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An Anglican clergyman best remembered as the author of the hymn Amazing Grace, John Newton was engaged in the slave trade for the first thirty years of his life and made several voyages as the captain of slave ships. In 1755, after suffering a severe stroke, he turned away from seafaring and pursued a path to the priesthood. His memoir offers a remarkable, no-holds-barred account of the African slave trade, as well as an account of his struggle between Christian religion and the flesh.
John Newton, born in 1725, went to sea at age eleven with his father to train to become a slave master on a Jamaican sugar plantation. In 1788 he finally denounced the appalling conditions of the slave ships and died in 1807.
Praise for Slaver Captain
“[Slaver Captain] will appeal to ordinary readers and to students seeking an approachable way to get to the human side of the slave trade. Newton’s religiosity may take some explaining to the uninitiated but his vivid descriptions of the horrors of the Middle passage, both while he was doing it and after his conversion, remain worth reading.”
— International Journal of Maritime History, June 2012
