It was thus therefore that I, Pedro de Zulueta the younger, appeared before the Committee, and, as will be seen by the minutes of my evidence, entered into an examination of every statement which was brought before me as having been made by the witnesses concerning my house, contradicted several of them, explained others, and volunteered a description of the nature of the dealings of my firm with the two others (whose names had been flung at us) from the time of the establishment of Zulueta & Co. in London, twenty years ago. I also underwent a cross-examination, of which one very remarkable feature was, that Captain Denman himself, one of the witnesses against me both at this examination and at the trial, was sitting close to several members of the Committee, and was seen by me to whisper repeatedly into the ear of more than one member, what, it is not unnatural to suppose, may have been directions for the more effectual discovery of the truth.
I can hardly restrain the expression of my feelings when I consider now the use which has been made of the unreserved frankness, the unguarded, because unsuspecting, candour of the statements made by me before that Committee. The thought never occurred to me, that evidence, professedly taken for the benefit of the public service, required any thing more than substantive truth, and a general bearing upon the points in question; nor could I ever have conceived that it would be scanned with critical severity, in order to take advantage to my detriment of the worst construction that might be put upon this or that verbal slip, so as to place my very existence at stake upon it. I considered myself as doing nothing more than (whilst attempting to eradicate from the minds of the Committee any unfavourable impression, which might have been made upon them by incorrect statements against the character of my house) affording information for placing the legislation on the subjects before the consideration of the Committee on a more satisfactory basis—not by indulging in assertion of crude theories, or in vague declamations, but by the simple statement of a practical case—anxious to show in the instance of my house the situation in which a firm of acknowledged honour and respectability, whose private character, and the prominent political position of one of its members in another country, renders them at least very unlikely abettors of the slave trade—may yet be placed, because, living in England, they happen to have a mercantile intercourse with persons residing in places where this trade is unhappily one of the existing evils, and in which therefore those persons may be more or less implicated, inasmuch as it is well known that no trade whatever can be carried on with a country where the slave trade exists without its being, in some measure, of more or less direct assistance to this illicit traffic. And as the assertion which had been made against some of our correspondents tended, if true, to place this position of merchants in England in a very striking light, I did think that whilst the statements made might be true (and to disprove them could not be in my power nor in the power of any man in my situation) the proper and fair course was not to controvert the matter at all; but, taking the statements for granted, practically to direct the attention of the Committee to the position in which British merchants are left upon the very case itself, which was made out by the bitterest impugners of the character of British commerce.
I appeal to every man who reads my evidence before the Committee—without a previous determination to find out some one upon whom an experiment of the power of the Act of 5 Geo. IV may be tried, and a corroboration of the theory respecting the alleged existence of British slave trading—whether upon any other hypothesis, but that of conscious innocence or of consummate effrontery, my answers to the questions put by the Committee can be possibly reconciled with common sense or common prudence, much less be consistent with that deep skilfulness and far-seeing intelligence, which have been so lavishly attributed to me and to my partners for the purposes of my destruction.
Not for an instant, even when those outraged feelings, which have not been spared, possessed greatest sway over my mind, has the thought occurred to me, that at the time of my examination the object of any one member of the Committee, or even of Captain Denman himself (for I have alluded to the fact of his being present), could be the collecting materials for a secret accusation before a Grand Jury; and I wish very distinctly to protest against any such inference being drawn from my remarks, not for the sake of the members of the Committee, who are above being injured by insinuations, but for my own sake, who alone could be injured by the supposition. I am conscious of having appeared before several men whose names are, and have been ever since I can recollect having heard them, associated in my mind with nothing but what is honourable and high principled: I received from some of them complimentary expressions upon the apparent candour and openness, the straightforward character of the evidence given; and I cannot help believing that my statements were considered moreover valuable, as tending to show the inexpediency, the gross injustice, of encouraging on the one hand trade with countries in which slave trade prevails, and yet, on the other hand, attempting to make the natural and well-known tendency of all trade to mix itself with the general state of society of the country into which it is carried, the evidence of some peculiar criminal knowledge in the parties necessarily nearest in contact with those countries, and visiting that knowledge upon them, after the community have derived profit and advantage from the transaction, although it is well known that the parties so to be sacrificed have it not in their power to guard any but themselves from being directly instrumental to the deviation of the trade into channels rendered illegal by Act of Parliament. I venture to assert, that the prominent feature of my evidence was felt by the Committee to be its unconnectedness with any party or theory; and this feature stamped it with the character of truth which, if fairly and honestly stated, must at times militate against one theory or another.
