The storm hit the Greyhound like the wrath of God Himself.

The Night a Slave Ship Captain Became a Hymn Writer

John Newton's Conversion in the Atlantic Storm

A brutal slave ship captain survived a storm at sea and later wrote 'Amazing Grace' as his confession.

The storm hit the Greyhound like the wrath of God Himself. On the night of August 13, 1748, somewhere in the North Atlantic, twenty-two-year-old John Newton clung to the ship's pumps as waves crashed over the deck, carrying men into the black water below. The vessel, returning from Sierra Leone laden with beeswax and wood, was breaking apart. Newton—a foul-mouthed sailor who had been so debauched that even hardened slave traders found him contemptible—found himself screaming into the gale: 'Lord, have mercy upon us.'

It was, he would later write, the first prayer he had uttered in years. And it changed everything.

Newton's journey to that storm-tossed deck was itself a descent into hell. The son of a pious mother who died when he was seven, he had rejected Christianity, been press-ganged into the Royal Navy, deserted, been publicly flogged, and eventually found work on slave ships. In Sierra Leone, he had sunk so low that he became the virtual slave of an African princess named Amba, who fed him scraps from her table while he lay fevered and near death.

But that night in the storm, something cracked open inside him. The ship miraculously limped into Lough Swilly, Ireland, after…

💡 Newton continued working as a slave ship captain for six years after his religious conversion, only leaving the trade due to illness—not conscience.