports: he was seized by a naval press gang. Britain and France, Europe’s two most powerful nations, were preparing for one of their periodic wars, five of which they would fight in the eighteenth century. And the Royal Navy, as usual, was manning its ships by sending armed gangs through the streets to kidnap all the sailors they could find.

Newton spent the next year aboard the HMS Harwich, braving storms, battling with the French, and writing shy, mournful love letters to Mary. One, dated January , , “One in the morning,” reads: “I am just now come from performing a Watch of four hours, which I have spent with great satisfaction, by the force of supposing myself in your Company. . . . This Voyage . . . I seriously believe will either make or marr me: Its true I hope to succeed; but . . . I shall not value Riches but for the opportunity of laying them at your feet . . . for I am certain that I could enjoy them with no Relish without you.” To his great dismay, Newton found out that the Harwich was scheduled for a five-year patrol in the Far East. While the ship was anchored at Plymouth, the lovesick young man deserted. He was captured two days later, marched back to his ship, and put in irons. Tied to a wooden grating on the deck, he was flogged before all the crew. Then the ship set sail, part of a convoy of more than a hundred vessels. And a grim passage it was, especially for the lowest-ranking sailors, victims of the press gang, whose hammocks were slung in cramped and airless quarters below decks. First a storm blew two ships onto the rocks of the English coast with great loss of life; then one collided with another “and carried away the Foremast while  of their best men were furling the Foretopsail who all perished.” Added to nature’s violence was the navy’s: a diary kept by another Harwich sailor lists more floggings, including that of one man who was “flogged round the fleet”given forty lashes for starters, then rowed to receive twenty more in front of each navy ship in sight, as an example to all. Another Harwich seaman was forced to run the gauntletthree circuits of the deck, receiving the blows or lashes of his fellow sailors “for committing sodomy with a sheep.”

When the Harwich stopped for supplies at the island of Madeira, Newton spied an unexpected opportunity. “I . . . saw a man putting his clothes into a boat, who told me he was going to leave us.” The Harwich was exchanging sailors with a “Guineaman,” a slave-trading vessel bound for Africa; its captain, as it happened, was a friend of his father. Captains often traded sailors to acquire men with a particular skill or to get rid of troublemakers. Newton begged to be included in the trade, and, to his joy, he was. A half hour later, a seaman from the Guineaman’s crew, no doubt horrified, found himself in Newton’s place on the way to five years in the Far East. The delighted Newton, who in a single year had been kidnapped, chained, flogged, shot at in battle, and separated from the woman he loved, was now miraculously taking his first step into the flourishing Atlantic slave economy. He was nineteen years old.

Although the expanding British Empire already had outposts in India and its thirteen colonies on the east coast of North America, its greatest wealth lay in the Caribbean sugar plantations. These were supplied with slaves by ships like the one Newton had just boarded, and the chance to be part of this trade seemed to offer riches to even the humblest Englishman. The Atlantic slave trade had first touched British life in , when the mariner John Lok had sailed back from West Africa carrying “certaine blacke slaves, whereof some were tall and strong men.” Two centuries later, British ships dominated the insatiable market for slaves in the Americas, supplying African captives to French, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese colonies as well as to Britain’s own. In peak years, they carried some forty thousand chained men, women, and child slaves across the Atlanticas many as those carried by the slave ships of all other countries combined. “What a glorious and advantageous trade this is,” wrote one man who worked for a firm of slave merchants. “. . . It is the hinge on which all the trade of this globe moves.” Another trader believed the transport of slaves was “the foundation of our commerce, the support of our colonies, the life of our navigation, and first cause of our national industry and riches.” The thought that anyone might ever want to ban this lucrative business was inconceivable.

Sailors like Newton dreamt of winning their fortunes, but the big money was made by ship owners who often never left England. We have detailed records, for example, of seventy-four slave voyages in which the Liverpool merchant William Davenport invested. His overall rate of profit was . percent. However, two voyages by his ship Hawke, in the dicey war years of  and when prices soared for slaves who could be slipped past French and American warships to Caribbean buyersnetted returns of . and  percent. Successes are what pass into legend, so the talk of the Liverpool docks and pubs was of bonanza voyages like the Hawke’s, not of those where ships went down, or lost their crews to malaria and yellow fever, or were captured by French privateers (the fate of the Hawke, as it happened, on its next voyage).

