The villain of our tale, Captain Kimber, is an accessible yet elusive figure; accessible in that you can find him on the internet within seconds, as the leering master of one of Isaac Cruikshank's memorable prints. There he is, whip in hand, ready to flog a female slave who is suspended from a pulley by only one leg. She is exposed to the gaze of sailors, helpless in her nakedness. The sailors themselves, a little nonplussed by the spectacle, seem reluctant voyeurs, and the one assigned the task of hoisting up the girl has a good mind to let her drop to the deck.

This print, ironically titled The Abolition of the Slave Trade, appeared a week after Wilberforce's exposure of the fatal flogging in the House of Commons on 2 April 1792. It is often used as an illustration in books on the transatlantic slave trade, and yet little is known about the incident. Apart from two brief forays into the rhetoric and reception of the event, we know little about it: about Kimber, about his slave ship, about the circumstances of the trial, the verdict, its legal implications and political ramifications. This micro-history aims to recover the story and its place in the first phase of the struggle to abolish the slave trade in Britain. It is a story of atrocity, of legal culpability, of a battle between abolitionists and pro-slave traders about the uses and abuses of evidence. It links the well-known figures of the abolition movement to the sailors who risked their lives and their livelihoods in exposing the brutal conditions of the slave trade and the horrors of the Middle Passage. It situates John Kimber, the captain of a Bristol ship, in the slipstream of local society and politics. It looks closely at the reasons why an abolition movement with such momentum in 1792 stalled in an era of revolutionary politics. In its last chapter it fans out to explain why Captain Kimber was criminally indicted for murdering an African girl during the Middle Passage when slaves were generally regarded as ‘cargo’. It compares the punishment of slaves to that of other marginal groups, specifically soldiers and sailors.