Granville Sharp's Uncovered Letter and the Zong Massacre

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Granville Sharp’s Uncovered Letter and the Zong Massacre Michelle Faubert Granville Sharp’s Uncovered Letter and the Zong Massacre Michelle Faubert University of Manitoba Winnipeg, MB, Canada

ISBN 978-3-319-92785-5 ISBN 978-3-319-92786-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92786-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018942883

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This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland I dedicate this book to the murder victims of the Zong, the 208 survivors—including the man who survived by laying hold of a rope to save himself—and all Jamaicans, who embody his spirit of fortitude today. Preface and Acknowledgements

I discovered Granville Sharp’s two-part manuscript missive to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty at the British Library in May of 2015 while performing research for an article of literary criticism, my usual focus as a professor of Romantic-era literature at the University of Manitoba (Canada) and Visiting Fellow at Northumbria University (UK). I had only a passing knowledge of the history of slavery and abolition then, but it was enough to recognize the signifcance of the names “Granville Sharp” and “the Zong.” My colleague at the University of Manitoba, Dana Medoro, had told me about the Zong massacre some years before—and, like so many others who hear this history, I was so shaken that it was seared into my memory and I sought out more information about it. Thanks to this experience, I recognized the signifcance of the mysterious manuscript I held in my hands at the British Library that day. After fnding the Sharp manuscript at the British Library, I became nearly obsessed with it and the history of the Zong. I felt like a sleuth as I slowly traced the document’s strange provenance—and, like the Wedding Guest in S. T. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, I felt “sadder and wiser” the more I learned about the horrors of the Zong massacre and the injustices of the court case that followed. As a Romanticist, I knew that slavery was a major aspect of the spirit of revo- lution and discussion of human rights that imbued the age, but I had not considered its infuence so deeply before. I threw myself into my research with a verve I had not felt previously. Here was my personal invitation

vii viii Preface and Acknowledgements from the past—or, rather, the manuscript demanded that I take respon- sibility for it, learn more about the Zong’s place in the history of slavery and abolition, and tell the story of Sharp’s mysterious manuscript as well as I could. My resulting publications have led to outcomes that I could not have imagined. My scholarly article on Sharp’s manuscript letter to the Admiralty at the British Library in Slavery & Abolition reached over seven hundred views online within a year, while a story about it in my University’s newspaper, UM Today, made it as far as Jamaica.1 There, Evelyn Smart read it and brought it to the Honourable Donna Parchment Brown, the Political Ombudsman of Jamaica, on account of the latter’s interest in the Zong episode. Parchment Brown contacted me about working with her and Vivian Crawford, Executive Director of the Institute of Jamaica, on a project to commemorate the Zong and I enthusiastically accepted. My resulting research trip to Jamaica in May of 2017 was a whirlwind of exciting and emotionally moving events. I lectured on three occasions in Jamaica, the frst as the main presenter at the Zong memorial in Black River, where the Zong landed in late 1783; for the second event, I presented a paper on my research into Sharp’s Zong missive at the University of West Indies in Kingston; the third event was my presentation at the Institute of Jamaica, also in Kingston, during which I also launched the exhibition on the BL document that I cre- ated for the Institute of Jamaica. The exhibition traveled to Black River in October 2017 for Jamaican Heritage Month. Two national television interviews and a talk-radio interview rounded out my incredible trip to Jamaica. Many people from several countries have encouraged me to write this book through their interest in and support for the project. I want to thank all of those who showed an early and enduring interest in this project, several of whom helped my research for it materially. James Walvin,

