On the Books

1501

The estimate. The Slave Voyages database holds 34,948 voyages, which the NEH calls an estimated 66 to 80 percent of all those that crossed the Atlantic; its estimates table covers 1501 to 1866. By that estimate about 12.5 million people were put aboard and about 10.7 million survived, so about 1.8 million did not. Reuters, in 2020, wrote of “about 17 million” taken from their homes between the 15th and 19th centuries, without saying who counted. This story follows the money: who owned the ships, who insured the people aboard, who lent against them, and what those firms and schools say now.

Nov 1781

The Zong, 1781. The Zong left São Tomé for Jamaica with about 440 captive people and 19 crew, Burnard counts, where a ship of its size usually carried around 250. Its captain, Luke Collingwood, was a surgeon who had never commanded a slave vessel. About 60 had already died when, on 29 November, with leaking water casks and a wrong landfall, the ship lay off south-west Jamaica with 380 left alive and four days of rationed water.

29 Nov 1781

The first fifty-four. On 29 November the crew took 54 women and children from the hold and threw them overboard, Burnard writes; no man was killed in that first act. On 1 December they took 42 men, and later 26 more; ten people leapt into the sea. Burnard, who calls these murders, counts 132 forced or driven overboard, and writes that “There was no insurrection on the Zong.” He adds that 36 more had died by landing, with 30 left dead on the decks, and 208 people were sold at Black River on 22 December. Kelsall said that, as the killing went on, one captive begged for the rest.

Mar 1783

The claim. The owners were a Liverpool syndicate led, the Insurance Museum says, by William Gregson. They claimed £30 a head from their underwriters, whose lead was Thomas Gilbert; he refused to pay. The owners’ own declaration in court spoke of 60 who died of thirst, 40 who leapt, and “150 other negroes” thrown overboard, a different count from Burnard’s. At a jury trial in March 1783 they won £3,660, for 122 people insured at £30 each.

22 May 1783

The King’s Bench. On 22 May 1783 the insurers’ counsel argued that the crew had expected a bad market and took the means of “transferring the loss from the owners to the underwriters.” The owners’ counsel answered: “Nor was it the fact that the slaves were destroyed in order to throw the loss on the underwriters.” The judges ordered a new trial, because the loss was not as the owners had pleaded it and because of killings after the rain. Burnard judges that the killing “seems to make more sense as an insurance scam” than as a defence against revolt, and writes that throwing people overboard to claim insurance “happened with regularity.” That is one historian’s view.

19 Mar 1783

Equiano and Sharp. On 19 March 1783 Olaudah Equiano called on Granville Sharp with news of the case. Sharp tried to bring the guilty men to justice, and failed: “nobody was ever prosecuted for the murders,” the London Museum writes. Collingwood, by the mate’s account, died at Kingston soon after the sale, and the owners never got their money. The court’s report notes later statutes barring recovery “against loss by throwing overboard on any account whatsoever.”

1807

On the books. Reuters wrote that the market of the time saw people as “cargo,” included in the general rate. Historians estimate, Reuters wrote in 2023 without naming one, that between a third and two-thirds of the British marine insurance market rested on the slave trade in the 18th century. Lloyd’s was a market of individual underwriters, each taking a share of a risk; the earliest ledger the Black Beyond Data project found is an underwriter’s risk book of 1807. The sources used here do not place the Zong’s underwriter, Thomas Gilbert, at Lloyd’s.

1764

The Sally, 1764. The brigantine Sally sailed from Providence in 1764, the year the College of Rhode Island, later Brown University, was chartered. It belonged to Nicholas Brown and Company, four brothers; Esek Hopkins commanded. On the eighth day out the captives rose, and the ship’s book records: “Slaves Rose on us was obliged fire on them and Destroyed Eight and Several more wounded badly.” Brown’s own report counts 108 dead of the 196 acquired. Three brothers then withdrew from running slave voyages; the report judged that their action “appears to have been motivated more by economic than moral qualms.”

1795

The Hope, 1795. John Brown, the college’s treasurer and a chief benefactor, sent the Hope to the Gold Coast; the report calls the voyage “a profitable one.” The Providence Abolition Society prosecuted him, in part through his own brother Moses. The ship was impounded, but a jury acquitted him, with costs against the society. The committee notes that the judge and prosecutor “were both longtime allies” of Brown on the college’s Corporation. No transcript survives.

1833

1833. Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act. Britain paid the owners £20 million, paid the enslaved nothing, and did not finish repaying the debt until 2015. Those over six became apprentice labourers who “were to work without compensation,” the National Archives writes, until 1838. University College London’s database counts about 47,000 claimants for about 670,000 enslaved people in the British Caribbean.

1835

The loan. Full Fact reports that a syndicate led by the bankers Nathan Mayer Rothschild and Moses Montefiore raised £15 million of the £20 million, and £5 million was paid in government stock; a Bank of England staff paper of 2022, giving its authors’ views, says the same. It was a public loan to pay the owners after abolition was law, not money for the trade. The historian Nicholas Draper told the Tax Justice Network: “we don’t know how much they retained and how much they distributed or sub-underwrote.” The Treasury says the debt was rolled into an undated gilt, redeemed in 2015.