Besides the hope of profits, the slave trade had other allures. To make a slave voyage was to be an entrepreneur. Most officers, the ship’s doctor, and sometimes valued senior crewmen like the carpenter got the right to carry a “privilege slave” of their own, whom they could buy in Africa and sell in the New World, pocketing the income. Captains might carry as many as four privilege slaves. Sometimes an officer would bring one home to England as a personal servant, a badge of one’s travels to far-off places and a great conversation piece in a country where slaves were rare. Adding to the trade’s entrepreneurial flavor, captains thousands of miles away from their home ports had considerable discretion over where in Africa they bought slaves and where in the Americas they sold them, and their fortunes rode on these decisions.

The slave trade promised wealth, independence, and excitement in a way that carrying cargo on a fixed route back and forth across the English Channel never could. To seafaring young Englishmen, it had the aura that their counterparts in the next century would find in a gold rush. The trade was even literally touched with gold, for the guinea coin, in Newton’s youth worth about $ in today’s money, took its name from the Guinea coast of Africa and was first minted from African gold; with their stylish cocked hats, slave captains wore laced coats with gold or silver buttons and gold buckles on their shoes.

Finally, the slave economy’s profits were a path to respectability. John Gladstone, a member of Parliament and the father of a future prime minister, owned Caribbean sugar and coffee estates with well over a thousand slaves. The cathedral-like library of All Souls College, Oxford, was financed by profits from a slave plantation in Barbados. Family slave estates in Jamaica paid for the elegant house on Wimpole Street where Elizabeth Barrett would be courted by Robert Browning. William Beckford, with a vast fortune based on slave-grown Jamaican sugar, hosted the most sumptuous banquets since Henry VIII and hired Mozart to give his son piano lessons. Edward Colston, M.P., was the best-known philanthropist in Bristol: vestryman of his church, lavish benefactor of schools, poorhouses, hospitals, and retired seamen, creator of an endowment that paid for sermons on specified subjects to be preached annually at several churches and the city jail. Colston proudly declared that “every helpless widow is my wife and her distressed orphans my children.” A large bronze statue of him still overlooks Bristol’s Colston Avenue, and it was not until one night in  that someone scrawled on its base the name of one of the professions in which he made his fortune:

In its quest for human cargo, the ship John Newton had joined sailed south, along the great western shoulder of Africa that bulges into the Atlantic. Below the Sahara Desert, where the coast starts to curve inward, slaving territory began. It was on this long expanse, stretching from what is Senegal to Nigeria today, that British ships gathered most of their slaves. The collecting was slow and laborious, for seldom could a captain come anywhere near filling his ship in one spot. In- stead, he haggled for two or three slaves here, three or four there, a dozen somewhere else, during what averaged three to four months of sailing back and forth along the coast.

The Atlantic slave trade depended on the fact that most of the societies of Africachiefdoms and kingdoms large and small, even groups of nomadshad their own systems of slavery. People were enslaved as punishment for crimes, as payment for a debt, or, most commonly of all, as prisoners of war. Slaves were often less important as labor than as prized status objects. This had its horrific side when they were killed in human sacrifice rituals, but it meant that African slave systems were in other ways sometimes less harsh than those that would come into being in the Americas: some slaves could earn their freedom in a generation or two, and sometimes could intermarry with free people. But they were still slaves. Once European ships started cruising the African coast offering all kinds of tempting goods for slaves, kings and chiefs began selling their human property to African dealers who roamed far into the interior. Groups of captives, ranging from a few dozen to six or eight hundred, were force-marched to the coast, the prisoners’ hands bound behind their backs, their necks connected by wooden yokes. Along the coast itself, a scattering of whites, blacks, and mulattos worked as middlemen for the Atlantic trade. They bought slaves from these traveling dealers or nearby African chiefs, held them until a ship appeared, and sold them to a European or American captain. As time went on, ships occasionally tried to cut prices by bypassing the middlemen and sending their own small boats up rivers to buy slaves directly from inland chiefs. Captains paid for slaves with everything from cloth, glass beads, iron bars, and pots and pans, to gunpowder and musketsthe beginning of the long history of the world’s North supplying arms to its South.