This is an offence to all who thrive upon theories, and in exactly the proportion of their affected or unreasonable belief of them. An instinctive alarm takes possession of such minds, and as they themselves cannot conceive that other people may have no theory of their own to serve upon that particular subject, which to them, and therefore in their opinion to all, must be paramount, they are disposed to imagine one theory of their own, which they at once fix upon the party thus offending against the assumed mental necessity of universal theorism. If the writer is not much mistaken, the irritation which is produced by this process of the mind, still more if self-interest is at the bottom, will materially help to reveal the moving-spring of the proceedings which are recorded in the following pages.
Be this as it may, one thing is altogether unquestionable (and indeed there has been no attempt to disguise the fact, and to it I beg to call the attention of every man in Great Britain)—it is this: Pedro de Zulueta could never have been placed in the position in which he was (charged with felony under the finding of the Grand Jury), with the remotest chance of a conviction, if he had not voluntarily offered himself for examination before a Committee of the British House of Commons—the way being this—a London attorney lays hold of the printed Report of the proceedings; every part of the evidence given by Pedro de Zulueta, that was destructive of the hypothesis of his being a well-knowing and wilful abettor of an alleged slave trading speculation in 1840, is disconnected from those passages in which he had stated that, in 1842, when he was speaking (after hearing and reading a mass of evidence given for the first time before that Committee), he had heard statements about his correspondents being participators in the slave trade which might be true, which were not, he felt, material to himself, and which, as he had not the means of disproving, he then stated that he must then believe; and then using this intelligible admission, made in 1842, the only one that could be found at all available, as the only presumptive proof of guilty knowledge in 1840. Nothing could be done or attempted against the house of Zulueta & Co., much less against the individual who was attacked, without this management, this distortion of the evidence—for some knowledge of some kind must be made out in 1840, and although the fallacy was transparent, it might and unfortunately did serve for the purpose of the attack at the heart, and might still serve for the next, but not the sole object, of the prosecution. It is true, that the whole of the evidence given by me was read at the trial, for so the law requires it; but that same law, as was observed, also permits that those parts of a man’s statements which make in his favour should not be believed or taken for any thing, whilst such admissions as might be made to appear criminatory of himself are received as evidence against him. By such a process of distortion alone could a case be made out against my house, or fixed upon myself, who was totally unknown to the so-called witnesses as they themselves admitted, and who did not personally appear in any part of the transactions excepting at my own examination before the Committee. If the facts are not so, let it be at once explained what other circumstance marked me out for prosecution. Let the reader of the following pages, after perusing the trial carefully, attempt to solve the problem for himself of how (apart from the fact of my appearing, and of the application which is made of my statements before the Committee of the House of Commons) the firm of Zulueta & Co. came to be prosecuted in my person to the exclusion of others. Let every other part of the evidence given before and at the trial, of matter of fact, by the witnesses on the transaction of the Augusta be considered, and where is one single fact that can connect Zulueta & Co. with the alleged, and only alleged, designs of the parties by whose orders they had acted in that transaction—an acting in itself admitted to be innocent? And if the reader does not find any other solution of the difficulty, it is clearly demonstrated that Pedro de Zulueta has been prosecuted upon partial statements from his own evidence, given before a Committee of the House of Commons, where he appeared voluntarily, where he was encouraged to explain transactions of business, and neither refused nor even hesitated to answer one single question that was put to him, as conducive to a great public object; but without the slightest intimation of the ulterior object to which it has been perverted.
For the purpose not certainly of clearing up the question, but of sophisticating a very plain case, it will perhaps be asked, whether, if a man should avow himself before a Committee of the House of Commons to have been guilty of a crime, or to have partaken in it, is it meant to be contended that his candour is to be the safeguard of his guilt? One short answer is, that the remark is inapplicable to the case; for no such avowal has been even contended to have been made, but on the contrary a distinct and repeated general and circumstantial disavowal was made. Whether my declarations did or did not amount to such degree of information in my mind, at the time of giving my evidence, as presumed a knowledge two years before, that would be brought under the description of the guilty knowledge described in legal phraseology, in an Act of Parliament, very obscure as is generally admitted, and never before put in practice, this was the utmost that the ingenuity of the prosecution could make out of my evidence—and this cannot be called an avowal of crime. The question is not, whether a crime avowed before a Committee of the House of Commons should or should not be prosecuted, using the avowal as one of the means of conviction—a question, which even so put is argued, I believe, on both sides by eminent lawyers—but whether in my case, such as it is, I have not a right to complain of the grossest and most unparalleled breach of good faith—whether the use made of my evidence is not one against which the conscience of every man revolts—whether it is likely to facilitate the public service, or to increase the respect due to the British Legislature at home and abroad, or to their proceedings—even if in other respects the course adopted is free from legal objections, which I believe is at least doubtful.
