Transcript

Part One: X-Mas Special: The Heroes Who Ended The Slave Trade | BEHIND THE BASTARDS

From Behind the Bastards · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 1 h 19 min · 15,612 words · 235 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Part One: X-Mas Special: The Heroes Who Ended The Slave Trade | BEHIND THE BASTARDS", an episode of Behind the Bastards published December 24, 2025 (1 h 19 min, about 15,612 words). It mentions 19 people, works and ideas, including The Zorg, Atlantic slave trade, British Empire, Liverpool, Quakers.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 10:00: British Empire, James Stout, Atlantic slave trade, Against Estate
  2. – 20:00: Atlantic slave trade
  3. – 30:00: Atlantic slave trade, Liverpool
  4. – 40:00: Liverpool, Quakers, Atlantic slave trade, Chad Michael
  5. – 50:00: British Empire, The Zorg, Atlantic slave trade, Quakers
  6. – 1:00:00: British Empire, Ashanti Empire, Atlantic slave trade, Robert Stubs
  7. – 1:10:00: The Zorg, George Vlosich III, Robert Stubs
  8. – 1:18:36: The Zorg, Against the State, Myanmar, Robert Stubs

Notable quotes from "Part One: X-Mas Special: The Heroes Who Ended The Slave Trade | BEHIND THE BASTARDS"

  • No, I would never mock James Stout.
    about James Stout · at
  • My book. It's called Against Estate, a story of anarchists and comrades at war in Spain, Myanmar, and Rajava. includes some places I've been with Robert and some places I've been on my own. it's a beautiful cover.
    about Myanmar · at
  • Greatest heroes in English history and world history. The heroes who ended the Atlantic slave trade.
    about Atlantic slave trade · at
  • 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…
    about Liverpool · at
  • Much just the not Menanites. What are they [ __ ] Quakers?
    about Quakers · at
  • Assumption was that it represented a kindness to Africans. Liverpool merchant Michael Sergeant gave a representative version of this argument. We ought to consider whether the…
    about Chad Michael · at
  • Right. We're going to tell the story of a ship called the Zong or the Zorg. You there's both names are fine actually technically to use. Have you ever heard of this boat? No, I haven't actually.
    about The Zorg · at
  • Have some quotes from it elsewhere, but the story of this boat begins with the story of a slaver, a guy named Robert Stubs. By 1781, Stubs was an experienced slave trader…
    about Robert Stubs · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

Books & papers

  • The Zorg — Book · 12 mentions · first at
  • Against the State — Book · 2 mentions · first at
    Yep. 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.
  • Zong — Book · 2 mentions
  • Against Estate — Book · 1 mention · first at
    I'm excited to hear about pedophile or whatever we're going to do. this is my book. It's called Against Estate, a story of anarchists and comrades at war in Spain, Myanmar, and…

Companies & orgs

  • AK Press — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Those who aren't familiar with those languages. Yeah. it comes out on the 26th of January with AK Press. We'll we'll give you a pre-order link if you'd like to buy it. I hope in the episode description, friends.
  • Company of Merchants Trading to Africa (CMTA) — Company · 1 mention

Concepts & topics

  • Atlantic slave trade — Concept · 8 mentions · first at
  • British Empire — Concept · 7 mentions · first at
    To 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, but [clears throat] I didn't do too much.
  • Quakers — Concept · 4 mentions · first at
  • Spanish Civil War — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Robert. but yeah, I've written a book about anarchists at war. about Myanmar, Rojava, and the Spanish Civil War. a bit less depressing than this episode was. You're going to…
  • Gregson v. Gilbert — Concept · 1 mention

Places & events

  • Liverpool — Place · 6 mentions · first at
  • Myanmar — Place · 2 mentions · first at
  • Ashanti Empire — Place · 1 mention · first at
    In October of 1780, Stubs has a meeting with an emissary of the king of the Ashanti Empire. and that this empire is the greatest power in the region. And they are the people…
  • Rojava — Place · 1 mention · first at
    Robert. but yeah, I've written a book about anarchists at war. about Myanmar, Rojava, and the Spanish Civil War. a bit less depressing than this episode was. You're going to…

Full transcript with timestamps

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

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

Yeah, you didn't do a British accent last time, Sophie. A weird choice for the second line. I was doing that not because of our guest, but because of our topic.

Oh, I thought you were doing that because of our guest. No, I would never mock James Stout.

Sir James Stout. Sorry. Sir James Stout. There it is. Yeah, absolutely not. I don't think that's happening anytime in the near future.

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

Well, well, Margaret told me the other day that I would make a great queen of You did, Robert, when we fenced. Mhm. You

We did. Well, I was pretty drunk, I think. Yeah, I was drunk, too. And we were using those crucifixes. We were using crucifixes to fence on Thailand. [gasps]

Before we This is a podcast about the worst people in all of history. Before we get to that, Robert,

yeah, I want to I want to take a moment for our dear friend James Stout to plug his his new book that's available for pre-order.

Yeah, I was trying to introduce him before we did that. Sophie, we said his name. What else do you want? I was going to put a little bit more like, you know, spin on it. Some oil, you know, on the vinegar.