As his ship filled with slaves, the young Newton quickly took sexual advantage of the women. He does not give us the details, but his diary mentions his “brutish lusts.” In the memoirs he wrote twenty years afterwards, he refers to a Bible passage about adultery and then adds, “I was exceedingly vile indeed. . . . I . . . sinned with a high hand.” Only still later in his life did he finally admit that sex on slave vessels amounted to rape: “When the women and girls are taken on board a ship, naked, trembling, terrified . . . they are often exposed to the wanton rudeness of white savages. . . . The prey is divided, upon the spot. . . . Resistance or refusal, would be utterly in vain.” Wild and rambunctious, Newton antagonized his fellow crewmen and taunted his new captain: “I made a song, in which I ridiculed his ship, his designs, and his person, and soon taught it to the whole ship’s company.” Finally, the angry captain threatened to trade him back to the navy, “and this, from what I had known already, was more dreadful to me than death. To avoid it, I determined to remain in Africa; and amused myself with many golden dreams that here I should find an opportunity of improving my fortune.”

At this point the ship was most of the way down the West African bulge, off Sierra Leone, a stretch of coastline much frequented by European slave captains. Its slaves, long experienced in cultivating rice in the coastal swampland, fetched good prices from landowners establishing rice plantations in the American South. Newton and his captain were eager to be rid of each other. The ship dropped him on an island where he went to work for a white slave trader whose African concubine was his business partner. With his youthful gift for getting at loggerheads with everyone, Newton quickly fell out with them both. He then became severely ill with what was probably malaria. Setting off on a business trip, the trader left Newton in the care of his concubine, who seemed to relish the rare chance to mistreat a white man. “I had sometimes not a little difficulty to procure a draught of cold water when burning with a fever,” he later recalled. “My bed was a mat spread upon a board or chest, and a log of wood my pillow. . . . She lived in plenty herself, but hardly allowed me sufficient to sustain life, except now and then . . . she would send me victuals in her own plate after she had dined. . . . Once, I well remember, I was called to receive this bounty from her own hand; but being exceedingly weak and feeble, I dropped the plate. Those who live in plenty can hardly conceive how this loss touched me; but she had the cruelty to laugh at my disappointment; and though the table was covered with dishes . . . she refused to give me any more.” He crept out at night to search for edible roots, which he pulled up and ate raw, though they made him sick. Sometimes “even . . . slaves in the chain . . . secretly brought me victuals (for they durst not be seen to do it) from their own slender pittance.”

Later, the trader became convinced Newton was cheating him, and for a time clapped him in irons. Newton always considered this period of humiliation and captivity the low point of his life. But neither at the time nor when he wrote his memoirs nearly twenty years later did he identify in the slightest with the “slaves in the chain” who had risked punishment to share their meager rations with him. His main aim was to find a job with another trading post, in this part of the world where the main commodity sold was human beings. At last he succeeded, and before long he “had a share in the management. . . . Business flourished.”

One day in  the sails of a merchant vessel appeared over the horizon. The ship dropped anchor, attracted by the column of smoke from the trading post that indicated goods for sale. The vessel’s owner, a Liverpool merchant named Joseph Manesty, was a friend of Newton’s father and had told the captain to keep an eye out for young John on the African coast and to try to bring him home. Newton was at first reluctant to leave his promising job, but was eventually convinced to do so by the hope of seeing Mary Catlett again and a story the captain concocted about an unexpected inheritance waiting for him. It was many months, however, before the ship finished trading in Africa and headed back to England. During that time, Newton continued to be, he wrote later, deep in the grip of sin. But the sin that loomed largest in his mindand nothing says more of how morally invisible was slavery in his worldwas that of blasphemy. “My whole life . . . was a course of most horrid impiety and profaneness. I know not that I have ever since met so daring a blasphemer: not content with common oaths and imprecations, I daily invented new ones.”

