"I know about hiding...
I know about long days and
years of deliberate and
desperate hiding."

John Newton was born in London, the son of the commander of a merchant ship which sailed the Mediterranean. At the age of 11 he went to sea with his father, and made 6 voyages with him.

At the age of 19, Newton was forced into service on H.M.S. Harwich. However, finding conditions intolerable, he deserted, but was soon recaptured, publicly flogged and demoted from midshipman to common seaman.

Then, he found service on a slave ship. At the age of 23, he was rescued by a captain who had known his father. Ultimately, he would become captain of his own ship, plying the slave routes off the coast of Sierra Leone.

Newton experienced a famous and dramatic conversion at sea. Nonetheless, he later captained his first slave ship and continued in the slave trade for several years. He tried to be a suitably Christian master by reducing the punishments meted out to slaves and holding services on Sundays. Newton's sense of shame and ultimate support for the cause of abolition only came late in his life.

In 1750, John Newton set sail for West Africa from Liverpool. He was on the first leg of the 'Triangular trade'. His cargo of cheap cloth, brandy, muskets, kettles, mirrors and glass beads would be used to buy 200 human beings.

Shackled together, in a hold 40 by 15 feet and 5 feet high, many of those men, women and children would die. The terrible journey, known as the Middle Passage, lasted about 60 days and during it, or during the 'seasoning' period on the plantations, 50% of the original human ‘cargo’ was expected to perish. Yet there were still enormous profits to be made — the slaves would be replaced by a cargo of West Indian produce, principally sugar, which was then run back to Liverpool on the ‘final leg’ of the voyage.

John Newton later became a minister of the Church and an abolitionist. It was reports by men like him that stimulated opposition to a barbarous and immoral trade, but initially it was only a small band who fought to end the system. It was led by William Wilberforce and supported in parliament by William Pitt the Younger and Charles James Fox.

At a time when the means of mass communication were in their infancy, and with much of Britain’s power and wealth lined up against them, they conducted a campaign of mass protest. After a long struggle, it led to the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. The slave trade had made Britain vast profits, but Africa had lost 40 million men, women and children.