John Newton: The Storm That Would Not Let Him Go

In the dark early hours of 10 March 1748, a young English sailor woke in his hammock aboard a merchant ship called the Greyhound, somewhere in the North Atlantic, to the sound of the sea breaking over the deck and water pouring into the cabin below. Someone was shouting that the ship was sinking.

His name was John Newton. He was twenty-two years old, and by his own account he was one of the most foul-mouthed, God-mocking men on board. The crew had come to regard him as a kind of curse. He was famous among them for inventing new ways to blaspheme.

He scrambled for the ladder. On the way up, the captain called to him to fetch a knife, and while he went back for it, another man climbed up in his place. That man was swept overboard almost at once and was never seen again. Newton never forgot that someone else had stood where he should have been standing.

The storm had torn away part of the ship’s side. The Greyhound was an old vessel, and the sea was getting in faster than it could be thrown out. The men worked the pumps and bailed with buckets, hour after hour, in freezing spray. What kept the ship afloat, Newton later decided, was its cargo: beeswax and wood, lighter than water, packed in the hold.

At about nine in the morning, worn out, Newton went to speak to the captain. As he turned away, he heard himself say something he had not said seriously in years. In his own words, it came out “almost without any meaning”: “If this will not do, the Lord have mercy upon us!”

He stopped. Mercy? The words had come out of his own mouth, and they frightened him more than the sea did. If there really was a God, Newton thought, what mercy could there possibly be for a man like him?

A Mother’s Hymns

John Newton was born in Wapping, a crowded district of sailors and ships beside the River Thames in London, on 24 July 1725. His father, also called John, was the master of a merchant ship and was often away at sea for long stretches. His mother, Elizabeth, was a quiet, devout woman who belonged to a group of Christians outside the official Church of England, known then as Dissenters.

She poured her faith into her only son. She taught him to read before he was four. She taught him Bible passages, hymns and the short question-and-answer summaries of belief called catechisms. She hoped, he later wrote, that he would grow up to be a minister.

She was also ill with tuberculosis, which people then called consumption. In July 1732 she died. John was six, a couple of weeks short of his seventh birthday. Almost everything good he would later remember from his childhood belonged to the years before that summer.

His father married again, and John was sent away to a boarding school in Essex, where he was unhappy.

At Sea at Eleven

On his eleventh birthday, in 1736, John went to sea with his father. Over the next few years he made several voyages with his father to the Mediterranean, learning the ropes, the rigging and the rough language of the ship.

What is striking about the teenage John Newton is how many times he tried to be religious, and how many times it fell apart. In his Authentic Narrative, the account of his early life he published in 1764, he describes going through phase after phase of trying hard. Several times, after a scare or a narrow escape, he became very serious. He prayed, read the Bible, fasted, kept long lists of rules, and stopped swearing. Then, after a while, it all slipped away, and he went back to how he had been, usually worse.

Fear made a poor foundation. He described his religion in those years as a matter of keeping rules in order to earn God’s approval, and he never found any peace in it.

When he was about sixteen, he came across a book by the Earl of Shaftesbury, an English writer who argued that a person could be good and wise without needing the Christianity of the Bible. Newton read it eagerly. It made faith seem small and unnecessary. Not long afterwards, a sailor he admired, a man who openly rejected Christianity, finished the job. Newton stopped believing altogether. Worse, he became a missionary for unbelief: he enjoyed taking apart other people’s faith, and he mocked anyone who prayed.

Around the end of 1742 something else happened that would shape the rest of his life. His father had arranged a good job for him on a plantation in Jamaica. Before he sailed, John went to visit a family in Kent named Catlett, old friends of his mother. There he met their daughter Mary, whom everyone called Polly. She was about fourteen. He was seventeen and fell completely in love. He stayed with the Catletts so long that he missed his ship. The job in Jamaica went to someone else.

Pressed into the Navy

Britain was at war, and the Royal Navy needed men. In those days the navy used “press gangs”: groups of sailors with the legal right to seize able-bodied men, especially men with sea experience, and force them to serve on warships. In 1743, when he was eighteen, John Newton was caught by a press gang and taken aboard a warship, HMS Harwich.

His father used his connections to have him made a midshipman, a junior officer in training, which was far better than being an ordinary seaman. But John was miserable. The Harwich was due to sail for the East Indies, which meant being away for years, and he could not bear the thought of leaving Polly for so long. When the ship was at Plymouth, he was sent ashore on duty with a boat, and he ran.

He did not get far. Soldiers caught him on the road, a day or so later, and brought him back to the ship in chains. Deserting the navy was a serious crime. He was stripped and flogged in front of the whole ship’s company and demoted from midshipman to the lowest rank of seaman. The other officers were told not to speak to him. From being a young gentleman on his way up, he had become the ship’s lowest, most despised hand.

He later admitted that in the weeks that followed, his mind went to very dark places: he thought about taking revenge on the captain, and about throwing himself into the sea. He said that only a lingering love for Polly held him back. He was a lonely, furious teenager with no one to talk to, and he came closer to the edge than anyone around him knew.

