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.
A merchant, to all practical purposes a British merchant, the junior member of a firm of unquestioned respectability, in which his father and brother are active partners with himself, which has been established for upwards of seventy years in Spain, and of twenty in the City of London, during which period they have maintained, both as merchants and as individuals in private life, the character which will be found in the following pages to have been given them upon oath by several of the most eminent of their fellow-merchants—this individual finds himself suddenly arrested, in the manner hereafter described, within the precincts of his own private office, which is situated in the most conspicuous spot in the City of London, whilst in the pursuit of his ordinary business, upon a bench-warrant, as it is said (but which was never shown to, or has been since seen by him), a true bill having been found against him by the Grand Jury of the County of Middlesex. The charge will be found in the two indictments inserted in [pages 211] and [214], the former for felony, under the Act of 5 Geo. IV, cap. 113, entitled “An Act to amend and consolidate the Laws relating to the Abolition of the Slave Trade;” the latter for conspiracy, to do that which the former indictment describes as done, viz. “manning,” &c. &c., “and shipping certain goods on board a certain vessel, called the Augusta, for the purpose of dealing in slaves;” and the penalty, amounting, in fact, to a person in the rank and station of the accused and of his family, to a forfeiture of life, and those objects which are dearer than life itself. He is carried in custody to the police-station on Garlick Hill, where shortly afterwards, a London attorney, whose name he had never before heard, appears and prefers a charge of slave dealing. The prisoner is immediately conveyed to the Central Criminal Court, then sitting at the Old Bailey; there the two indictments are read to him pro formâ, for they leave him in utter ignorance of who the prosecutor is, or upon what depositions the Grand Jury had found the bill, although his defence, to be effectual, must be directed against them: they remain to this moment an undisclosed mystery, and no one is answerable for the accuracy of those statements, whilst who the prosecutor was, was only disclosed by the counsel for the prosecution at the trial, before the examination of the witnesses began.
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 2,000l., and the prisoner’s own recognizance for 6,000l. 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.
As it is in the power of every reader to verify the correctness of any observations that may be made upon the merits of the evidence given by these individuals before the Committee, it cannot be improper to call attention to the temper which evidently pervades it, not for the purpose of invective, but because it is a circumstance of very great practical application to the matter in hand. It is impossible not to be struck upon its perusal with the absolute recklessness of statement, both as to fact and theory. The most formidable conclusions are built upon the most slender foundations. Facts and theories are so mixed up together, that it is only after much sifting that it turns out that what was stated as fact was no more than a theory in the speaker’s mind; and these theories, too, embracing all questions, whether of commerce, of fiscal science, policy, legislation, international law, education, morals, and religion: after which, the character of individuals, or that of a commercial house, is no doubt a matter about which much circumspection cannot be expected to be exercised. The fate of Africa, the immense interests of British commerce, of the commerce of the world; the interpretation of existing laws, under which property, life, honour, may be forfeited; their modification and adjustment; public opinion with its powerful influence, so dangerous when misled, so difficult to be set right; all these awfully important matters seem to hang upon the lips of those two officers of the navy—and they do not seem to feel any hesitation in disposing of such momentous interests. Can it be expected that they would stop and consider before they make a statement regarding private individuals, even though they may happen to be, to say the least of it, accounted by the first men of this city, and in others of the first cities of the world, honourable by birth, profession, and personal character? The crime of which they would be guilty, were mere assertion to be taken as positive proof, is according to the witnesses so heinous, that it exceeds in their estimation almost every other, not only in the law of man, but in the law of God; and yet it is to be imputed upon their construction of some rumours which they themselves, it is quite possible, indeed very probable, may quite unconsciously have helped to mould into a shape by their readiness to accumulate this miscalled evidence. Whether this representation of the general character of the evidence given before the Committee by these individuals is, or is not, correct, may be seen at once by a reference to it in the following pages.
The first information, which any of the members of the house of Zulueta & Co. had of even the existence of the Committee, was the receipt of a letter (see [p. 1]) accompanying a copy of a lengthy Report, by a Dr. Madden, on the Coast of Africa, which called forth a reply (see [p. 5]) addressed by Zulueta & Co. to the Chairman of the Committee—a reply, which, in truth, contains the whole of their case, and to which they may well look back with just pride, since the keenest appetite for the discovery of guilt has not been able to detect one single circumstance contradictory of one tittle of its contents. Neither the examination before the Committee in 1842, nor the trial in 1843, circumstances which could not be foreseen or anticipated, have elicited one single fact at variance with the statements of that letter, impossible as it was to have contemplated at the time it was written, that its accuracy would be subject to so severe a test as either the examination before the Committee, which took place two months afterwards, or the trial, which did not occur till after the lapse of more than a year.
After that letter was sent, it became known to the house of Zulueta & Co. that further statements, unfavourable to their character as merchants, had been made before the Committee; and in consequence of a verbal representation of the unfairness of such mode of accusation, copies of the examinations of two of the witnesses were sent to them. The individual who now addresses you, then offered himself, at the request of his partners, to be examined, the selection of himself being made for no other reason than that he was thought more capable of making himself understood.