Approaching the British Isles on the final leg of its voyage home, the ship encountered a severe North Atlantic gale. “I . . . was awaked from a sound sleep by the force of a violent sea, which broke on board us. So much of it came down below as filled the cabin I lay in with water. This alarm was followed by a cry from the deck, that the ship was going down.” A sailor who went up the ladder to the deck just ahead of Newton was washed overboard. All seemed lost. “I expected that every time the vessel descended into the sea, she would rise no more.” The half-frozen, exhausted sailors frantically worked the pumps, bailed with buckets, and jammed clothes and bedding into cracks in the hull. The storm blew most of the sails away, smashed barrels of food to pieces, and swept all of the ship’s pigs, sheep, and chickens over the side. Newton pumped for nine hours straight, until he could do no more. Then he cried out, “Lord have mercy on us.” Soon after, the storm abated, as storms will do. When the battered ship limped into the nearest port, its remaining sails stained by seawater, its sailors’ rations reduced to small portions of salted cod, Newton remembered his desperate appeal and saw “the hand of God in our danger and deliverance. . . . The Lord had wrought a marvellous thing; I was no longer an infidel; I heartily renounced my former profaneness. . . . I was quite freed from the habit of swearing.” On shore, he began going to church, sometimes twice a day. God had saved him, he felt, and his promising career in the slave trade had only just begun.

The following year, , still in search of his fortune, Newton went to sea in another of Joseph Manesty’s vessels. This time he was first mate. “My business in this voyage, while upon the Coast, was to sail from place to place in the long-boat to purchase slaves. . . . sometimes venturing in a little canoe thro Seas like Mountains, sometimes traveling thro the woods, often in danger from the wild beasts and much oftner from the more wild Inhabitants.” But in a letter home he wrote, “Notwithstanding what I have said in relation to the difficulties I meet with here, I assure you I never was so happy in my life.” He abstained from alcohol and meat, feeling that this allowed him to win “mastery over the fleshly appetites.”

While on the African coast, Newton helped suppress a shipboard slave rebellion that took the lives of one crew member and several slaves. Then came the ocean crossing. The Mayflower had carried  passengers on its voyage to New England; Newton’s ship was smaller, but held  slaves,  of whom died at sea. Given the suffocating conditions, the limited and fetid water, and the way sick slaves often had to lie in their own excrement, it is surprising the death rate was not higher. To imagine the slow passage across the Atlantic in a typical square-rigged slave ship, we must picture not only the slaves packed together in rows, each with less floor space than would be taken by a coffin, on a deck dimly lit by a swinging lantern or two at night and forever lurching up and down over the waves, but all of them, plus captain, officers, and crew, jammed for months into a vessel less than one hundred feet long.

When his ship docked at Charleston (then Charles Town), South Carolina, to sell its slaves, Newton walked the brick and cobblestone streets to attend church faithfully, and “almost every day, when business would permit,” went into the woods to pray. On his return to England, his good prospects now established, he screwed up his courage and proposed to Mary Catlett. “I sat stupid and speechless for some minutes. . . . My heart was so full, it beat and trembled to that degree, that I knew not how to get a word out.” They were married in .

Over the next four years, now promoted to captain, Newton made three more triangle voyages, as they were called, from Liverpool to Africa to the West Indies and back. This route, carrying trading goods to Africa, then slaves to the Caribbean or North America, and then sugar, coffee, cotton, rice, and rum back to Europe, was profitable because vessels could carry cargo on each leg. And the triangle, it seemed, was fatally favored by nature itself, for North Atlantic currents flow clockwise. The Canary Current sped ships from Europe south along Africa’s Sahara coast; then the North Equatorial Current carried them and their slave cargoes to the Caribbean; and from there back towards England flowed the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Current. The powerful Gulf Stream could add up to  miles a day to a ship’s speed. For a good part of the year, winds over much of this same route blew clockwise as well.

On his voyages Newton kept a detailed log, punctuated with occasional sketches, that fills  pages of a large, leather-bound book; wrote a diary of his spiritual life; and, with every passing ship headed for England, sent voluminous love letters to his wife. He penned everything in a clear script with graceful curls on the capital letters, remarkably neat for being written on a rolling and pitching ship. As significant for what they omit as for what they say, these writings are the widest window we have into the life and mind of a man in the African slave trade.