By by all means. Go ahead. Go ahead. This is James Stout, podcaster and author and journalist and our friend

and our buddy. Yeah. You want to tell people about your book? I do. I I would like that. Um and then I'm excited to hear about pedophile or whatever we're going to do. Um this is my book. It's called Against Estate, a story of anarchists and comrades at war in Spain, Myanmar, and Rajava. Uh includes some places I've been with Robert uh and some places I've been on my own. Uh

it's a beautiful cover. It's a really Yeah. So, um a friend of Roberts and mine uh took this photograph uh and I was really happy to be able to like share it with people and I really like having it in this is Burmese, Kurdish, this is English and Spanish for those who aren't familiar with those languages. Yeah. Um, it comes out on the 26th of January with AK Press. We'll we'll give you a pre-order link if you'd like to buy it. Uh, I hope

in the episode description, friends. Yep. Uh, you can also just search my name and the words against the state and you'll find it uh almost everywhere good books are sold. Uh, 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 I've been lucky enough to to spend some time with. And obviously the Spanish uh revolution is something I studied for my PhD. I didn't didn't spend time in that one. I'm not that old.

Buy the book. Read the book. Overthrow the government. You know, nothing would make me happier than you pre-ordering James Stout's book.

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

Yeah. Yeah. To be clear, my book is not a guide to how to do that. No, these are jokes. comedy bits.

You know what's not funny, James? I'm shredded to think what you're about to say.

It's It's not. Uh, but today, this is our 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 or a group of heroes, right? This is an episode about a good thing that happened. Uh, now because it's still behind the bastards, we will largely be talking about terrible things. Um, but I did bring you an episode for the end of the year because we we both needed a little bit of a break, James, that uh this is going to be a little bit of a a play against type because generally when we talk about the British Empire uh in this series,

we're not talking about good people doing good things, but [clears throat] I didn't do too much of that.

This isn't 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 and world history. The heroes who ended the Atlantic slave trade.

That's that's our subject for this episode. 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 to the West Indies, the New World. Um, 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 has 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 uh 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 dogooders went up against the most evil and powerful industry in the world at the time, and eventually brought it to its knees. Um, and it's 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 the the stamina that was required to to bring this this industry down, right? The 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, um, is is really like worth celebrating. It's a beautiful thing. I'm excited to learn more about it.

Yeah. Yeah. And uh it's it's you get a lot of this is like a battle of Britain kind of thing where it's a lot of like uh just just just [clears throat] English society at its very best. Like you you have a lot of uh these people who kind of like come up in uh like London or come up in 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. Um, so yeah, that's what we're talking about. Although episode one, we're going to be laying a lot of groundwork. So it's still mostly about bastards. Yeah, I always have to like go for a nice walk before I before I do bastards, you know, like I can't can't be reading the news and uh then mainlining this stuff. Well, this is going to be largely upbeat, largely

inspiring, although again a lot of bleak stuff to get through first. So I think everybody's aware that slavery is an institution and an industry has existed on every continent. Well, I probably except Antarctica and in most societies across the vast ban of human history 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 the an equivalent level of horrifying and is not an equivalent level of abusive. Right? [snorts] Ancient Rome, for example, was a slave society and in a lot of ways a nightmarish one. And some of the methods of slavery practiced in Rome, like the vast slave funded plantations called Lafundia or the slavedriven 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 freed men 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 breathe with other people or whatever, right? That would have been crazy to the Romans, you know? Um, and likewise, and I I'm really not trying to minimize the horrors of slavery in Rome because 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 there's just nothing that compared to that,

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

Yeah. It's like I mean it's like an Awitz 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 who really got this going. They got their [ __ ] together before anyone else in Europe did. And then they lost having their [ __ ] together before anyone else in Europe did. That's the story of Portugal and Spain.

Um Europeans did not have much in the way of meaningful contact with subsaharan 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 it'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 uh 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 per the terms of the Treaty of Tortoisila.

That's right. Right. James Tortois, I think. Tortois. To toasus. Yeah. Signed in 1494. Africa wound up in Portugal 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, clearly Iberia will be the center of the world forever, right?

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

Yeah. So, earliest, you know, that that would have been handy. Um, 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, uh, started as a place to gather and store gold before it could be offloaded into merchant vessels. Uh, 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 have to not have sugar. Like it's they're addicted. It's a drug. It's an incredibly addictive drug. Um they called it sweet salt initially and once they realized like, oh [ __ ] this stuff grows really well here and you can grow as much of it as you want that re like it becomes very like that's worth more than gold potentially. You know, there's only so much gold. Inflation is a thing, but you can sell sugar forever. People never don't want sugar. The only problem with sugar as a money-making enterprise is that it sucks ass to farm, right? It is absolute hell to grow.

It's a nightmare. Yeah. Yeah. That's why you don't see many people growing backyard sugar.

Exactly. Nobody No, 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 10 years, you know."

Um, it's a shame. for whatever reason. Some of the homesteading YouTubers I would like to see

I would like stop YouTubing just farm sugar. Yeah. Yeah. Get in the sugar trade. That's what I will say.

