John Kimber was the captain of a British slave ship who was tried

 John Kimber was the captain of a British slave ship who was tried for murder in 1792, 



after the abolitionist William Wilberforce accused him of torturing to death an enslaved teenaged girl on the deck of his ship. Kimber was acquitted,
but the trial gained much attention in the press. The case established that slave ships' crew could be tried for murder of slaves.Publicity about the case contributed to growing opposition to the
African slave trade, which the British parliament prohibited in its colonies by the Slave Trade Act 1807.In 1791, John Kimber was the captain of Recovery, a slave ship of 189 tons (bm) from Bristol, England.[1] The Recovery travelled from Bristol to New Calabar in West Africa, where it collected approximately 300 slaves who were to be sold at Grenada in the Caribbean. The vessel left Africa on 1 September, and arrived at Grenada on 28 October, by which time 27 of the slaves had died.[2]

"Dancing the slaves" was a regular part of the routine of a slave ship on the Middle Passage; the captain and crew forced slaves to exercise in an effort to decrease the mortality rate caused by the extremely cramped and unhygienic conditions below decks. Those who refused to take part in the dancing were flogged with a cat o' nine tails.[3]

On 2 April 1792, William Wilberforce made a speech to parliament at the end of a debate on the abolition of the slave trade.[4] He gave two examples of the atrocities associated with the slave trade, in order to appeal to the sympathy of fellow members of parliament. Firstly, he described an attack on Calabar by British slave ships, which bombarded the city in order to force its traders to lower the price of slaves.[5] The second example was the case of Captain Kimber, whom Wilberforce said had murdered a teenaged slave girl on his ship for refusing to dance for exercise. Kimber was said to have repeatedly lashed the girl and to have had her several times suspended by one leg and then dropped to the deck of the ship. Following this maltreatment, she died.

In his speech, Wilberforce emphasised the innocence of the girl. He downplayed the captain's claims (subsequently reported in the press) that she suffered from an unidentified preexisting medical condition causing lassitude and that she had gonorrhea.[6] Isaac Cruikshank's depiction of Kimber's assault on a "virjen," in his image published at the time, also emphasises her innocence in the face of the captain's aggression and moral corruption.[6]

On 7 April 1792, Kimber placed advertisements in several newspapers proclaiming his innocence.[6] The charges against Kimber were soon reported in the press, as were accounts of his trial beginning in June 1792. Such reports rapidly crossed the Atlantic and were published in ten American newspapers.[6]

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