Much of Newton’s journal is the stuff of all eighteenth-century life at sea: the notes of a mariner whose survival depends on wind, calm, storm, the state of rigging, and water supply. He records tides and fathoms, compass courses and speed in knots, and the constant scramble of sending hands aloft to set sails. He labors at the perennial nautical problem of guessing how far east or west he is, since at this time sailors out of sight of land had no accurate way of measuring longitude. Several times, crossing paths with other captains in mid- Atlantic, he stops to hail them, draw up alongside, and compare longitude estimates.

But a slave captain was not just a seafarer; he was also a speculator in a high-risk business. To make money, he had to buy low in Africa and sell high in the West Indies. The part of each triangle voyage along the coast of Africa was really where a captain’s fortune was made or lost. Most of what Newton records is the daily business of exchanging muskets, rum, tobacco, and other goods for slaves, all of whom were then branded JM with a red-hot iron, to show that they now belonged to Joseph Manesty.

Competition was brisk; there might be well over a hundred ships simultaneously cruising the coast, and demand was always greater than supply. Once it took Newton eight long months to fill his vessel. From the captain’s point of view, it was a series of tricky calculations. If it took you too long to assemble a full load of slaves, the earlier batches, imprisoned below decks in the hot, humid climate, would start to die of disease and despair. But if you left for the West Indies before the ship was “fully slaved,” you wouldn’t turn a profit. If you arrived in the Caribbean in December, as the sugar harvest began, slave prices would be higherbut the last three months of the year had the worst sailing weather for crossing the Atlantic. In his logbook, Newton constantly weighs these pressures of time, mortality, and profits. When he meets one slave ship with a better supply of trading goods, he vows to avoid its path in the future, because “Captain Ellis gets all the trade that is stirring here. . . . Believe I have lost the purchase of more than  slaves for want of the all commanding articles of beer and cyder.” When African or mulatto dealers show him slaves, he evaluates them as dispassionately as if they were livestock. “Yellow Will brought me a woman slave, but being long breasted and ill made, refused her, and made him take her on shoar again.”

Not long into each stay on the African coast the slaves he has already bought begin to die. “This day buried a fine woman slave, No. , having been ailing some time . . . she was taken with a lethargick disorder, which they seldom recover from. Scraped the rooms, then smoked the ship with tar, tobacco and brimstone [sulfur] for  hours, afterwards washed with vinegar.” Seamen believed “smoking” the ship prevented disease; we can only imagine how the sulfur, tar, and vinegar increased the stench of a poorly ventilated hold jammed with sweating slaves. The smoking was little help against one of the biggest killers, the “bloody flux,” or dysentery. “Sent a girl, ill of the flux (No. ) on shoar . . . not so much in hopes of recovery (for I fear she is past it), as to free the ship of a nuisance. . . . This morning buryed a woman slave (No. ). Know not what to say she died of for she has not been properly alive since she first came on board.”

Death also ravaged Newton’s crew, who had no immunities to tropical diseases. It was on these white sailors and officers that Africa took its revenge. In Newton’s logbook, slaves, lesser creatures without Christian souls and thus not destined for the next world, “die” or are simply “buryed.” But when he speaks of whites, they “depart this life.” “A little before midnight, departed this life Mr John Bridson, my chief mate, after sustaining the most violent fever I have ever seen  days.” On his first trip as captain, Newton left England with a crew of thirty; seven died during the triangle voyage, a higher death rate than among the slaves.

Dozens of entries in Newton’s logbook record the meting out of punishments to both crew and slaves. Lovestruck as he might be by his wife, at sea Newton’s voice is that of a tough, suspicious man for whom lashing unruly sailors is routine. When one crew-man is caught stealing brandy, Newton “gave him a smart dozen.” Sometimes he found that wielding the cat-o’-nine-tails freely was not enough: “In the afternoon while we were off the deck, William Cooney seduced a woman slave down into the room and lay with her brutelike in view of the whole quarter deck, for which I put him in irons.” And when a sailor took a swing at another crew member with a sledgehammer, Newton put him “in hand cuffs and stapled him down to the deck.” On another voyage, he discovered “a conspiracy amongst my own people to turn pirates, and take the ship from me.” He put the rebels in irons, one in “double irons,” and as he so often did, praised God for saving him. “I cannot but acknowledge a visible interposition of Divine Providence.”