I mean there's got to be one of those one of those like evil foster parents who adopts a bunch of kids to make them work their farm. Like there's there's got to be someone who's tried it with a sugar plantation.

I'm sure. Um 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.

No, we do that with European instead, right? Yeah, you do with beetroot. You make shitty beet sugar if you want.

Not the same. Um, but you can't and you can't you can't take European farmers in moss and transport them to the Caribbean or to like the African coast. uh because they die. They die really quickly. It's it's very they're they don't they 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 those 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 the the kind of industry Portugal knows it can be. Uh 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 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? Uh 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 and a lot of these tribes are like, "Yeah, actually guns sound great."

Uh, 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? Cuz that's not part of Portugal's sphere of influence at the time. Um, 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 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. Um, so that's that's kind of this is sort of the the the generally agreed like start

to the slave trade. A little bit of a soft start cuz like when do you count that? But like probably when Portugal starts sending slaves to Spanish colonies in in the Caribbean is a is a good start. Uh Elmina, 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. love to see a literally stratified society where you've just uh you've really really made it pretty [ __ ] obvious what you're going for.

Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those sometimes you watch like Snow Piercer and you're like, "Well, that's not very subtle." But neither is history.

Yeah. Sometimes history can be that way. Um so this is the first like big slave trading post in Africa. And the many 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's 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. Um, and you know, I I get why they use the term. That's what how they would have framed it then. These aren't concubines.

These are Yeah. Yeah. Like this is raping people is what this is. Yeah. There's obviously like a lot of concubines would have been technically weren't free people, 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. Um, historian Sedarth Ka 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 wellwater and brought up a staircase through a trapdo 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. Yay.

That's not very nice. 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. It's 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 that like well you're not paid well and it's dangerous but you get to do all the rape you want.

Fantastic. Yeah. This is like no wage benefit not taxable. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Speaking of non taxable things.

Yeah. Yeah. Rough ad pivot. Yeah, that that one wasn't easy. And we're back. So, uh, any slaves, male or female, who fought back or attempted to lead insurrections were locked in a condemned cell, which Ka 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. Car 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? Um cuz slave uprisings start happening as soon as slavery does and it scares the [ __ ] 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.

Yeah, maybe you should probably wouldn't be killing you then. Could just leave them alone. Um, could just leave them alone. Uh, so on the seaborg side of Elmina was the chillingly named Door of No Return. Uh, 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 wetted 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? Uh 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 because 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 cough which is like a chain of basically handcuffs and chains that like 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 ship right um they used coffles as well in the Americas and and what like once like it's it's not just but like yeah that's how they're being transported and the 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 the 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 in 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 chatt 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 etc. 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 cuz they're getting guns and stuff and that's a fair these are bad people um but the slavery that existed and that they that existed existed in

their heads was very different from like the slavery that Europeans were increasingly executing. Um, it is a mark of how diff different 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. Um, 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 uh an African man who as a boy was captured by some of these slave traders and 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 quote 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 fermenting 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 going to happen to you the next time you have a war? Right? Like inciting is as simple as that. It's not necessarily some CIA skull duggery. 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. It's just like a classic like vicious cycle thing, right? Like one builds on the other. Yeah. And we 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 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.

Yeah, it totally makes sense. Like you're contributing to that same cycle of of death and enslavement.

Exactly. Exactly. The first English slave ship left Africa somewhere around 1555. Uh 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 [ __ ] 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 it takes about a hundred years, but but England becomes the primary like movers and shakers of the Atlantic slave trade, and they will stay that way until it ends.

Uh 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 13 colonies in North America.

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

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

and I think probably more people like sugar than like Yeah, it is an acquired taste tobacco. It's just I mean it's just impossible to look at how profitable this is and not be like, "Well, yeah, cuz it's [ __ ] addictive as hell, you know?" Um, and it it's also kind of worth 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 cuz the 13 colonies, they were not that big a part of the econ of of the economy of the empire, right?

They had a lot of irons in the fire. Okay. They had some other options. tobacco.

Good luck everyone. Um, now these vast profits can only be sustained by the constant import of new slaves to Jamaica because it's a very deadly business actually farming this stuff. Historian Sedarth car 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 calculations," 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 col colonize the start colonizing the Americas is the money that came from, you know, Yeah.

the slave trade, enslaving people. Um Yeah. Enslaving people and working them to death.

Yeah. And I guess stealing the land, too, right? Like it's a great stealing their land cuz all your input really good like stealing [ __ ]

Yeah. Who' have thought? Yeah. Uh 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? Do you want any masks? I I have a couple. Got a got a couple. Okay. Yeah, I got a Reagan mask. I don't know. We'll talk about this.

Okay. Yeah. Probably probably get one off the Are we Are we doing this again? Yeah. Again, Sophie, we never did. What are you talking about, Sophie? The listeners can't see me winking.

Better say it out loud so everyone knows. Robert, that's my winking voice. Yeah, that's my winking voice.

So, we're never going to 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. Um but I mean that's 10 and 20% is itself a pretty wide margin. We simply don't know. In some voy I mean some ships everyone died but in some voyages it was like 30 or 40% you know um sometimes it's less.

