The Portuguese began the Atlantic slave trade in the 16th century, operating sugarcane plantations off the western African coast and soon shipping captives to support the Spanish in the Caribbean. A century later, the Dutch supplanted them. The English joined the trade in the 17th century, and by the eve of the American Revolution, the island of Jamaica’s exports were five times those of the thirteen colonies. The slave trade transformed “Britain into an economic superpower.” The mass murder of enslaved Africans aboard the Zorg helped ignite the movement to abolish the slave trade in the United Kingdom and, eventually, in America.
Luke Collingwood, an experienced slave-ship doctor, set sail from Liverpool aboard the William under the command of Richard Hanley in October 1780. By year’s end, they reached the African coast and anchored on January 15 at Cape Coast Castle. Hanley and Collingwood began the months-long task of acquiring Africans from middlemen. Two months later, they had forced 382 people aboard.
Around the same time the William left Liverpool, the Zorg sailed from the Netherlands, and by March the ship held 244 captive Africans. A British privateer soon captured the Zorg. Hanley purchased the vessel and appointed Collingwood as its captain. The William then sailed for Jamaica. Under Collingwood, the Zorg departed in August with 17 crew members and 442 enslaved Africans. For a cargo of that size, more than 30 crew members were customary. There was also a passenger, Robert Stubbs, a ruthless man returning to England who had once captained a slave ship. The expected arrival in Kingston was early November.
Each day, the enslaved were brought up from the hold to exercise, eat, and allow the crew to clean below decks. The Zorg’s first major mishap occurred when a storm drove the ship off course. Early in the voyage, Collingwood fell ill and named Stubbs his successor. As time passed, scurvy afflicted both crew and captives.
In late November, they reached Tobago—about 1,100 miles and ten days from Jamaica. They were twenty days behind schedule and had already lost 62 enslaved people and 6 crew members. After a navigational error, the Zong sailed 300 miles past Jamaica and had to turn back against the wind. They were still ten days from port with only four days’ worth of water remaining. The crew decided to throw some of the enslaved overboard to preserve supplies for the rest. Fifty-five women and children were murdered first. The men followed the next night. In all, about 130 people were drowned. The Zorg docked on December 22 with a mortality rate approaching 50 percent. Soon thereafter, Collingwood died. The surviving enslaved people were sold, and the atrocity might have faded from memory.
The Zorg had been insured by its owner, William Gregson. A key clause covering “all other perils, losses, and misfortunes” was generally understood to apply to events such as slave insurrections. Gregson filed a claim, although what had occurred was unprecedented. A jury found in his favor. Two weeks later, an unknown likely a clergyman, published a long letter in the nation’s largest newspaper, calling the killings murder and asking how Parliament could legislate the procedures the killing of partridges while ignoring the destruction of human life. Britain’s leading abolitionist, Granville Sharp, sided with the insurers and demanded a retrial, arguing that incompetence—not a genuine water shortage—had led to the massacre. The insurers’ lawyers then pivoted and requested a murder prosecution. A retrial was granted, but Gregson dropped the case. There was no retrial, and no one was ever tried for murder. Nevertheless, the Zorg had “exposed the vast carnage to the public.”
Sharp published the trial transcripts and wrote an essay that energized the abolition movement and contributed to its eventual success in Britain and America. The campaign was by Thomas Clarkson, a Cambridge scholar who tirelessly traveled the country building support. Parliament came close to abolition in the early 1790s but retreated when war with France began. The United Kingdom abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833.
This magnificent book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It does, however, suffer from a significant drawback: there are relatively few hard facts about the episode, and the author relies more on conjecture than one expects in a work of history. Nonetheless, it is highly recommended and very good.
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