A Slave Ship Captain's Long Conversion

John Newton went to sea as a young man under difficult circumstances, was later forced into naval service, and by his twenties was working in the Atlantic slave trade, eventually captaining his own slave ships on voyages between England, West Africa and the Americas. In his own account, published years later as An Authentic Narrative, he describes a violent storm off the coast of Ireland in 1748 that nearly sank his ship and that he came to regard as the beginning of his conversion, a process he was careful to describe as slow and incomplete rather than instantaneous. He continued working in the slave trade for several more years after that storm, a fact his own later writing does not conceal, before ill health ended his seafaring career and he turned toward the church, eventually seeking ordination in the Church of England. He was made curate of Olney, a small Buckinghamshire town, in 1764, where he built a reputation as an evangelical preacher and pastoral counselor, and later moved to the more prominent London parish of St Mary Woolnoth in 1780, remaining there until his death in 1807. Jonathan Aitken's biography treats the gap between Newton's early trade in enslaved people and his later public repentance as central to understanding him, not as a difficulty to be smoothed over but as the lived experience that gave his later preaching on grace its particular weight.