Uh it it really just depended on the captain. So these are rough averages right? Um 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

Yeah. It only works if you see it there being an infinite supply of people who have almost no value, right? Like

Right. Exactly. Jesus. And if you don't know about how germs work, right? The fact that like, well, we just jam more people in the hold where like everyone is going to the bathroom all over like it's everywhere, right? You're in a a hold. You're chained together. you have 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? Like you you're jamming them into these dise nasty disease riddle tiny hell rooms. It's just it's a nightmare. Everyone's in it's a boo box from the hook, but like everyone's in it, right? For months. It's just incomprehensible suffering. Yes. um 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 uh kind of I think roughly that's the estimate um and that's not the end of how many

people this [ __ ] killed because about 2/3 of the slaves who survived transit were immediately put to the task of cutting sugarce in the Americas or the Caribbean or or doing other crops but sugar plantations were the big and they are hell on earth. Laborers worked 14 hours a day. Uh the heat was intense. They're in an unfamiliar climate with unfamiliar diseases. And about a third of enslaved Africans died within 3 years of reaching the Caribbean. Um [clears throat] yeah, like you're just feeding people into the m of this this system of death. It it it could it could it's it's barely less lethal than a concentration camp, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Um, and the only reason is that they they wanted these people to live for some period of time to extract value from it.

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

Yeah. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty rough, right? Yeah. Like why breed them? That's too much trouble.

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

Yeah. I think some of it may just have been that like well when people women are giving birth they need like some degree of care and even that is more effort than I want to put into thinking about these people. I just want them to work until they drop. Right? This attitude is going to change over time. Um 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 corps for a large chunk of this period of time. Adam Smith, the famous economist, gave a lecture at the University of Glasgow in 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 Hoschild 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.

Um, [clears throat] uh, 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. Uh great stuff. So yeah, like the ruling class is all very much embedded with this stuff, right?

Yeah. It's the entire economy, right? And like even the people who aren't directly owning slaves are making money from the people who own slaves,

right? Right. It 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 like I said earlier, 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. Uh the city of Birmingham was a ma 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. And it seems like there's no one who didn't want to. Like everyone was just fine with it.

Yeah. Very. It's it's it's pretty much just the uh Oh [ __ ] The It's pretty much just the uh not Menanites. What are they [ __ ]

Quakers? Yeah. Sorry. It's pretty much just the Quakers who don't want to be financially like and 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 cooks to most people cuz they're saying crazy [ __ ] like I it's bad to be in the military and fight and die for a king. Yeah, maybe we shouldn't be killing each other.

They're saying crazy [ __ ] I think these wacky Quakers the term Quaker is one that like they didn't prefer to use for themselves, right? It's like a a derogatory term

that was put upon them and I guess I I think so. Yeah, they called themselves I know they called themselves friends.

Yeah, the friends. Um and it it's one of those like hard to pick a group of people in like western society in early modernity who were more consistently right than the Quakers.

I mean they really called it quite a few times. Yeah. Yeah. You can go back and be like, "Yep, yep." I mean, still go to bed on everything, but a lot.

Yeah. I mean, this very morning, I was out with a 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 uh they're still still doing a pretty good job. Yeah. You know, we could talk about religion and all of the things I don't agree with, but if you're bit 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 going to be right more than you're wrong. Yeah. Yeah. You're doing you're beating the average, especially back then.

Yeah. You're going to beat the average in your society, you know. Um now, you know what church didn't have a problem with slavery, James? any of them really but most of them most of them

but the ang the church of England right shocking to me church of England big fans of slavery deeply financially involved now there is there is a a sect like a radical Anglican sect that are anti-slavery from like a 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 English 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 Sergeant 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. [ __ ] [ __ ] sake.

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

Well, and like Yeah, they live under a desperate as opposed to you who lives under a king in a state that makes all of its money from slavery. Yeah. And they're dying after 3 years. Like how how could it be better than whatever the situation was back home?

Yeah. It's people will just make [ __ ] up. Yeah. It's just to make themselves feel better. Like who knows how much he even cared. like this is just a 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 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 well maybe they're better off you know you know how bad things are in Africa.

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

Yeah. Yeah. Otherwise I'm I'm a world historic monster. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a piece of [ __ ] on like a centuries wide scale. That Speaking of world historic monsters.

I was hoping you would do this as an ad transition. Yeah. Monsters of our Some of them, right? Maybe. We don't know.

Yeah. We never know. We don't know. Be sure to DM Sophie uh and let her know if you don't like the advertisers. It's I write. Okay.

Mhm. 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 [ __ ]

My mom's from Liverpool. Liverpool. What did Liverpool do to you, [ __ ] I mean, they did a lot to some to a lot of people. So, they've done some bad [ __ ]

You to you? These Liverpodians I'm I'm offended on their beha on behalf of the the you know, the world about the 10 million people who were enslaved. Yeah,

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

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

If you know if you know anyone FROM LIVERPOOL, WE GET THEM. My entire mother's side of the family is from Liverpool.