Every captain had to be constantly on the lookout for uprisings by desperate slaves, particularly when still on the African coast. There were over three hundred documented revolts on Atlantic slave ships, and undoubtedly many more on vessels whose logbooks have been lost or whose captains thought rebellions too commonplace to bother recording. In one famous case some female slaves on the Thomas, bound for Barbados, seized muskets, overpowered the crew, and freed the male slaves. But they were unable to sail the ship back to Africa, and a British warship eventually recaptured them. More successful were rebels on a London vessel, the Industry: they seized it four days into a voyage to South Carolina, killed all but two of the crew, and managed to run the ship aground in Sierra Leone.

Ever wary, Newton mounted guns on deck and trained muskets on the captives’ quarters “to intimidate the slaves.” But less than a month after putting down his sailors’ abortive conspiracy, Newton, “by the favour of Divine Providence made a timely discovery to day that the slaves were forming a plot for an insurrection. Surprized  of them attempting to get off their irons, and upon farther search in their rooms, upon the information of  of the boys, found some knives, stones, shot, etc., and a cold chissel [a steel chisel for cutting metal]. Upon enquiry there appeared  principally concerned to move in projecting the mischeif and  boys in supplying them with the above instruments. Put the boys in irons and slightly in the thumbscrews to urge them to a full confession.” A few weeks later, Newton discovered another “intention to rise upon us. Found  principally concerned, punished them with the thumb screws and afterwards put them in neck yokes.”

In the midst of applying the lash and thumbscrew, Newton kept up an unceasing stream of love letters to Mary. And, much as we might wish otherwise, it is difficult not to be moved by them. “I press to my lips the paper that will be with you in a few days, while I must be kept from you for many months,” he writes when leaving on one voyage, imploring her, “Let me know at what hours you usually rise, breakfast, dine, sup and go to bed that I may keep time with you.” When some letters of hers reach him, months later, after being transferred through half a dozen ships, Newton is so overjoyed that “I could almost hug every dirty fellow through whose hands they have passed.”

“To live without you,” he writes Mary from Africa, “constitutes the very essence of Guinea to me . . . I hope and believe I should find myself as much at a loss, and sigh as often for something better, if I lived in the palace of Versailles, and could call it my own, unless you were with me.” To make the people around him understand his love for her would be “like describing the rainbow to a man born blind.” In Newton’s ceaseless search for slaves to buy, he spent almost all his time in the area he knew best, the Sierra Leone coast. Midway along it lies the estuary of the Sierra Leone River, one of the best natural harbors in Africa. Some eighteen miles upstream rises Bance Island, a rocky outcropping a third of a mile long. Its protected position and abundant fresh water supply made it one of West Africa’s most active trading posts, selling slaves and supplies to European and American captains and performing repairs in its small shipyard. Newton moored his ship at Bance Island’s stone jetty on several of his voyages. When he arrived there on March , , for instance, he traded his longboat for four tons of rice from the island’s warehouse. Then he left his vessel, the African, at the shipyard to have sixty barrels of water stowed on board and the mollusks scraped off its hull. His logbook does not detail how he spent his spare time while this was being done, but it is possible that he played a round or two of a game just then becoming popular in Europe.

Bance Island’s golf course, the only one in Africa, was bordered by mangrove trees and had only two holes, about a quarter of a mile apart. The balls were about the size of today’s tennis balls; the clubs were wooden. The players were a motley assortment of the island’s traders, slave ship officers, and other white soldiers of fortune. They divided themselves into two teams; members of each took turns driving their team’s ball towards the opposite hole. The golfers wore white Indian cotton. Their caddies, from nearby African villages, were given loincloths of tartan wool woven near Glasgow.

Writing to his wife, Newton says, “I have been very happy this evening, in a solitary ramble round this island. I studiously avoided all company, and chose a retired walk, where I could vent my thoughts aloud, without fear of being overheard.” It is not surprising that the now pious Newton declined evening company, for, as one disapproving visitor wrote of the island’s traders, “When they get opportunity . . . which is frequent . . . [they] drink away their senses.” On his solitary ramble Newton would have seen, on a small hill at one end of the island, a collection of living quarters, offices, and warehouses, most of them inside a protective wall. The side facing the sea was made of brick and stone thirty inches thick, with cannons on the rampartsa bulwark against French and pirate guns.