Traded Away

When the Harwich reached the island of Madeira, in the Atlantic, in 1745, a merchant ship was in the harbour, bound for the coast of West Africa to trade. Newton managed to be exchanged onto it. He was glad to be free of the navy. He had no idea what he was going into.

The ship was in the slave trade. For about three hundred years, European and American traders bought African men, women and children, many of them captured in wars and raids, and carried them across the Atlantic in chained, overcrowded ships to be sold as slaves in the Americas. Huge numbers died on the way. It was one of the greatest crimes in human history, and in the 1740s it was a normal, legal and highly profitable business in Britain.

Newton was not troubled by it at all. On board his new ship he went on mocking God and the captain. When the ship reached the coast, he left it to work for a white slave trader who lived on the Plantain Islands, small islands off the coast of Sierra Leone, on the western bulge of Africa.

A Servant of Slaves

What happened next was the lowest point of his life, and he later told it without self-pity.

Soon after he arrived, he fell seriously ill with fever. His employer went away on a trading trip and left him in the care of the trader’s African partner, a powerful woman in the local trade. For reasons Newton never fully understood, she took a strong dislike to him. Sick and weak, he lay on a mat with almost nothing to eat. He remembered being so hungry that he went out at night to pull up roots from the ground and eat them raw. People mocked him; some threw limes at him as he lay helpless. Sometimes, he remembered, the only kindness he received came from Africans who were themselves in chains, who secretly passed him a little of their own tiny rations.

When his employer came back, he believed accusations that Newton had been stealing from him. After that, when they went out by boat, Newton was locked on the deck with a pint of rice for the day, in the open air through days of sun and nights of pouring rain, with almost no clothes. “I was locked upon deck,” he wrote, “with a pint of rice for my day’s allowance.” He began to look, he said, like a man in a state of misery that would have frightened anyone who had known him at home.

For about a year, the young man who would one day captain slave ships was treated almost as a slave himself. He later called himself, in the epitaph he wrote for his own grave, “a servant of slaves in Africa.” It is important to be clear about what this was and was not. He was not bought and sold, chained in a ship’s hold and carried across an ocean, as millions of Africans were. But he had a taste of hunger, contempt and helplessness, and he never forgot it.

There is one odd, stubborn detail from those months. Newton had brought with him a copy of Euclid, the ancient Greek textbook of geometry. In his worst days on the islands, he would take it to a remote part of the beach and work through the proofs by drawing the diagrams in the sand with a stick. Something in him refused to give up entirely.

Eventually he was allowed to go to work for another trader on the mainland, who treated him well. He began, for the first time in years, to do well for himself. He was even starting to like the life. He wrote home to his father, and his father asked the captains of ships trading on that coast to look out for his son.

The Greyhound

Early in 1747, a ship called the Greyhound passed along the coast where Newton was working. It was trading not in human beings but in gold, ivory, beeswax and a red dyewood. A trader on shore happened to send up a column of smoke as a signal, and the ship stopped. The captain asked whether anyone knew of a young man named John Newton. He had nearly missed him; Newton reckoned that if he had been a little further along the coast that day, the ship would have sailed past.

Newton did not want to go home. He had found a life he liked. The captain, by Newton’s own account, persuaded him partly by inventing a story about an inheritance waiting for him in England. But it was the thought of Polly, more than anything, that made him step into the boat.

The Greyhound spent another year trading on the African coast before setting out for England. Newton had nothing to do on board but wait, and he spent the time drinking, swearing and trying to talk the other sailors out of what little faith they had. Once, drunk, he nearly went over the side of the ship after his own hat. The captain told him more than once that he was a “Jonah,” the bringer of bad luck to a ship.

On 9 March 1748, the day before the storm, out of sheer boredom, he picked up a book from the ship’s small collection. It was The Imitation of Christ, a famous old book of Christian devotion by Thomas à Kempis. As he read, a question crept into his mind that he did not want: what if these things are true? He shut the book, and the thought, and went to bed. A few hours later the sea came through the side of the ship.

“Mercy! What Mercy?”

After he heard himself cry out for mercy that morning, Newton went back to the pumps. At noon he was sent to take the helm, steering the battered ship, and he stayed there until midnight. For hours, with nothing to do but hold the wheel, he thought about his life.

What he felt was not comfort. It was terror. All the Scripture he had learned at his mother’s side came back to him, and the verses that came back were warnings. He thought about what he had done: the people he had led away from faith, the God he had mocked. He thought there was no possibility he could be forgiven. But he also thought: if the Bible is true, then Jesus is real, and if Jesus is real, then perhaps.

The storm passed, but the danger did not. The ship had lost most of its food and was drifting, damaged, far off course. For four weeks the crew lived on a shrinking store of salted fish. Then the food ran out almost entirely. Newton started to read the New Testament seriously, for the first time since he was a boy. One verse, in the King James wording he read, gave him hope: “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?” (Luke 11:13). He did not feel he had faith. But he could ask. So he asked.

