John Newton

John Newton

If this man placed his life at the feet of JESUS, so can you...

"Amazing grace!
How sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see."

These were the words of John Newton, a former slave ship captain. At age 11, his mother died and he went to sea with his father. Young John Newton fell in love with Mary Catlett while on shore leave, but overstaying his visit, he missed his ship's departure.

In 1744, he was caught by a "press gang" and dragged onto the ship HMS Harwich where he was forced to be a sailor. Newton tried to desert but was caught, stripped to the waist and flogged with 8 dozen lashes.

John Newton later wrote in a letter:

"Like an unwary sailor who quits his port just before a rising storm, I renounced the hopes and comforts of the Gospel at the very time when every other comfort was about to fail me."

His reckless behavior caused him to be traded to a slave ship.
Being a continual problem, Newton was intentionally left on a slave plantation in Sierra Leone, West Africa. There, the African slave dealer, Amos Clowe, made Newton a slave of his wife, Princess Peye, an African duchess, where he suffered abuse and mistreatment.

Years later, Scottish Missionary David Livingstone mentioned John Newton and the Muslim Arab slave traders' shocking treatment of African slaves (Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, London, October 1857):

"It was refreshing to get food which could be eaten without producing the unpleasantness described by the Rev. John Newton, of St. Mary's, Woolnoth, London, when obliged to eat the same roots while a slave in the West (Africa) ..."

David Livingstone continued: "A party of Arabs from Zanzibar were ... at a village in the same latitude as Naliele town ... The Arabs mentioned ... they ... disliked the English, 'because they thrash (criticize) them for selling slaves' ...

... I ventured to tell them that I agreed with the English, that it was better to let the children grow up and comfort their mothers when they became old, than to carry them away and sell them across the sea ...

Livingstone described the Arab Muslim slave trade as "a monster brooding over Africa."

John Newton was finally rescued from Africa but continued his immoral life in the slave trade, deriding Christians with blasphemy that shocked even sailors.

He wrote in 1778:

"How industrious is Satan served. I was formerly one of his active under-temptors and had my influence been equal to my wishes I would have carried all the human race with me. A common drunkard or profligate is a petty sinner to what I was."

In 1747, Newton was on the slave ship Greyhound. The ship was caught in a storm so terrible that he was convinced they would sink. He prayed for the first time in his life.

Someone gave him a copy of Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ and the Bible, which he began to read. Newton continued in the slave trade for a time, but endeavored to treat slaves humanely.

John Newton finally left the slave trade, married Mary Catlett in 1750, and moved to Liverpool, where from 1755 to 1760 he worked as a surveyor of tides.

He wrote: "I am not the man I ought to be, I am not the man I wish to be, and I am not the man I hope to be, but by the grace of God, I am not the man I used to be."