On 7 June 1792, at the Admiralty Sessions held at the Old Bailey, the trial of John Kimber set two irreconcilable narratives of the voyage of the Recovery against one another. The surgeon, Thomas Dowling, and former mate Stephen Devereux described acts of violence committed upon a young female captive, followed by her death a few days later. The defence, for its part, set their depositions against a backdrop of shipboard quarrels, disputed wages, and accusations of mutinous conduct. The jury acquitted Kimber upon both indictments. That decision closed the proceedings; it did not, however, efface the contradictions of the printed pamphlets, nor did it restore a voice to the women whose fates were debated before the bench.
The vessel had sailed from Bristol in 1791 bound for the African coast. According to the opening address for the prosecution, the Recovery reached the Calabar River in early June, departing Africa with its human cargo at the beginning of September. Among those embarked was a girl of some fourteen or fifteen years of age—an estimate which, according to the surgeon Thomas Dowling, had been given him by the man who bought her. She suffered from a venereal disorder and lay in a lethargic state, the cause of which, Dowling deposed, he was never able to ascertain. The record preserves neither her name nor that of her kin.
The prosecution described a punishment which allegedly began with the lash and proceeded to suspensions by means of a tackle. In his opening statement, Sir William Scott explained that the young woman ate less than the other captives, and that the other women, apprehensive of her disease, refused to eat in her company. About six days before her death, Kimber was alleged to have ordered that she be bound and hoisted by one arm, then by the other, while a ship’s boy pulled violently upon her legs. She was then said to have been suspended by each leg in turn, the captain flogging her throughout. On the following morning, she was reportedly found seized with convulsions, dying after three days in that extremity.
Such was the sequence of events the Crown undertook to establish. Dowling, surgeon of the Recovery, delivered his version under oath, yet his own answers rendered the matter far less straightforward than the prosecutor’s opening. He reckoned the girl to have been fourteen or fifteen; she had been ailing ever since her arrival on board, and her complaints appeared stationary. He swore that she could not join the others in the ship’s exercises, that Kimber flogged her repeatedly, and that a suspension took place after their departure from Calabar. He placed the incident about three weeks out to sea, toward the close of September, though he admitted he could fix upon no precise day.
Dowling then related what he claimed to have witnessed: the young woman was hoisted several times by the arms and then by the legs; suspended by both hands, she was allegedly whipped by Kimber. She descended a few steps toward the steerage and slipped the remainder of the way. The following day, Dowling found her convulsed and attempted to administer volatile salts; she was unable to swallow the remedy and expired after several days. He attributed the convulsions to the beating, and her demise to the convulsions. This was his medical conjecture, not the result of an autopsy or an independent diagnosis.
The cross-examination fastened upon what Dowling had recorded, sworn, and suppressed. His journal concerned the white passengers alone, not the African captives; the death was nowhere mentioned therein. He claimed to have refused to swear to an incomplete log, yet the counsel for the defence read an affidavit affirming it to be “just and true.” Dowling could not recall signing it, though his name appeared upon the face of it, and he admitted having presented the journal to the customs at Grenada. Interrogated as to who might have seen the punishment, he replied that a bulkhead upon the deck prevented a portion of the crew from witnessing the scene.
The nature of their personal relations was likewise probed. Dowling admitted having struck Kimber after being struck himself, whereupon he was placed in irons for four-and-twenty hours and relegated before the mast. He contested the promise of a “privilege slave”—a share of the cargo that ought to have accrued to him—and demanded his arrears of wages. He denied having threatened to ruin the captain, insisting he had spoken merely of exposing him for his ill-usage and withheld pay. He disclosed the death neither at Grenada nor upon his return to Bristol. He imparted the tale to a Birmingham banker, and subsequently to William Wilberforce, only after being approached regarding another incident at Calabar, on the eve of a speech in the Commons.
The second witness, Stephen Devereux, had served aboard the Wasp before joining the Recovery as third mate. He likewise described several suspensions and floggings. He swore he heard Kimber call the girl “sulky” and refuse her any assistance in getting below. On the morrow, Devereux allegedly helped her back onto the deck; she appeared, by his account, feeble and covered with bruises. He believed the ill-treatment had caused her death. Yet he conceded having spoken with great delicacy before the magistrate, and acknowledged he had not alerted the harbour master at Bristol. Neither testimony arose from an immediate deposition upon the ship’s return.
