Trial of Pedro de Zulueta, jun., on a Charge of Slave Trading, under 5 Geo. IV, cap. 113, on Friday the 27th, Saturday the 28th, and Monday the 30th of October, 1843, at the Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey, London / A Full Report from the Short-hand Notes of W. B. Gurney, Esq.

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TRIAL OF PEDRO DE ZULUETA, JUN., ON A CHARGE OF SLAVE TRADING.
A Full Report from the Short-hand Notes of W. B. Gurney, Esq.
WITH AN ADDRESS TO THE MERCHANTS, MANUFACTURERS, AND TRADERS OF GREAT BRITAIN , BY PEDRO DE ZULUETA, JUN., ESQ. AND DOCUMENTS ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE CASE.
LONDON: C. WOOD & CO., POPPIN’S COURT, FLEET STREET. 1844.
LONDON C. WOOD & CO., PRINTERS, POPPIN’S COURT, FLEET STREET.
TO THE MERCHANTS, MANUFACTURERS, AND TRADERS OF GREAT BRITAIN.

The case, which will be laid before you in the following pages, must be admitted to be one of an unprecedented character.
The prisoner’s application to the Central Criminal Court to be admitted to bail was strenuously opposed by the prosecuting attorney in person, when the Court, yielding to the representation of the probable result of the refusal upon the members of an honourable family thus violently taken by surprise and distracted, granted the application on terms indeed which the Court itself deemed excessive, but which were the only terms to which the attorney’s consent could be obtained. It was found impossible, on account of the lateness of the hour, to meet with one of the two individuals who had been approved of by the attorney; and under these circumstances the Court consented to receive one security alone for 2,000 l. , and the prisoner’s own recognizance for 6,000 l. Thus it happened, that he who had left his home, his wife, and his children in the morning, with as assured a conscience as any of you can do, returned about ten o’clock in the evening a prisoner, with the possibility of a sentence of transportation hanging over his head, as ignorant of his accuser, or of the facts deposed to against him, as if he had fallen into the hands of the Inquisition.
The whole transaction, embracing the purchase and dispatch of the vessel Augusta, named in the indictment, had formed part of the subject of an examination, for which the house of Zulueta & Co. tendered themselves in the person of Pedro de Zulueta, before a Select Committee appointed in March, 1842, by the House of Commons, to inquire into the State of the British Possessions on the West Coast of Africa, and which was sitting in July and August, 1842, and the Report of whose proceedings had then been nearly a year before the public. Before that Committee, among several other witnesses, two officers of the navy (whose names may be seen on the back of the indictments), who had been in command of British cruizers on the African coast, and another individual, who it seems has discharged the duties of a Judge at Sierra Leone, appeared and were examined. Their examinations were published in the Report, and from thence are inserted in the following pages; but it should be observed that the last-mentioned of these three individuals did not appear in the prosecution, his evidence being inserted here only from the anxiety that a complete case should be placed before you.