Latest / The Atlantic Slave Trade: Empire Built on Human Suffering — Fexingo History / The 1707 Slave Ship Mutiny of Thomas Gaines: Justice Denied
Transcript
- Lucas: We've covered a lot of slave ship revolts on this show — captives rising up against their captors. But today I want to talk about a mutiny of a very different kind: a revolt led by a white sailor against the slave trade itself. This is the story of Thomas Gaines. Luna: A white sailor leading a mutiny on a slave ship? That sounds almost impossible. Lucas: It does, but it happened in 1707, on the slave ship Elizabeth, owned by the Royal African Company. Gaines was a sailor, not a captive. And what he saw on that voyage changed him. The ship had taken on enslaved people from the Gold Coast — modern-day Ghana — and conditions were brutal. But the trigger for Gaines was a specific act of cruelty: the captain, John Williams, ordered a woman who was sick and 'useless' to be thrown overboard alive. Luna: Thrown overboard alive? That's murder. Lucas: Exactly. And under English law, killing an enslaved person was not technically murder — they were property, not persons. But Gaines saw it differently. He and a few other sailors, along with some of the enslaved, decided to take the ship. They captured Captain Williams and the officers, and then Gaines sailed the Elizabeth to Boston, of all places, expecting to be welcomed as a hero. Lucas: But Boston in 1707 was a colonial port deeply enmeshed in the slave trade. The local authorities didn't see a hero — they saw a pirate. Gaines and his men were arrested and tried in the Admiralty Court for piracy and robbery of the ship. Luna: Wait — piracy? They didn't steal anything. They took the ship from a murderer. Lucas: Legally, the ship belonged to the Royal African Company. By taking it, they had committed an act of robbery on the high seas — that's the definition of piracy. The court didn't care about the moral justification. The judge, Governor Joseph Dudley, was himself a shareholder in the slave trade. He made sure the trial was swift. Luna: What happened to them? Lucas: Gaines and his co-leaders were convicted and sentenced to death. They were hanged in Boston in March 1707. And here's the kicker: the enslaved people on board were simply returned to the ship and sold. The system absorbed the rebellion. Lucas: What's striking is that contemporary accounts — like the Boston News-Letter — barely covered it. There was one brief mention. It was as if the authorities wanted to erase this story, because it suggested that white sailors might side with the enslaved against the trade. Luna: So it was a threat to the entire economic order. Lucas: Exactly. And it wasn't an isolated incident. Sailors often had the worst jobs on slave ships — high mortality, brutal discipline — and many came to sympathise with the captives. But Gaines's case is unique because he went all the way — he actually seized the ship and sailed it to a British port, expecting justice. He miscalculated. Luna: If he had sailed to somewhere outside British control, maybe? Lucas: That's a fascinating counterfactual. He could have tried for Spanish Florida, where runaway slaves were sometimes given freedom. But he was a sailor, not a strategist, and Boston was home. He thought the law would back him up. Lucas: The case also highlights a legal loophole. Under English law, if you took a ship without authorisation, even for a just cause, it was piracy. There was no 'justifiable mutiny' defence. That wouldn't change for centuries. Luna: So the system was designed to protect the slave trade, even from its own people. Lucas: Absolutely. And that's the deeper lesson. We often think of the slave trade as something that persisted because of racism or greed, but it also persisted because of legal structures that made any challenge—whether by the enslaved or by white allies—an act of criminal rebellion. Lucas: Now, I want to step back for a moment. If this conversation has given you something new to think about — a different angle on how the slave trade was enforced — then know that this show stays ad-free because listeners like you choose to support it. The way to keep that going is simple: buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just a fact. Luna: Yeah, it's a small way to make a big difference for the show we both love. Lucas: Exactly. And speaking of legal structures — let me tell you about another case, just a few years later, that shows how the Admiralty courts handled claims of 'cargo theft' when enslaved people were thrown overboard. It connects directly to the Zong case we talked about in episode 141. Luna: Oh, the Zong — the insurance case. Lucas: Right. But before the Zong, there was a case in 1700 involving the ship Martha. The captain threw overboard 20 sick enslaved people, then claimed they had 'perished' due to a storm. The insurer argued it was fraud. The court ruled that throwing enslaved people overboard to save water or prevent disease was not covered by insurance — but only because the captain hadn't proved necessity. The principle that you could kill enslaved people in an emergency was upheld. Lucas: So the Gaines case and the Martha case together show two sides of the same coin. One punishes a white man for trying to stop the killing, the other punishes a captain for not following insurance rules. Both protect the commerce, not the humanity. Luna: It's chilling how consistent the logic is. Lucas: It is. And that's why the story of Thomas Gaines matters. He was a footnote, a forgotten rebel. But he saw clearly what the system was, and he acted. He lost, but his story survives as a reminder that the slave trade was not just opposed by the enslaved, but by some of the people who worked it. Luna: And it shows how hard it was to fight that system from within. Lucas: Exactly. Next time, we'll look at another mutiny — this one by the enslaved themselves, on a ship called the Little George, which we mentioned briefly in episode 141. That one actually succeeded.