Kimber’s counsel directed their assault against Devereux’s credibility as well. He denied having been convicted of mutiny aboard the Wasp, but admitted having been discharged for giving the captain the lie. Defence witnesses described a meeting of shipmasters, charges to which Devereux was said to have assented, and his subsequent dismissal for insubordination. The printed report gives no access to the minutes of that meeting; it merely sets the accusations brought against him beside his denial. Nor do the two contemporary published accounts render his statements in precisely the same manner. It would therefore be incautious to convert this disciplinary dispute into conclusive proof that he had fabricated his testimony regarding the young woman.
The defence then called Walter Jacks, part-owner of the Recovery, Thomas Laughter, William Riddle, Captain Thomas Phillips, and Thomas Lancaster. Jacks testified that Dowling, having received his final wages, had denounced Kimber as a rascal and vowed he would ruin him. Laughter and Riddle reported similar menaces, arising from the dispute over the privilege slave and the captain’s conduct toward his surgeon. Dowling denied these utterances before the court. Phillips, who had known Kimber for many years, portrayed him as a man of humanity and good humour; he suggested, moreover, that the oranges and plantains served to the captives might well induce bowel complaints. These depositions served to vindicate the master; they did not constitute an expert medical judgment upon the precise cause of death.
The roll of witnesses could not of itself reconstruct the Middle Passage. Devereux deposed that the ship’s boys, Pearson and Crews, were present; Dowling named them as well, yet neither boy was examined at the trial. The witnesses disagreed as to how many persons stood in view, the manner of the girl’s descent into the hold, and the duration of her survival. They concurred as to the suspensions and her death, but the defence suggested they had concerted their narratives; Devereux denied the charge.
A second count in the indictment concerned the death of another enslaved woman. Stalker’s pamphlet announced upon its title-page that Kimber was prosecuted for two murders; Lane’s account describes the second indictment as a similar charge, supported by the same witnesses, without setting forth an independent narrative. It permits us neither to identify this second woman, nor to ascertain the circumstances of her end, nor to assign with certainty each detail heard at trial to her specific case. The jury acquitted the captain of this charge as well. This divergence between the title-page, which lends the affair a wider scope, and the extreme brevity of the second count must remain apparent.
Following the final depositions, the jury declared themselves satisfied; the court delivered no summing-up of the evidence. Both counts terminated in verdicts of not guilty. Upon the motion of Mr Pigott, counsel for the defence, Dowling and Devereux were committed to Newgate to answer indictments for wilful and corrupt perjury. This committal was not a conviction for perjury, and the pamphlet records nothing of the eventual outcome of those proceedings. It rendered striking, nevertheless, the total reversal of the courtroom: the trial of the captain concluded, the word of his accusers had in turn become the object of criminal process.
The two pamphlets printed in 1792 frame this trial in diametrically opposed fashions. That published by C. Stalker, attributed to an Impartial Observer of the Temple and presented as taken in shorthand, condemns the slave trade, holding up the affair as an abolitionist lesson; that of William Lane presents itself as a vindication of Kimber against the “declamation” of the abolitionists and celebrates the acquittal. Both contain detailed accounts, yet they remain partisan tracts rather than dispassionate official transcripts. They diverge even upon the calendar: the indictment printed by Lane places the incident on 22 September and the death on the 27th; Stalker’s edition prints “22d of December,” an impossibility given the Recovery’s arrival at Grenada in October, which the same text records. In the present narrative, the September date given in Lane’s indictment and depositions has been retained, while the discrepancy is noted in the documentary commentary.
Upon its final leaf, Lane insists upon the brilliance of the acquittal; Stalker invites the public to draw its own conclusions from the proceedings. The jury determined a question of criminal guilt upon the testimonies laid before them; the text preserves neither the names of the two women, nor their voices, nor any mention of their kin. In a traffic that reduced them to mere “cargo,” this silence is no trifling detail: it circumscribes all that the historical narrative can presume to know. The judicial determination is absolute; that which it could never suffer to be heard belongs to another story, to which these printed leaves lend no voice.