1Michelle Faubert, “Granville Sharp’s Manuscript Letter to the Admiralty on the Zong Massacre: A New Discovery in the British Library,” Slavery & Abolition 38, no. 1 (2016): 1–18. Some of the research in this book appears in the Slavery & Abolition article. Sean Moore, “Professor Finds Lost 232-Year Old Letter Condemning Slave Massacre,” UM Today, http://news.umanitoba.ca/professor-fnds-lost-232-year-old-letter-condemning- slave-massacre/, 19 August 2015, unpag. Preface and AcknoWLEDGEMENTS ix author of The Zong: A Massacre, the Law & the End of Slavery (2011)— the seminal monograph on the Zong case—has been hugely generous in advising me via e-mail and telephone conversations. Others include: James Basker, Sean Moore, Liesl Smith, Gad Heuman, Tim Lockley, Lyle Ford, Salvy Trojman, Andrew Lyall, Clark Lawlor, Alan Vardy, Chris Brown, Jenny Sharpe, Joel Fafak, Caroline Piotrowski, Marcus Closen, Anita King, Tom Schmid, Bob O’Kell, and Elyssa Warkentin. Most notably, Suzie Park and Charles Wharram, of Eastern Illinois University, invited me to present on the Zong massacre and my discovery of Sharp’s missive to the Admiralty for the 27th Annual Lecture of the Phi Beta Kappa Society in November of 2017. At Palgrave Press, I want to thank Megan Laddusaw and Christine Pardue, as well as the anon- ymous readers of the manuscripts, whose comments and suggestions improved the book immensely. Allan Ingram read a draft of this monograph; he caught several typos and responded enthusiastically to it, which gave me the boost of confdence I needed to fnish my task. As ever, Allan, I am deeply grateful to you for your support. Finally, Shoshannah Bryn Jones Square contributed to this book in multiple ways, not least of which was by helping me to copyedit it as part of her work for me as a Postdoctoral Fellow for my Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant (2015–2020). I cannot thank her enough for her great attention to detail and scholarly professionalism. Any remaining errors are my own. I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to the British Library, which so generously allowed me to reproduce their images of the Sharp manuscript free of charge in this volume for the Appendix (© British Library Board General Reference Collection T.35.(2), folios 1–15). Many knowledgeable and helpful staff members at the BL helped my investi- gation immeasurably, but I offer special thanks to Sandra Tuppen (Lead Curator of Modern Archives and MSS 1601–1850, British Library). I also want to thank the archivists and other employees at the various archives I consulted, including Graham Thompson (Archives Assistant, National Maritime Museum); George Hay (Military records specialist, Advice & Records Knowledge Department, The National Archives); Andrew Parry (Archives Assistant at the Gloucestershire Archives); Kirsty Farthing (Archives Assistant, York Minster Historic Collections Team); and others at the Wellcome Library and the Medical Society of London. I am moreover grateful to so many people in Jamaica who made my trip there the incredible success that it was: Donna Parchment Brown, x Preface and Acknowledgements

Vivian Crawford, and everyone at the Institute of Jamaica, including Sir Roy Augier. At the University of West Indies, I owe thanks to Michael Bucknor, Matthew Smith, Paulette Kerr, Verene Shepherd, Kim Robinson-Walcott, and James Robertson. Thanks are also due to all of those who attended or also presented at the multiple presentations in Jamaica, including students from the Black River Primary School—and their teachers, Roschelle Sheriff and Crisana Banton-Smith—the Junior Centre Drummers, representatives from Scotiabank at Black River, the Mayor of Black River Derrick Sangster, Canadian High Commissioner to Jamaica Sylvain Fabi, and so many others. Jamaican members of the media have helped to spread the word about the Zong episode, as well as my presentations on it, for which I am hugely thankful; they include Earl Moxam, Garfeld Myers, and the television staff and interviewers from CVM at Sunrise and Smile Jamaica. I am grateful to the University of Manitoba, as I developed a substan- tial portion of this monograph during a half-sabbatical in 2017. I offer a special note of thanks to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC): I made my discovery of the Sharp letter at the British Library and funded the trip to Jamaica through their generous award of a SSHRC Insight Grant (2015–2020). Finally, none of this work could have advanced without the love and support of my mom, Yvonne Faubert, and my husband, Javier Uribe, who was a tireless, curious, and excited audience for my endless rambling on this topic—and who played driver, security guard, and techie for the trip to Jamaica. Thanks, Javi.