1838

1838. The Jesuits’ Maryland Province sold 272 people from its plantations in southern Maryland, among them Isaac Hawkins, 65, listed first, with his children and relatives. Georgetown says its presidents Thomas Mulledy and William McSherry “administered the 1838 sale” and that the proceeds went to the Province and were used to pay off debts at the university. Georgetown and the Jesuits say 272; the student paper The Hoya writes of 314. The Georgetown texts used here give no price or buyers. They are separate bodies, the university and the Province, and both later apologised.

16 Apr 1862

Washington, 1862. Congress passed and Lincoln signed an act freeing about 3,000 enslaved people in the capital and paying owners up to $300 each. One was Philip Reid, 42, who was then casting the Statue of Freedom for the Capitol dome; his owner’s petition valued his life at $500. Some owners tried to keep people in bondage, and a supplementary law of July 1862 let those people petition for themselves. They found freedom, the National Park Service says, but received no payment.

1831

On the books of two banks. In 2005, after a Chicago ordinance required its contractors to research their past, JPMorgan Chase said that two Louisiana banks, Citizens and Canal, took about 13,000 enslaved people as collateral and came to own about 1,250 after defaults. The Associated Press notes that the disclosure “did not make clear what happened to those people.” The banks merged in 1924 and failed in 1933; the BBC’s timeline has Chase Bank taking control of Canal in 1931, and the AP says a bank formed in 1933 from some of their assets was a precursor of Bank One, which JPMorgan bought in 2004. The bank called itself a “very different company” and set up $5 million in scholarships. The line to today is traced here by the AP and the BBC, not the letter itself.

9 Mar 2000

Aetna. In March 2000 Aetna said that shortly after its founding in 1853 it “may have insured the lives of slaves,” with benefits paid to owners. Its records showed “no more than a dozen” such policies, but it had “limited and incomplete information” on its archives. It noted the policies were legal before abolition, said it would make no reparations, and had “concluded that no further actions are required at this time.” The lawyer Deadria Farmer-Paellmann argued the policies’ profits helped make Aetna a multibillion-dollar company, and that it had “a moral obligation to apologize and share that wealth.”

26 Jan 2004

The suit. Descendants sued a group of corporations in federal court in Chicago for reparations. Aetna and the Society of Lloyd’s were among the defendants; the Clearinghouse counts eighteen, NPR 19. On 26 January 2004 Judge Norgle dismissed the case, without prejudice. He did so again in 2005, with prejudice. On 13 December 2006 the Seventh Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Posner, upheld the dismissal on standing but sent the consumer-protection claims back. The Supreme Court denied review, and the docket closed in 2011.

18 Jun 2020

Lloyd’s answers. Lloyd’s apologised in 2020. Then it opened its ledgers. Black Beyond Data at Johns Hopkins, funded by the Mellon Foundation, found that one underwriter’s 1807 risk book covered at least a third of the slaving voyages leaving Britain that year, a share it said could be an undercount, and that Joseph Marryat, Lloyd’s chairman from 1811 to 1824, had enslaved people. Lloyd’s said it had no editorial control. In 2023 it said it would invest £40 million, in development-bank bonds, in regions affected by the slave trade, and about £12 million in recruitment and education. “There’s no way to compensate for the damage that has been done,” said Junior Garba of Equity, calling it “a good starting point.”

Feb 2007

Brown answers. In 2003 President Ruth Simmons asked a committee to report on Brown’s ties to slavery; it was not asked to decide whether Brown should pay reparations. Brown made no apology: the committee wrote that its members “have different opinions about the propriety and value of an institutional apology,” and asked for acknowledgement instead. Brown’s 2007 response promised a revised history, a research center, a memorial, and a $10 million endowment for Providence schools, with free tuition for master’s students who commit to teaching there.

18 Apr 2017

Georgetown answers. On 18 April 2017, with about 100 descendants present, the Jesuits and Georgetown apologised. Fr. Timothy Kesicki said the Society “prays with you today because we have greatly sinned,” and asked forgiveness while saying it had “no right to it.” President DeGioia called slavery “the original evil of our Republic” and offered the apology “humbly and without expectation.” In 2019 students voted 66.1 percent for a $27.20 fee for descendants; the university did not adopt it, and instead announced a $400,000 reconciliation fund, The Hoya reports. This story follows Georgetown no further than 2021.

26 Apr 2022

Harvard. Belinda served Isaac Royall for forty years, the Brown report says; in 1783 she petitioned for a share of his estate. His family’s Antigua sugar plantation, the Harvard report says, furnished the wealth that endowed Harvard’s first chair in law. Harvard’s committee found its presidents, leaders, faculty and staff enslaved more than 70 people between 1636 and 1783, among them Titus, Venus, Juba and Bilhah, who served Presidents Wadsworth and Holyoke. President Bacow wrote that Harvard “benefited from and in some ways perpetuated practices that were profoundly immoral,” but, the Washington Post noted, his statement “stopped short of an apology.” The Corporation authorized $100 million, part for current use and the rest an endowment.