The Earl - caught up in the Zong case - studies it with pride and a hint of confusion.
Poor navigation and strong headwinds meant his ship, the Zong, was taking months, not weeks, to sail from Africa to Jamaica.
The Zong case was one of a series of atrocities that spearheaded progress towards the parliamentary abolition of the slave trade in 1807.
As if that wasn't horrifying enough, the owners of the Zong then tried to get insurance money for the financial loss.
The Zong model is applicable to polymeric materials at high microwave frequencies and can be used to calculate the parameters of the Davidson Cole model.
The Earl of Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson) presided over the real-life case of the Zong, an English slave ship who's crew were accused of drowning 142 diseased slaves to claim insurance money.
As lord chief justice, Mansfield heard several significant slavery cases, including the 1772 Somerset v Stewart case (which questioned whether slavery was supported by common law), and the Zong ship case, which hinged upon the deliberate drowning of human "cargo".
As Lord Chief Justice, Mansfield presided over two of the most important cases in the history of the abolition of slavery in Britain: the Somersett case of 1772 and the Zong case of 1782.
It was a British sea captain who invented the refinement of this commerce that finally brought its obscenity to light, when in 1781 the Liverpool ship the Zong threw more than 100 sick slaves overboard for the insurance.
The most interesting story line involves Lord Mansfield's work as he decides the Zong massacre case, in which a ship of slave traders threw 142 slaves overboard, claiming it was necessary because supplies were running low.
The death toll was almost five times that of the next-largest tragedy: the 1781 massacre of 132 slaves on the Zong, a British-owned ship that was transporting slaves from Africa to Jamaica.