Winnipeg, Canada Michelle Faubert Contents

1 Introduction 1 1 The Discovery of Granville Sharp’s Letter to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty on the Zong in the British Library: A Hidden Treasure Found 1 2 Overview 6

2 Equiano, Sharp, Mansfeld, and the Zong Massacre: History and Signifcance 13 1 The Zong Massacre: A Primer 14 2 Olaudah Equiano 22 3 Granville Sharp Versus Judge Mansfeld 27 4 The Zong Case: A Debated Legacy 44

3 The Provenance of the British Library Document 59

4 The British Library Document: The Defnitive Version of Sharp’s Letter on the Zong to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty 75

5 The Historical Signifcance of the British Library Document 99 1 The Burial of the British Library Document and the Truth of the Zong 100 2 (Re)Writing History 106 xi xii Contents

6 Conclusion: Revisiting the History of Abolition 117

Correction to: Equiano, Sharp, Mansfeld, and the Zong Massacre: History and Signifcance E1

Appendix: Transcription and Images of Sharp’s Missive to the Admiralty on the Zong at the British Library 123

Index 159 Epigraph

“Your writings, Sir, are not of trivial matters, but of great and essential things. … Therefore, we wish, for ourselves and others, that these valua- ble treatises … may be preserved and established as a monument or bea- con to guide and to warn men, lest they should depart from the paths of justice and humanity; and that they may … restrain the avaricious invad- ers of the rights and liberties of men, whilever the human race inhabits this earth below.”2

From the Sons of Africa to Granville Sharp

2 Quoted in Hoare, Memoirs, 374.

xiii Note on the Text (Appendix)

Appendix: Transcription and images of the BL document, Sharp’s manuscript of his letter to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. All oddities of grammar, spelling, and format are Sharp’s. I do not note these instances with a “sic”; nor do I attempt to replicate special formatting, such as fourishes and unusually large writing, but I do replicate extra spacing and unusual page orientation, such as centring, when possible. At the end of many lines in this document, Sharp includes a long dash to fll in the remaining space before the edge of the page, but these marks serve a merely aesthetic purpose; I only include dashes that function as punctuation. Another oddity of this manuscript is that, in keeping with the formatting style typical of publications in this period, Sharp includes quotation marks at the beginning of each new line of quoted words, rather than simply a single opening and closing set of quotation marks, as is typical today. Because I do not replicate each line length in my transcription, I use today’s method of marking off quota- tions. I strike through words so marked for deletion by Sharp (or appar- ently so, when it is done in the same ink as the rest of the document). Where marks or text have been added in pencil or different ink from the main text, I include this information through a footnote. Notably, such insertions are often diffcult to read, but I provide my best estimation of them.

xv xvi Note on the Text (Appendix)

I enclose in square brackets all of my own additions to the main text, which I include only when necessary for sense. I indicate when the square brackets are Sharp’s own. All Biblical references and other such contextual information I have adumbrated in footnotes in the transcription. The British Library (BL) document does not have page numbers, but I begin my own numbering of the document with the frst full page of the cover letter (1) and end it with the last page of the detailed document (15). I provide these numbers (in addition to the regular numbering of this monograph) in bold, marking the beginning of a new page with brackets and a slash ([/ page number]); in all of my references to the BL document in my discussion of the text, I refer to these numbers, rather than the page numbers of this monograph. Incidentally, the NMM document is numbered: the frst page of the cover letter is 95 and the last page of the detailed account is 110. In my in-text references to the NMM document, the page numbers accord with the document’s own numbers (95–110). I am grateful to Shoshannah Bryn Jones Square’s invaluable assistance in aiding me in the creation of the transcription of the BL document.