John Kimber

John Kimber was an English sea captain and slave trader who was tried for murder in 1792, after the abolitionist William Wilberforce accused him of torturing to death an enslaved teenaged girl on the deck of his ship.

[1] The Recovery travelled from Bristol to New Calabar in West Africa, where it collected approximately 300 slaves who were to be sold at Grenada in the Caribbean.

[5] The second example was the case of Captain Kimber, who, Wilberforce said, had murdered a teenaged slave girl on his ship for refusing to dance for exercise.

He downplayed the captain's claims (subsequently reported in the press) that she suffered from an unidentified preexisting medical condition causing lassitude and that she had gonorrhea.

[6] Isaac Cruikshank's depiction of Kimber's assault on a "virjen," in his image published at the time, also emphasises her innocence in the face of the captain's aggression and moral corruption.

[1] His trial at the Admiralty Sessions of the Old Bailey began on 7 June 1792, and was attended by many prominent public figures, including Horatio Nelson.

The judge ruled against the insurers' paying for the loss of slaves because of new information revealed at the appeal hearing, which suggested the captain and crew were at fault for the shortage of water.

[17] Walvin notes that by the late 1780s, the Zong case had become an important symbol of the abuses of the slave trade, having inspired anti-slavery writings by Thomas Clarkson, Ottobah Cugoano, James Ramsay and John Newton,[18][19] and stimulating the rapid growth of the abolitionist movement.