On a Saturday night in October 1744, in the English harbour of Antigua, the crew of the Mercury were living it up. The occasion was the capture of a Dutch sloop, or at least of a sloop flying Dutch colours that had been marauding colonial shipping, and the crew members were no doubt looking forward to receiving the windfalls of the prize. Between ten and eleven o’clock, the sentry on duty spied a smaller craft approaching and hailed it to little avail. Amid the noise of drums, trumpet and general merrymaking, the watch could not identify the approaching vessel, nor comprehend the muffled response of its seamen, some of it in French. The captain was alerted. ‘Warm’ with drink and armed with a pistol, he demanded that the boat heave to. The commander of the vessel, the master of a local tender, pleaded with the captain not to fire ‘for there were only Negroes that were with him in the boat’. But Captain Montagu, concerned that the intruders might be French, ‘snapped his piece’ nonetheless and on his second attempt fired indiscriminately into the boat, severely wounding one of the seamen in the thigh. The injured man was brought on board, but the ship's surgeon was too drunk to dress his wounds properly and so the surgeon from HMS Lynn was called for. By the time he arrived, the wounded man had lost a lot of blood. The second surgeon patched him up as best he could, but the man died the following morning. Crudely sutured with needle and thread, with only a small bandage over the dressing, he bled to death on the deck.

Captain William Montagu of the HMS Mercury was hardly perturbed by this incident. The dead man was not simply black; he was a slave, one of the ‘King’s negroes’ belonging to the yard at Antigua whose job it was to careen the vessels of the royal navy. As far as he was concerned, his action merited at best a fine and some monetary compensation to the government for the loss of one of its slaves.