![]() Custom, example, and interest, had blinded my eyes. In his Letters to a Wife he describes his own incredulity: 'The reader may perhaps wonder, as I now do myself that, knowing the state of the vile traffic to be as I have here described, and abounding with enormities which I have not mentioned, I did not, at the time, start with horror at my own employment, as an agent in promoting it. What strikes us as incomprehensible today, is the fact that after he was dramatically converted to Christianity, Newton went on to accept further responsibilities in the trade. It is a mark of those times that although the Authentic Narrative went into many editions and was translated into several different languages, it drew no censure or criticism from any of its numerous readers. In his Authentic Narrative (1764) he wrote openly of his slave trading: 'I considered myself as a sort of gaoler or turnkey, and I was sometimes shocked with an employment that was perpetually conversant with chains, bolts, and shackles.' Newton's association with the slave trade began when, at the age of 19, a failed attempt at desertion from the Royal Navy saw him exchanged on to a merchant ship bound for West Africa. What is not so commonly known is that he left the slave trade more than thirty years before The Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed. The fact that he was once a slave trader is well known today. ![]() John Newton was born in Wapping in 1725 to a seafaring father and a godly mother. John Newton (1725–1807) By Marylynn Rouse
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