KENOTE: John Newton is now best remembered as an Anglican clergyman and the author of the hymn Amazing Grace. For the first thirty years of his life, however, he was engrossed in the slave trade. His father planned for him to take up a position as slave master on a West Indies plantation but he was instead pressed into the Royal Navy where, after attempting to desert, he was captured and flogged round the fleet. After this humiliation he was placed in service on a slave ship bound for Sierra Leone, but there, having upset his captain and crew, he found himself the servant of the merchant's wife, an African Duchess called Princess Peye, who abused him along with her slaves. As he wrote himself, he was 'an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves of West Africa.' In 1748 he was rescued and returned home and it was on this voyage that he experienced his spiritual conversion. Though avoiding profanity, women, gambling and drinking he continued in the slave trade, taking up a position on a ship bound for the West Indies and then making three further voyages as a captain of slave ships. In 1755, after suffering a severe stroke, he turned away from seafaring and pursued a path to the priesthood, becoming the curate at Olney in 1764. His Authentic Narrative, as it was called, is a remarkable, no-holds-barred account of the African slave trade, as well as a account of his struggle between religion and the flesh. AUTHOR: John Newton was born in Wapping in 1725 and aged 11 went to sea with his father to train to become a slave master at a Jamaican sugar plantation; the rest of his seafaring career is recounted in his An Authentic Narrative which he wrote while seeking to become a priest. In 1788 he finally denounced the appalling conditions of the slave ships. He died in 1807. SELLING POINTS: -Racy and compelling narratives for modern readers -Fascinating first-hand accounts of sailors' lives in bygone eras -Third work in a highly collectible library of twelve volumes, painting a picture of life at sea over 300 years Galley Slave: Seafarers' Voices 1 9781848320703 (10/10) Privateer's Voyage Around the World: Seafarers' Voices 2 9781848320666 (1010) Landsman Hay: Seafarers' Voices 4 9781848320680 (0211)
