Murder on the Middle Passage

How the death of a fifteen-year-old girl aboard the slave ship Recovery shook the British establishment. On 2 April 1792, John Kimber, captain of the Bristol slave ship Recovery , was denounced in the House of Commons by William Wilberforce for flogging a fifteen-year-old African girl to death. The story, caricatured in a contemporary Isaac Cruikshank print, raced across newspapers in Britain and Ireland and was even reported in America. Soon after, Kimber was indicted for murder - but in a tria