At one point Newton tried to desert and was punished in front of the crew. He became a midshipman aboard HMS Harwich.

In 1743, while going to visit friends, Newton was pressed into the Royal Navy. Instead, Newton signed on with a merchant ship sailing to the Mediterranean Sea. At that time, Newton's father made plans for him to work at a sugarcane plantation in Jamaica. Newton sailed six voyages before his father retired in 1742. Īt age eleven he first went to sea with his father. Newton spent two years at a boarding school, before going to live at Aveley in Essex, the home of his father's new wife. She died of tuberculosis (then called consumption) in July 1732, about two weeks before her son's seventh birthday. Elizabeth was brought up as a Nonconformist. Elizabeth was the only daughter of Simon Scatliff, an instrument maker from London. John Newton was born in Wapping, London, in 1725, the son of John Newton the Elder, a shipmaster in the Mediterranean service, and Elizabeth (née Scatliff). Newton lived to see the British Empire's abolition of the African slave trade in 1807, just months before his death. Now an evangelical, he was ordained as a Church of England cleric and served as parish priest at Olney, Buckinghamshire, for two decades and wrote hymns. Some years after experiencing a conversion to Christianity, Newton later renounced his trade and became a prominent supporter of abolitionism. After retiring from active sea-faring, he continued to invest in the slave trade. He was rescued, returned to sea and the trade, becoming Captain of several slave ships. In 1745, he himself became a slave of Princess Peye, a woman of the Sherbro people in what is now Sierra Leone.

Newton went to sea at a young age and worked on slave ships in the slave trade for several years. He is noted for being author of the hymns Amazing Grace and Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken. He served as a sailor in the Royal Navy (after forced recruitment) and was himself enslaved for a time in West Africa. He had previously been a captain of slave ships and an investor in the slave trade.

John Newton ( / ˈ nj uː t ən/ 4 August 1725 – 21 December 1807) was an English evangelical Anglican cleric and slavery abolitionist. British sailor, slaver, Anglican cleric and prominent slavery abolitionist

John newton and william wilberforce