Part 1
Transcriber’s Notes
Text printed in italics has been transcribed _between underscores_, blackletter text ~between tildes~. Small capitals have been replaced with ALL CAPITALS.
More Transcriber’s Notes may be found at the end of this text.
TRIAL OF PEDRO DE ZULUETA, JUN., ON A CHARGE OF SLAVE TRADING.
TRIAL OF PEDRO DE ZULUETA, JUN., ON A CHARGE OF SLAVE TRADING, UNDER THE 5 GEO. IV, CAP. 113, _On Friday the 27th, Saturday the 28th, and Monday the 30th of October, 1843_, AT THE CENTRAL CRIMINAL COURT, OLD BAILEY, LONDON.
~A Full Report from the Short-hand Notes of W. B. Gurney, Esq.~
WITH AN ADDRESS TO _THE MERCHANTS, MANUFACTURERS, AND TRADERS OF GREAT BRITAIN_, BY PEDRO DE ZULUETA, JUN., ESQ.
AND DOCUMENTS ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE CASE.
LONDON: C. WOOD & CO., POPPIN’S COURT, FLEET STREET. 1844.
LONDON C. WOOD & CO., PRINTERS, POPPIN’S COURT, FLEET STREET.
CONTENTS.
Page
Address to the Merchants, Manufacturers, and Traders of Great Britain ix
Opinions of Legal Authorities lxxiii
DOCUMENTS ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE CASE:--
Letter from R. R. Gibbons, Esq. to Messrs. Zulueta & Co., and Summary of Dr. Madden’s Report 1
Copy of a Letter from Messrs. Zulueta & Co. to Lord Viscount Sandon 5
Evidence of H. W. Macaulay, Esq. before the Select Committee on West Coast of Africa, forwarded to Messrs. Zulueta by order of the Chairman 7
Evidence of Captain Henry Worsley Hill, R.N., ibid 80
Additional Evidence of Captain H. W. Hill, ibid 102
Evidence of Captain the Honourable Joseph Denman, R.N., taken before the Select Committee on West Coast of Africa 107
Evidence of Pedro de Zulueta, Jun., Esq., taken before the Select Committee on West Coast of Africa 167
Report from the Select Committee on the West Coast of Africa 187
Proceedings instituted against Pedro de Zulueta, Jun., Esq.--Arrest Aug. 23, 1843 209
Application to take Bail (_from the Anti-Slavery Reporter_) 210
Indictment for Felony 211
Indictment for Conspiracy 214
Proceedings in the Central Criminal Court, August 24, 1843 (_from the Anti-Slavery Reporter_) 219
Affidavit of Defendant and Mr. Edward Lawford in support of Application for Writ of Certiorari 219
Motion to postpone the Trial of the Indictment 222
TRIAL OF PEDRO DE ZULUETA, JUN., ESQ.
First day, Central Criminal Court, Friday, Oct. 27, 1843 235
Second day, Saturday, Oct. 28 316
Third day, Monday, Oct. 30 391
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 2,000_l._, and the prisoner’s own recognizance for 6,000_l._ 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.
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.