Christopher Bassnett

The Reverend Christopher Bassnett (1677–1744) was a Presbyterian minister in Liverpool for more than thirty years. In 1711 he preached a sermon to Bryan Blundell and the crew of his ship, warning of the moral and spiritual dangers that accompanied the pursuit of wealth. Six years later, Blundell made his first investment in the slave trade.

“Sometimes God speaks in a still small Voice, at other Times he speaks in Thunder and Lightning, in Storms and Tempests: and in these latter he speaks so TERRIBLY LOUD, that one wou’d think Men shou’d hear him, and learn Righteousness.” Christopher Bassnett, 1711

The minister

Born in Chester in 1677, the son of an apothecary, Bassnett came to Liverpool as a young minister at the start of the eighteenth century and served the Nonconformist congregation in Key Street for the rest of his life. Contemporaries remembered him as “a homely, useful preacher, with a Puritan unction.” He preached without notes, straight to the merchants, sailors and tradesmen in front of him, in an older Puritan style that was already going out of fashion.

Many of those listening were bound for Barbados and Guinea, on ships increasingly caught up in the trafficking of enslaved Africans. Bassnett did not speak with the certainty of the later abolitionists, but with the troubled conscience of a man who sensed the moral current shifting beneath his town long before most were willing to see it. He suffered long periods of illness and melancholy, the first in 1711 and a severe one in 1726, and died in July 1744. Liverpool scarcely paused.

The sermon to the Cleveland

On Thursday 13 December 1711, Bassnett preached to the crew of the Cleveland, whose captain was Bryan Blundell. When the sermon was printed the following spring as The Seaman’s Character and Calling Consider’d and Improv’d, he dedicated it to Blundell in a letter written from Toxteth Park and dated 1 March 1712:

“It was upon your Account, my good Friend, that I preached this Sermon … I have resolv’d at last upon the Publication, not for the Sake of any Curiosity in the Composition, but for the good Example it presents the World with.” Christopher Bassnett to Bryan Blundell, Captain of the Cleveland, 1712

The letter is warm, even admiring. Bassnett praises Blundell as a captain who never put to sea or came home without prayer and thanksgiving, and thanks him for his kindness during Bassnett’s own illness. That friendship is what makes the story so striking: the warning came from someone Blundell trusted. The full letter is reproduced in Appendix A of The Slave Trader.

In the book

Bassnett is the other voice in Blundell’s story. Where Blundell’s ledgers record the profits of Liverpool’s rise, Bassnett’s sermons ask what that prosperity was costing. Chapter 20, “The Voice Above”, follows his last years and the legacy he hoped to leave, which he called a minister’s “fruits”: that commerce answers to conscience, and that prosperity alone can never justify what a man knows to be wrong.

More than three centuries later, his voice can still be heard.

The family connection

Bassnett’s daughter Ann married Samuel Shaw, Bryan Blundell’s grandson. The author, Ben Shaw, is descended from both men: the preacher and the slave trader, united in one family tree. The connection came to light through the family’s 1595 Breeches Bible, and he tells the story in Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine and in his Pen & Sword post, The Ledger and the Silence.

Read his sermons

Two of Bassnett’s printed sermons have been digitised and can be read free online at the Internet Archive:

• The Seaman’s Character and Calling Consider’d and Improv’d (1712). The sermon preached to Bryan Blundell and the crew of the Cleveland, with Bassnett’s dedication to Blundell.
• Church-Officers, and their Mission (1717). An ordination sermon, in which Bassnett urged the ministers of his generation to “take Care of a Succession: That so the Work may not die with us.”

Read the full story in The Slave Trader: The Story of Bryan Blundell.