This is behind the back, James. It's not a good time. No, it's not. No, no, no. That's why we we left Liverpool in opposition.

Yeah. around the 19. If you know anybody from Richmond, hit them, too. You know,

and maybe wink hit people if they come to Wink while you're hitting them. Wink while you're hitting them. Exactly.

I guess it's not a crime. Yeah, it's just a joke. It's a bit. Yeah, it's a bit.

Don't hit people. 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 the 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 in 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 hardressed to find a person on the street who would be like, "Yeah, slavery is 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 want to 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? Like, and they did. Uh, so yeah, that's pretty important for us here staring at an insurmountable mountain of problems to pay attention to how this happened. Um yeah, and it's worth noting the abolitionist movement is often described by historians at the specifically the abolitionist movement that starts in England and first ends the slave trade and then slavery in the British Empire is the first social movement dedicated entirely to the recognition and protection of other people's rights.

Right. Where you are 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. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah, that's a really interesting way to frame it. It's significant, right? It's a deserves to be celebrated.

Um, 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 like how good our culture is that we're the only ones who tried to end slavery. It was the white Europeans were the first people to decide slavery should be banned, you know.

Jesus. Um yeah, it's [ __ ] nonsense. Like it's it's not true for one thing. But

um 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. Um any acknowledgement of how remarkable the panabolitionist cause was and it was has to be tempered by the acknowledgement that it came into being not to be not they like the 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 shadow slave trade that existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries. the the nightmarish horrors of that system which was so much worse than the the very bad slavery that existed forever is what inspired this movement.

Yeah. It's uh unfortunately uh I'm a person who teaches at a college right now and uh we we're living in the era of uh chat bots right and I have noticed a certain number of chatbot generated essays arguing this point that you're making and uh it doesn't get any less upsetting even even after reading it hundreds of times that or like yeah there was slavery elsewhere and and it it's like if at some point in the future America got a complete handle on the whole gun thing and whatever did whatever we had to do to make sure that nobody dies from guns in the United States again. And then people like that were like, "Yeah, America's America is the greatest culture ever cuz 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 you're really cutting out some important facts. There's some bits there that you probably probably don't want to gloss over.

Yeah. Yeah. We sold guns like an American in that society like [ __ ] [ __ ] talking a country that allows hunting rifles and it's like wait a second.

Yeah, hold on buddy. You're forgetting some stuff. Yeah, it's pretty bad [ __ ]

The intellectual Yeah, there's a there's a lot of of history you're ignoring here.

Yeah. Um 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 how a small number of those people came together to create a massive movement that actually ended this horrible, horrible institution. Right?

[snorts] 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 there's both names are fine actually technically to use. Have you ever heard of this boat? No, I haven't actually. I'm excited to learn more about this boat. Love a boat story. This is It is a good boat story. It's a there's a very good book. There's actually a couple of books about it.

James, you're so pure. I love a good boat story. Stories. You're not beating the British allegations.

I know. It's just it's that's my epigenetic expression of loving boats. Yeah. It's it's tea.

I love a boat story. Boats. Cricket. I've got a friend who comes from like the Martha's Vineyard area and I was like, "So, you're 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, "Okay, do it."

Yeah. As it happens. Yeah. No, boats. All kinds of good stories about boats. Pirates live boat peoples. Pirates live on boats.

Mhm. That pirate radio station in the movie Pirate Radio. Those were British. Oil oil oil rig. Yeah. I mean it was an oil rig at some point. I forget.

Yeah. Pirate radio gave us like punk music and scar music, right? Which is uh you know

Exactly. Exactly. It's why I am the way I am. Yeah. I'm going to try to take my take my savings and invest in a SCA boat cruise. You know, SCA and sailing together again at last. I've just thought about the little domino meme and uh at the bottom end it's like you know somebody starts broadcasting from an oil rig in the Atlantic and the top it's the mighty Boston release a memorial song for George Floyd.

Okay. Now I'm no longer making it seem like a bad idea. Yeah. Now I'm no longer Now I'm no longer so into boats.

Yeah. No que story. No no no not yet. And there's 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. Um that's by Sedarth Kara. Um and I I do recommend it. That'll be a big source for this episode in particular. Um 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 Stubs. By 1781, Stubs was an experienced slave trader, albeit an unlucky one. His first recorded journey was his first mate on a ship called the Black Joke, which he abandoned within months of taking the job due to having

a bad when I found the [ __ ] name out like Yeah. Not a great name. That guy. Yeah. Jesus. He can come up with a bad one. All the other words been taken.

Nope. Nope. Nope. Just Just the black joke. Yeah. Um Okay. He 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 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. um but or sorry takes it 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 those become slaves the French get to profit off of right

two years later stubs 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 privateeer and then he's captured a third time the next year so Jesus

out OF FOUR VOY FIVE VOYAGE He's abandoned ship once, been captured three times, and had one successful trip.

Yeah. Yeah. Old Stubsy isn't really delivering on the investment there. Not the best. Old Stubsy is not the best ever.

Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to I'm just thinking like, you know, you're you're a young wannabe boat person and then you find out you're going to be on the Stubs boat. It's got to be got to be a rough line.

[ __ ] I guess I better brush up on my French bjour. Everyone's got like one of those blue and white striped shirts underneath their like English red jacket, you know, just for the when the moment arises. Just got to get ready to change ownership. [gasps] Um, 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 after this, but his failure to success rate is high enough that he's 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, uh he starts a family and has six children who he is not in the least bit interested in in raising or caring for.

It sounds like a bit of a bit of a bad dude. He's not a good man. the slave captain thing. That's

Yeah, fat stub. Stubsy said, "Fuck them kids." Yeah, [ __ ] 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 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. Um, now we don't know why as evidence that they're more efficient, they made Stubs a governor.

Great. It didn't have background checks. We don't know why. [gasps and clears throat]

Yeah, it seems like he I think it's that he had friends in the company and he was a really good asskisser. 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 the job by licking boots.

Are we sure want to go in Are we sure he didn't want to go into government politics?

Uh, 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 the British is operating is a a fort called Anameabu 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.

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. What do you mean?"

Yeah, that was a joke. That was a joke for the girlies. You're welcome. Okay. Okay.

That went over both of your heads. Y, it sure did, Sophie. No, the bit I would make is that they looked at how he's raising his family and they're like, "Look, Stubs, 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 Stubs said, "Absolutely. Yes, I can."

He's like, "Honey, where do I sign?" Like um, his dream job. 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 [ __ ] he'd have very little personal risk. Uh but as Sidarthk writes in the Zorg, things started to go wrong as soon as Stubs departed England. Quote, "From the moment the ship departed England, Captain Leuen reported vexation often arising between me and my passengers, occasioned by malicious information and other base insinuations, all of which were spread by Robert Stubs. Stubs directed much of his eyeire towards one of his fellow CMTA officials, Stuart Beard. He accused Beard of destroying the ship stores and of hurting his son by tying his legs together. Leuen 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. Um, that's

the son who's g he's accusing this guy. Stubs then accused Beard of being a pimp at a body house and that he and John Roberts were highway robbers. To top it off, Stubs accused Roberts of trying to breed a mutiny, which Luen also found to be an ill-designed falsehood. The bickering, discord, and wild accusations led Captain Leuen to describe Stubs as a wicked and treacherous character. Another official on the ship was said Stubs 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 [ __ ] dick."

Like an [ __ ] among the worst people in history. It's like when other billionaires are like Elon Musk, what a [ __ ] prick. And what's wrong with that dude?

Yeah, you really have to be on another level of [ __ ] Yeah. Now, as noted in that above passage, as I said, he brought his son, his 12-year-old boy, George, on the trip with him. And this was not normal. Cara notes that there are no records of any other governor bringing a child that young to Africa with him. In fact, what Stubs 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 12year-old?"

Do we know the [ __ ] Do we know why? Yes. Yes, we do. Sophie is As soon as they reach the fort, he gives his son George a job working for the fort as like a copywriter. I think he's like keeping a track of accounts or something and he pockets his son's salary. That's why he brought his kid so he could make him. HE'S KIND OF enslaving his 12-year-old child.

What a t. He's got one move and it's Yeah. Right. Yeah. That takes [ __ ] them kids to another level.

It's so funny. 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 his [ __ ] Stubs is a governor. He's making better money than that. Like this he's just like he just likes to do it. He just loves to abuse a child.

The love of the game. Jesus. 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 them like [ __ ] As soon as he arrives, Stubs 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 pounds a year, which Stubs pockets. Jesus Christ,

you should have brought the other five kids. You'd really be making bank have them all out that farming.

Yeah. Jesus. Now, outside of this, he refuses to do the actual job. He calls in sick whenever he has meetings to 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's got does try to do this guy. He sucks so bad. He sucks. He's one of the shittiest people we've ever I know this is like our reverse episodes about getting to the heroes,

but this guy sucks so hard. Um, he may be the shittiest slave captain of all of the slave captains. [clears throat] It's a high bar. Um,

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, FOR A MILD PROFIT. That'll do it. Um, so when he does and he 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 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.

Such a sketch. Can't even [ __ ] read. Jesus, man. Wow. Tribe that ran. Can you imagine that he'd have written down otherwise?

Yeah. If he could if Yeah. if he could actually write. Now the local tribe that ran things in because the British have a small presence here. They are mostly reliant upon local allies as is generally 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 font are a crucial part of that, too. And so, everyone else who has this job is very nice to these people cuz they outnumber you and you've given them guns and you're reliant on them for food. Can see where

this is going, Robin. It's just a bad idea to piss them off. Stubs 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 a it's like a goodwill thing right to keep like here's some liquor keep being our friends you know Stubs 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. Yeah. He at least he's very bad at being evil. He sucks so bad at this.

Now, I think 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 cuz they need them, you know?

Right. We've sold them guns. I can't emphasize enough. We've sold them guns. Um, in October of 1780, Stubs has a meeting with an emissary of the king of the Ashanti Empire. Uh, and that 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 Stubs is supposed to preside over the signing of a treaty with the Ashante. 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.