Like most such slave posts, the installation was equally fortified against rebellion from within. “Every window had its iron grate,” wrote one naval officer, “every door had its iron bar, while the passages were so constructed that only one person could be admitted at a time.” From the second floor of the whites’ quarters a visitor could look down on holding pens big enough for several hundred chained slaves, the largest one  feet on each side and ringed by a -foot stone wall. Nearby was a graveyard for the whites, which got a lot of use: between drink and tropical diseases, nearly half the island’s white population died each year.

Bance Island had been a British outpost since the s. In , just before Newton began stopping there, it was taken over by an upand- coming London firm, Grant, Oswald & Co. The holding pens at the fortress meant that ships from Britain or elsewhere willing to pay good prices could take on dozens of slaves at one stop, cutting down on the time they had to cruise the coast. Before long, the island was loading an average of a thousand slaves a year onto ships from many countries. The white staff grew to thirty-five and the African staff, both slave and free, to well over one hundred. Some of them manned the fleet of small vessels, including the ship’s longboat Newton had traded for rice, that gathered slaves from the area’s network of creeks. The slave depot’s largest contract was with a British shipping firm that supplied slaves to French colonies in the Caribbean. When one of the frequent Anglo-French wars threatened to interfere, the firm’s ships merely ran up the Spanish flag.

Bance Island’s quarters for whites even had a false fireplace, to make the tropics look more like home. To the visitors who have left us their impressions, however, it didn’t feel that way. One traveler said he knew when he was “amongst a parcel of Slave traders, for besides their cursing and swearing, they had all on check shirts, a black hankerchief round the neck and another round the waist, all insignia of the bloody trafic in human flesh.” Another, Henry Smeathman, a British naturalist who stopped by while collecting insects along the coast, gave a vivid description of the scene at dinner: “The teakettle shall boil, the tea shall be made in it; . . . a piece of old canvas shall contain the sugar, the mate with his tar[r]y dirty fist shall break some into the tea and stir it about with a rusty, dirty, greasy knife, and the dirt and dust which swims on the top, he shall pick out with his fingers & every man shall dip [his cup] in his turn.”

After the meal, things only grew worse: “I had the fruits & labours of a long & glorious day totally demolished by the rats whilst I was at dinner. Oh sun & moon & stars! . . . While I am at supper [a candle] is carried and [put] in a quart bottle . . . I return from supper and find the candle fallen, from the softness of the tallow not supporting itself, the table on fire and the tallow floating amongst my books, papers & apparatus. Oh ye Gods! Pity a poor misfortunate flycatcher.” Meanwhile, outside, ships were filling their holds with slaves: “Alas! What a scene of misery and distress is a full slaved ship in the rains. The clanking of chains, the groans of the sick and the stench of the whole. . . . Two or three slaves thrown overboard every day dying of fever flux, measles, worms all together. All the day the chains rattling or the sound of the armourer rivetting some poor devil just arrived in galling heavy irons. . . . Here the Doctor dressing sores, wounds and ulcers, or cramming the men with medicines and another standing over them with a cat[-o’-nine-tails] to make them swallow.” The majority shareholder in Bance Island and the dominant figure in Grant, Oswald & Co. was, like the plaid worn by the golf caddies, Scottish. Just as John Newton exemplifies the men who sailed the triangle trade route, so Richard Oswald represents those on its commanding heights. These stretched from the ramparts of whitewashed slave forts in Africa to the sun-baked sugar fields of the Caribbean to the rolling green lawns and formal gardens of country homes in the British Isles. As a young man, much like an executive trainee in a transnational corporation today, Oswald had learned the importexport business in several corners of the empire: Glasgow, Virginia, and Jamaica. In , he settled in London, where, from a modest brick home and office at  Philpot Lane, he rapidly built up an international trade in slaves and in a wide range of goods, from horses to wigs. He sold tar and turpentine to the Royal Navy, and wagons, hay, and more than five million loaves of bread to the army. Before long he came to own shares in ships and in slave plantations in South Carolina, Jamaica, and Florida. Oswald’s ships could then carry slaves from his depot-fortress at Bance Island to his plantations in the Americas, and return to England loaded with their sugar or tobacco. Although his business ranged as far as India, its core was the triangle trade. With lucrative investments in each corner of the triangle and in the ships that sailed among them, he amassed a fortune of some £,, roughly equal to $ million today.

