How Did we Miss This Creepy Detail for 234 Years?

In 1792, London print shops sold a picture meant to shame Britain out of the slave trade. For 234 years, almost nobody has read the small print. Isaac Cruikshank drew it. S. W. Fores published it on April 10, 1792, just eight days after William Wilberforce stood up in the House of Commons and named a slave ship captain in front of the whole chamber. Copies sit in the British Museum, in Greenwich and in the Library of Congress, and the image still turns up in textbooks and documentaries as proof that Britain was finally learning to look at what its ships were doing. And almost every time it gets reproduced, one side of it is cropped off. That is the side with three sailors on it, and every one of them has something to say. This video goes through the picture inch by inch: what the sworn testimony from the trial actually described, why it does not match what Cruikshank drew, and what somebody did to the surviving sheets with a blade after the verdict came in. Captain John Kimber. The slave ship Recovery. A girl of 15. A trial at the Old Bailey that was over in under five hours, and a man who went to prison for telling the truth about it. #ArtHistory #Abolition #Cruikshank #HiddenDetails #History