Can I guess what happened? He keeps the gifts. He uses them to buy slaves. That's exactly what I was like I was like, "Nobody's getting those gifts."

He He has one. Somebody Yeah, he has one move. Steal things and buy slaves. Yeah.

And get captured by the French. I guess this is Yeah, he's I guess he has another move. This spells the end of his career as governor. Uh he was deposed violently and robbed of most of his illgotten possessions. Like the other white people don't even wait to get the order to depose him. Like we got to 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.

Um yeah. So they they depose him. They lock him in a cell. They take all of his illgotten gains, which includes a bunch of gold that he'd put together based on his fraudulent transactions, about $15,000 in modern money, worth of gold, and Stubs 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, you stole that [ __ ] You stole all of it." Luckily for Stubs, a slaving vessel named the William arrives at the fort not long after he gets taken into custody. And you know, they the crew of the boat goes into the fort and one of the members of the crew was a higher ranking crew member, the ship's surgeon, a guy named Luke Collingswood, meets Stubs. And again, Stubs just has some sort of charm for a certain kind of person because within it sounds like hours, maybe days of meeting Stubs.

Collingswood is so charmed that he convinces the captain, we got to take this guy back with us as a passenger to to England, right? Like, we got to put him on the boat with us, you know, and get him out of here. He's being unfairly treated. It's a bad situation for him. Um if there's one human being at that time you don't want on your slave vessel, surely it's stubs.

Absolutely not. The last man average is very poor. Yeah. So, and again, he's just got to this is going to be the he's got to continue having like the worst record on a boat. Um, now I think he probably Stubs probably promises Collings with some of his money that he's totally going to get back. I don't know what they say, but Stubs' 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 going to happen, you know. Yeah.

Um, where's George at this point? He stole from two kings. Jesus Christ. Yeah. What's happened to George? Is is is little George on the boat? Like, great great question, George. You would think. You would think Dubsy departing the fort where he had been imprisoned would take his 12-year-old with him. HE DOES NOT.

HE DOES NOT. AND we don't know. He abandoned the 12-year-old. He abandons his 12year-old at the port.

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 just forgets he has a son.

God, [gasps] cool guy. I guess the optimistic maybe George is like, "Fuck no, I'm not getting on a boat with you."

Yeah. Hopefully, George is like, "I would love to be on another continent from my father." Like this is ideal for me.

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 cuz we can do that? You can just make money to have a job." And he's like, "What? Really? Really? That's an option?

Yeah, I didn't know how that works. [ __ ] My dad told me it was illegal for kids to make money.

Goes on an apology tour and uh yeah, recovers to Stub's name maybe. So elsewhere, kind of at the same period of time Stubs is being deposed as governor, a British privateeer, right? Cuz 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 the the government starts giving, you know, licenses to privateeers, which are private boats that are basically pirates that are endorsed by the government, right? And one of these privateeers 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 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 zork zq u e is also common. Um but Sidarththa uses the the zorg which I think is its original name. Um 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 slaveship. uh seems like an not a well-fitting name, but okay.

Uh the owner of the William. So this the this gets taken by privateeers and this you know this privateeer 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 a basically a major slave owning uh trading company, right? And the the captain of the boat is like, well, I've got some petty cash here. If I buy the Zorg at opt 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 the Zorg from the William

and we can take even more enslaved people back. Right? So that's what happens. He he buys the Zorgat op auction. It was loaded with 244 people uh like enslaved people in the in the hold at the time that they buy it. Um and because they don't have that many sailors, they're kind of just sticking a minimal crew on it. So that the Zorg is not going to be crewed by enough people, right? Like it's it's it's not an ideal load. And they don't have 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 the ship surgeon the captain of the zorg right

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 thought think he would have been good at it he's a doctor.

Yeah. He doesn't know how to navigate for [ __ ] Like, yeah, he's not particularly good at leadership, you know. He's he's good at cutting into people, you know.

Um I don't even think he's a very good doctor, right? And he's never captain a vessel before. And again, the the first mate that he's put with on this skeleton crew is an experienced seaman and navigator, but the two of a falling out. Collinswood does not get along with this guy and he's confined to quarters for a sizable chunk of the journey.

To make Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Put the guy who knows how to find [clears throat] stuff in the hole.

Yeah. We'll work it out. To 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 wreaking hold as they begin their journey. Right. So, this is 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 going to be getting sick. There's not going to be enough food and water right?

Great. Good decisions. Illness is going to be everywhere. Yeah. Maybe too heavy. Also, like it's sitting too low in the water or whatever. Maybe too heavy. It's got to be slower. Uh, the ship encounters bad weather immediately. Illness spreads rampantly throughout the crew and the enslaved people in the hold. Collings would very quickly get 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 [ __ ] up navigating cuz he's like hallucinating and puking and [ __ ] himself to death while he's trying to like work a sexant and figure out longitude or whatever. Right. Um, now because he's [ __ ] up, the ship keeps getting lost and you know the weather being bad hurts with that. So they're they're not getting into Jamaica. Like it 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, right?

Perfect. Um 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 who to run a boat, he makes Robert Stubs the captain.

