He then encapsulated for the jury the injustice done his client at the trial on Jamaica; to which Sir George Norman made no objections… He might have been contemplating dinner, for his part was done. It was old news for the spectators, but visibly distasteful to the jury as they learned what a sham the trial in absentia had been, and the feud that had preceded it.

"Now let us proceed, gentlemen, to the root cause," MacDougall said, returning to the Defence table for a letter that his clerk, Mr. Sadler, handed him. "Here is a letter from former Leftenant-Colonel Christopher Cashman, with whom Captain Lewrie allegedly conspired. I wish you to be patient as I read this affidavit, sworn before a Justice of the Peace in Wilmington, North Carolina, in the United States, and witnessed and notarised… which affidavit has already been presented to the court and laid in evidence."

The affidavit laid out Cashman's career in both the British and East India Company armies, his return to the West Indies, his initial acceptance of slavery as a necessity to work his lands, his previous military service in conjunction with then Lieutenant Lewrie during the last year of the American Revolution, and their rencontre in the '90s, when he had been asked by the Beaumans to lead the volunteer regiment. The botched battle, Ledyard Beauman's cowardice, and the feud that followed, which led to the duel. Then…

"By this time, I was heartily sick of Jamaica, heartily sick of the Beaumans, and all their brute class, and, most especially, sick of the horrid institution of slavery, a view which I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my old friend Alan Lewrie wholeheartedly shared," MacDougall stressed, pacing urgently before the jury box as he read on. He'd sold some of his slaves off, the most troublesome and truculent, but freed the bulk of them. Then as he was selling up, after the duel, it had been Cashman who had suggested freeing some of Beauman's slaves as well.