Oswald, as he appears in portraits, had a long, determined face, intense eyes, and a proudly bowed-out chest. His contemporaries saw him as a wise, thoughtful man who embodied the Scottish virtues of frugality, sobriety, and hard work, and who spent all of his spare time reading, often far into the night. He supervised the construction of a home library with sliding glass panels that contained more than two thousand books of theology, philosophy, literature, and history. His art collection included works by Rubens and Rembrandt, and a friend called him “a Man of Great Knowledge and Ready Conversation.” Among those who shared that conversation at his London dinner table, or could hunt pheasants while visiting his ,-acre estate in Auchincruive, Scotland, were Benjamin Franklin and the writers Laurence Sterne and James Boswell. Oswald played a major role in Scottish road building, gave to charity, and, as we shall see, would represent his country on a crucial diplomatic mission. Although Bance Island was a cornerstone of his fortune, one way in which he was typical of the Britons who reaped the greatest profits from the Atlantic slave economy was that he never set foot in Africa.

• • •

“No one here can guess, by my looks or behaviour,” John Newton wrote Mary from the island, “how much of my heart is in another quarter of the world.” For slave captains like him, Bance Island was often the last stop before they headed across the Atlantic. Once wind filled his sails and the ocean currents bore his ship away from the African coast, the “middle passage” had begun. And here we must step back and imagine Newton’s tiny ship, dipping and bobbing over the sea, as part of a huge armada spread out in time as well as space, for there were an estimated thirty-five thousand Atlantic slave voyages during more than three and a half centuries of the trade, transporting captives to every destination from Quebec to Chile.

For Newton, pacing the captain’s quarterdeck above the slave quarters, the most dangerous and difficult part of the triangle routebuying slaves on the African coastwas over. His logbook entries become cursory, and he seems almost convinced that the slaves are now happy. On a typical Atlantic crossing, he writes: “I shall always take pleasure in ascribing to the helping of the God of peace . . . the remarkable good disposition of the men slaves . . . who seem . . . to have entirely changed their tempers. I was at first continually alarmed with their almost desperate attempts to make insurrections upon us. . . . However from about the end of February they have behaved more like children in one family than slaves in chains and irons and are really upon all accounts more observant, obliging and considerate than our white people.”

The end of each middle passage was marked by the sight of the birds and floating seaweed that meant the ship was approaching the West Indies. At this point Newton would order the slaves shaved and their skin given the fake sheen of good health that would attract buyers. “Wash’d the slaves with fresh water and rubd them with Bees wax and Florence [olive] Oil.” After selling the slaves on one or more Caribbean islands, he took on cargousually sugaror ballast for the final leg of the triangle, back to England. When not pressed with trade matters, he spent one to two hours praying and reading the Bible each morning, with another round of prayers at midday, praying especially for “all debauched and profane persons such as I myself too long was.” Compared to the seafaring life, with its long spells of solitude between ocean and sky, he knew no “calling that . . . affords greater advantages to an awakened mind, for promoting the life of God in the soul.” This was particularly so on slave ships, he felt, because, “excepting the hurry of trade, &c. upon the coast,” the extra officers and crew they carried made the captain’s job less burdensome. “I never knew sweeter or more frequent hours of divine communion, than in my two last voyages to Guinea, when I was either almost secluded from society on shipboard, or when on shore. . . . I have wandered through the woods reflecting on the singular goodness of the Lord to me.”

Whether surviving a storm, defeating a slave rebellion, or marrying Mary Catlett, Newton interpreted all the turning points in his tumultuous life as divine interventions. Always at the last minute, miraculously, it was someone else sent on the mission he had been designated for and who was drowned or came to some other terrible end. God spoke to him at key moments, he felt, by means of portents, blessings, warnings. Yet during the better part of a decade in the slave trade, and for some thirty years afterwards, John Newton seems never to have heard God say a word to him against slavery.