Stubs is back. Of course he is back in charge. He's like a boomer down. So the first mate, Kelsaul, protests. And again, one of the last command decisions Collingswood makes is he forces Kellisol to be confined confined to quarters and also orders him to stop updating his log book, which suggests that he and he and like Stubs 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 Kel right now. For weeks, the Zorg sails without a real captain, going increasingly off course as the water supplies dwindle. Things get so bad that they have to free Kelsol from confinement cuz they're like, "Someone who knows what they're doing has, we're going to die. We're literally going to 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 to stretch their supplies by throwing dozens of enslaved passengers into the ocean.

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

Yeah, that's that's their immed 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. Um per car's book, The Zorg, quote, "The cabin windows on a typical frigot like the Zorg were no larger than 5 to six square ft. Once the woman's 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 Stubs, Collingwood, Kelsol, and the crew of the Zorg first stabbed her with a cutless 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 slaveold, 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 quote alive singly through the cabin windows into the sea and drowned.

That's horrific. Yeah. One of the ch one of the I mean, one of the women and one of the children they throw is a newborn baby who was born on the vessel.

They throw her and her mom into the sea. Um, and yeah, I mean it's it's just a nightmare. The Zorg ultimately docks in Jamaica on December 22nd, 1781. 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, right?

Um which hard to like 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? Yeah.

With the knowledge that they're just going to keep doing it. Yeah. Yeah. And that you have to that whatever you're doing is benefiting these [ __ ] monsters.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh after they within like a days of landing in Jama Jamaica, Luke Collingwood dies. Uh but Robert Stubs survives and he makes his way back to London where he brings the tale of what had happened. Stubsy, he's like a [ __ ] cockroach. You can't kill him.

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 Stubs doesn't get, you know, rich off this journey cuz he's not part of the crew, right? Um 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 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 going to help me, you know, get back in good and start making money off the slave trade again, right?" And the deal that he talks is, so

I need to set something up. Do you know where insurance comes from, James? As an industry,

boats, slavery. Okay. Specifically slavery. Yeah. Voids of London which started as a coffee house really gets going as a business ensuring slaveships right now sla boats in general that is a big part of insurance but ensuring the ensuring the slave trade is a huge part of a birth of insurance as an industry right um because it's an expensive proposition right you're filling this boat up you're buying all of the 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 a shitload of money right um 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 going to get money just because some slaves die on the boat because it's assumed that they will, right? You're jamming them in there. Illness is going to some crew are going to die, right? But catastrophes like a boat sinking in a storm or a slave uprising are insured. And so Stubs comes back and he's 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, well, this disaster hit us and we were going to run out of water. We had no option but to throw them overboard. That means their debts are payable. Like your insurance company owes you for them, right? Because it was an unavoidable necessity. So yeah,

that stubs his move and Greg'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 about30 each, these people who were murdered. The insurers fight back, not because they're good people, because they don't want to pay out any money. And there's a court case over this, Gregsson 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 they should 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 the the abolitionist movement in the US owes a lot to what happens in the wake of this horrifying case. Right. So we're going to talk about all that and more in parts two and three. James, how you feeling? Well not as Christmy as I expected coming coming on the the Happy Nice Guy Christmas episode. There's good guys in the other parts. Okay, good. I'm glad to hear that. Sorry. Yeah, I know. Good to uh talk about the the way that British people have covered themselves in glory throughout history.

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

it's not a book about British people particularly. I am in it. Uh so is Robert. Uh but yeah, I've written a book about anarchists at war. uh about Myanmar, Rojava, and the Spanish Civil War. Uh a bit less depressing than this episode was. You're going to find some some really inspiring people who I think have done really beautiful things.

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

Uh the pre-order link will be in our episode description. Yeah, just go and click that. It's quite reasonable. It's quite affordable right I think it's $18. Uh, so if you if you buy it now, it will arrive in late January. It's released on the 26th of January. Uh, so maybe you'll forget and it'll 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.

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

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "Part One: X-Mas Special: The Heroes Who Ended The Slave Trade | BEHIND THE BASTARDS"?

In order: 0:00 British Empire, James Stout, Atlantic slave trade, Against Estate; 10:00 Atlantic slave trade; 20:00 Atlantic slave trade, Liverpool; 30:00 Liverpool, Quakers, Atlantic slave trade, Chad Michael; 40:00 British Empire, The Zorg, Atlantic slave trade, Quakers; 50:00 British Empire, Ashanti Empire, Atlantic slave trade, Robert Stubs; 1:00:00 The Zorg, George Vlosich III, Robert Stubs; 1:10:00 The Zorg, Against the State, Myanmar, Robert Stubs.

What is mentioned in this Behind the Bastards episode?

19 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including The Zorg, Atlantic slave trade, British Empire, Liverpool, Quakers, Robert Stubs. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Part One: X-Mas Special: The Heroes Who Ended The Slave Trade | BEHIND THE BASTARDS"?

The episode runs 1 h 19 min; the transcript is about 15,612 words in 235 timestamped sections.

More from Behind the Bastards

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 7, 2026.