![]() Eventually, he tried to desert but was arrested and returned to his ship the next day. He made bad friends, was derisive of religion, and contemplated killing either the captain or himself. Newton was miserable in the Navy, physically and spiritually. While visiting Mary again in 1744, he was pressed into the Royal Navy as a crewmember on the man-o’-war HMS Harwich. He visited Mary instead and missed the boat again. He quickly turned to all the drunkenness, blasphemy, and general debauchery of his fellow sailors.įollowing this trip, Newton was supposed to take a second voyage, this time as an officer. Intended to reform Newton, this move had the opposite effect on the young man. Upset at his son’s refusal to go along with his plans, Newton, Sr., sent him back to sea, this time as a common sailor without the privileges of being the captain’s son. As far as he was concerned, leaving for Jamaica was out of the question. ![]() However, unbeknownst to his father, Newton had fallen in love with Mary Catlett, the daughter of the couple who had cared for him as a boy and the woman he would eventually marry. There, he would work as a slave overseer, obtain his own plantation, and eventually use his massive profits to enter Parliament, as other plantation owners had done. A Liverpudlian shipowner involved in the slave-trade and sugar production would take young John to Jamaica. When Newton was seventeen, his father had big plans for him. As a result, young Newton began to lose sight of what his mother had taught him. Unlike his Puritan Dissenter mother, whose faith would ultimately influence Newton’s own spiritual journey as an adult, Newton’s father and stepmother neglected the boy’s religious upbringing. At the tender age of eleven, he went to sea with his father, John Newton, Sr., a merchant seaman. After his mother died when he was just seven, Newton was temporarily taken in by her friends, the Catletts, before attending boarding school for two years. ![]() When John Newton penned these words in 1779, he was writing from personal experience: His life had indeed been fraught with “dangers, toils and snares,” and he knew that it was only by the grace of God that he was still alive and well.īorn in 1725, John Newton had a short childhood. ![]()
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