On 8 April 1748, the Greyhound finally limped into Lough Swilly, a long sea inlet in the north of Ireland. Newton later noted that almost as soon as they anchored, a violent gale blew up. Had they still been at sea, they would have been lost. In the nearby town of Londonderry he went to church twice a day. He kept 10 March as a kind of second birthday for the rest of his life.

Not Yet Seeing

Here is the part of the story that many retellings leave out, and that Newton himself, to his credit, refused to leave out.

The storm did not turn him into the man who wrote “Amazing Grace.” Newton always said that his conversion was slow, not sudden. He wrote that he could not consider himself to have been a true believer, in the full sense of the word, until a considerable time after the storm. He stopped swearing and he started praying. But he went straight back to sea, and the trade he went back to was the slave trade.

In 1748 he sailed as first mate on a slave ship to the African coast. In 1750 he married Polly Catlett, and that same year he became captain of a slave ship, the Duke of Argyle. Later he commanded another, the African. On those voyages, hundreds of enslaved Africans were held in chains below his deck while Newton led his crew in prayers on Sunday above it. He wrote hymns of thanks to God in his cabin. He did not see any contradiction. Years later he admitted that at the time he had felt no scruple at all about the work. He thought of it as a respectable job, which most of his society thought it was.

That is hard to read, and it should be. It shows that a person can truly begin to turn to God and still be blind to a great evil in front of their eyes, especially an evil that everyone around them thinks is normal. Newton’s eyes were opened, but slowly, and too slowly for the people chained below his deck.

In 1754 a sudden seizure, a kind of fit, ended his career at sea. He took a job as a customs officer, a “tide surveyor,” in the port of Liverpool. In the evenings he taught himself Greek and Hebrew so he could read the Bible in its original languages. He went to hear the great preachers of the day, including George Whitefield. Slowly his faith deepened and settled. It had stopped being about keeping rules to earn God’s favour. He had come to see that his only hope was what Jesus had done for him, not what he did for Jesus.

What Came After

After several refusals, Newton was ordained as a clergyman in the Church of England in 1764 and sent to the small town of Olney in Buckinghamshire. The same year, he published his Authentic Narrative, which made him famous.

At Olney he became a close friend of the poet William Cowper, who struggled all his life with deep depression, and the two of them wrote hymns for their congregation. For a New Year’s Day service on 1 January 1773, Newton wrote a hymn to go with his sermon on 1 Chronicles 17, where King David says in wonder, “Who am I, O LORD God, and what is my house, that You have brought me this far?” The hymn began, “Amazing grace! how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me!” It was published in Olney Hymns in 1779. Newton was not reaching for a dramatic word when he wrote “wretch.” He knew exactly what he meant by it.

In 1780 he moved to London to be rector of St Mary Woolnoth, a church in the City. In 1785 a young member of Parliament named William Wilberforce, who had recently come to faith, came to him for advice. Wilberforce was thinking of leaving politics. Newton urged him to stay, believing God could use him there. Wilberforce went on to lead the long campaign in Parliament against the slave trade.

In 1788, more than thirty years after he left the sea, Newton published Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade, an eyewitness account of the trade’s cruelty and a public confession of his own part in it. “It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me,” he wrote, “that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders.” That same year he gave evidence about the trade to a government committee. Coming from a former slave-ship captain, his testimony carried real weight.

He lived just long enough to see the result. In March 1807 Parliament passed the act abolishing the British slave trade. Newton died in London on 21 December 1807, aged eighty-two. Near the end, when his memory was failing, a friend recorded him saying that he could remember two things: that he was a great sinner, and that Christ was a great Saviour.

In Their Own Words

“My memory is nearly gone; but I remember two things, That I am a great sinner, and that Christ is a great Saviour.”

— John Newton, near the end of his life, as recorded by Richard Cecil in his Memoirs of the Rev. John Newton (1808)

Think It Through

1. Newton tried to be religious many times as a teenager and gave up each time. What was missing from those attempts, and what was different about what began in the storm?
2. Newton prayed on his ship while people were held in chains below. What blind spots might Christians today have that feel “normal” because everyone around them shares them?
3. Newton called himself a “wretch” and a “great sinner” for the rest of his life, yet he was full of joy. How can someone be honest about their worst failures and still be at peace?
4. Newton’s eyes were opened to the slave trade only slowly, but when they were, he confessed his part in it publicly and helped others fight it. What does real repentance look like when you have done harm to other people?

Read More on Ochorus

Newton’s own sermons are in the library, preached in London in the 1780s on the Bible passages Handel set to music in Messiah. Start with “Come Unto Him,” on Jesus’ invitation to the weary, and “Behold the Lamb of God,” then go on to “Comfort Ye My People,” “He Was Despised,” “Unto Us a Child Is Born,” “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth,” “If God Be for Us” and “Worthy Is the Lamb.” His full biography is on his author page, and his life as a pastor is told in Men Who Tended the Flock.