The fact itself is unquestionable, and I must repeatedly assert it—that the materials for my prosecution were collected from my own evidence as laid before the public, in the printed Report of the Committee, for whose information it was given—that in collecting these materials the statements, although formally read as they were made, were virtually vitiated—that, although the whole was read, only that part which was thought susceptible of some adverse construction was avowed to be of any necessary weight; and statements, such as they were, which had been made in 1842, after information that was at any rate only furnished in that year, were applied for the purpose of raising a presumption of guilty knowledge in 1840.
I have insisted so much upon this point, because it is very material that it should be borne in mind throughout the perusal of the following pages. I do not hesitate to believe that the unsophisticated sense of the people of this country will revolt at the fact of a Committee of the House of Commons having been turned into a trap wherein to take a man—a snare to his good faith—the more effectual, because the members who happen to compose the Committee stand high for honour and integrity in the land, and therefore their very names seemed to afford a guarantee that the fairest construction would be put upon the words of a respectable individual, who appeared voluntarily before them, without assuming from the outset that he is a self-convicted felon, who comes before them for no other purpose than to deceive, and who must be listened to only in order to see if he does not betray himself into some acknowledgment of his crimes, of which advantage is to be taken to secure the ends of justice, which he craftily endeavours to defeat. It may suit those who want such a monster of craft and subtlety in order to justify the monstrous proceedings, which have been deemed necessary to support a mischievous and unfounded theory that British capital is employed in the slave trade—it may suit them, to make me out to be this desideratum in their system; but, without laying claim to any more extended or more favourable notoriety than that which is on record, I venture to say that the attempt must fall to the ground, by the weight of its intrinsic absurdity, before the common sense of the people of this country.
But what the Committee thought of the evidence, after hearing at length the very individuals who appeared against me at the Old Bailey, and after hearing my own evidence, which formed the chief weapon against me in that Court, will be found in their own Report, printed in the following pages. Every reader may judge for himself, whether, in point of fact, it is not an anticipated condemnation of such proceedings as have been inflicted upon me—a verdict of not guilty, not only upon the transactions of the Augusta, but upon the whole of Zulueta & Co.’s agency for the houses mentioned, in my evidence, if the representation given by me of the transaction be substantially correct. In [page 203] the following words will be found:—“In the first place, it is fair to state that we have no evidence, or reason to believe, that any British merchant, concerned in the trade with the West Coast of Africa, either owns or equips any vessel engaged in the slave trade, or has any share in the risk or profits of any slave trade venture”—a declaration this, the correctness of which every one conversant with the characteristic features of British commerce must acknowledge. Have any facts been elicited subsequent to this Report, and previously to the prosecution being instituted—any new evidence, which was not before the Committee of the House of Commons? This is a question which happily every reader of the following pages may settle for himself. Let him, as he peruses the evidence, at each stage of it ask himself the question—Was this before the Committee of the House of Commons? That it was, must be the answer upon every point. Not one statement was elicited from a single witness which had not been before the Committee. There was indeed an unworthy attempt to create a false impression about some casks and shackles having been left on board, even after the most unsparing of the witnesses for the prosecution had acquitted the vessel of even the shadow of a suspicion of containing the least implement available for a slaving equipment. How the attempt was foiled by their own witness afterwards will be seen; and I will not say a word more about an attempt upon which the very existence of a fellow-creature perhaps might hang, leaving it to be visited with the feeling of abhorrence which it must excite in every reader. Apart from this, there was before the Committee much more against me than there was before the Court, as may be seen by a comparison of the evidence as given before the one with that given before the other; because the nature of legal proceedings keeps the witness, even if otherwise disposed, within the limits of matter of fact—limits, which before the Court they did attempt to transgress, as may be seen very prominently in the case of the chief of them, but from which before the Committee it was in their power to wander, and they did accordingly so wander at every moment. Is it not fair to infer, that it was not to serve the purposes of justice, but at the very best that of some fancied expediency, that this prosecution was undertaken—a prosecution demonstrated to have been undertaken against the recorded sense and opinion of the Select Committee of the House of Commons? Suppose, for a moment, that by some quibble of law, by the forced interpretation of an Act of Parliament, admitted to be sufficiently obscure—not to speak of attempts to pervert evidence, or of the effort to carry off the victory, which constitutes the very essence of all legal conflict between individuals, and which of itself renders the right of private prosecution of public wrongs the destruction of civil liberty and of individual security—suppose, that by such means, what to the deliberate judgment of the Committee of the House of Commons did not appear to deserve even animadversion, might have been made out before an Old Bailey Jury to be such evidence of guilt, as to have procured an adverse verdict—is this the kind of justice which the people of this country would have approved? Impossible! I cannot believe it: the idea cannot be for a moment entertained.