In August 1781, the Zong or as it was originally named, Zorg, a British slave ship, set sail from the West African coast, specifically Accra, in modern-day Ghana, bound for Jamaica and laden with approximately 442 enslaved Africans.
The vessel had begun its life as a Dutch slave ship operating out of Middelburg in the Netherlands, carrying enslaved Africans to the Dutch colony of Surinam in South America. On 10 February 1781, during the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, the British captured the Zorg. The ship was taken to the Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast, arriving on the 26th of February. In early March, it was purchased on behalf of a syndicate of Liverpool merchants that included Edward Wilson, George Case, James Aspinall, and Willian, James and John Gregson.
William Gregson, the syndicate’s leading figure, was a prominent Liverpool merchant and slave trader. He had been involved in dozens of salving voyages, and vessels in which he held financial interests ultimately carried tens of thousands of Africans into slavery in the Americas.
It is important to reiterate the circumstances and events that would eventually lead to the tragedy aboard the ship. The Zorg, renamed Zong by its new British owners, was purchased partly with bills of exchange. At the time of its acquisition, the ship was carrying 244 enslaved Africans. The merchants subsequently insured both the vessel and its human cargo, and gave the ship a new Captain — Luke Collingwood, a surgeon who had never before commanded a ship. A Liverpool syndicate of underwriters insured the vessel and its enslaved cargo for £8,000, roughly half the potential market value of the enslaved people, leaving the owners to bear the remaining risk.
Before departing from the West African coast that August, the Zhong bought an additional 198 enslaved Africans along the coast, gained a new passenger by the name of Roberts Stubbs, a former slave-ship captain, and set sail for Jamaica. Robert Stubbs, who also had served as governor of Anomabu, a British fort near Cape Coast Castle, was returning to Britain and Collingwood may have considered his previous experience in the slave trade useful during the voyage.
On the other hand, the ship carried only 17 crew members, an exceptionally small number of hands for a ship carrying so many captives. British slave ships of the period typically carried about 1.75 enslaved people per ton capacity. On the Zong, however, the ratio was approximately four enslaved people per ton.
The ship had left the West African coast grossly overloaded, carrying more than four hundred captives, roughly twice the number for which a vessel of its size could safely be expected to carry. At the centre of the voyage was Luke Collingwood, an inexperienced ship’s captain whose background was as a slave-ship surgeon. The Zong was therefore entering the Middle Passage under conditions in which profit had already been placed above the survival of the people confined aboard it.
Maybe its misfortune long began with its change of ownership. Maybe they began when the ship stopped for provisions on the island of São Tomé. We have no idea, but we do know that crucial preparations that should have happened aboard the ship during this stop did not happen. The ship’s first mate, James Kelsall, who was in charge of loading basic necessities — food and water — failed to do so on this stop. The ship’s builder and repairer of casks, on the other hand, had also become indisposed. The ship’s first mate, James Lelsall, had also been involved in an argument with Collingwood and had been temporarily suspended from duty.
The Zong officially set out that August and by late November, had reached the Caribbean. As a result of the unsavoury living conditions the enslaved Africans were exposed to on the ship, illness was quite rampant and 62 of the 442 enslaved, as well as several crew members, had died. Collingwood, the ship’s first-time commander, had also fallen ill and had handed over to Roberts Stubbs.
According to accounts, this was the beginning of the ship’s troubles. On the 21st of November, a discovery that would determine the course of events on the ship was made, although they didn’t know it yet — a large quantity of the fresh water kept in the ship’s hold had leaked. However, for the meantime, the water that remained was supposedly sufficient to get them to Jamaica.
Sometime around the 27th-28th of November, a costly mistake was made in the ship’s navigational course. The crew sighted Jamaica at a distance of roughly 27 nautical miles but mistook the island for the French colony of Saint-Domingue on Hispaniola. The Zong continued sailing westward and left Jamaica behind. The mistake was discovered only after the ship had travelled approximately 300 miles beyond the island. By the time the error was discovered, it was November 29 and calculations showed that it would take about 10-14 days to reach Jamaica, while the ships had only about four days’ of fresh water left. The accuracy of these calculations remains suspicious. By the time a full account of these events was reported to British courts, the crew had good reason to manipulate the numbers.
The Massacre
Remember that Captain Collingwood was ill and in his place, Robert Stubbs had taken command? Well, by the time several errors had been made on the ship, Kelsall who was the first mate, and the first in line to take command but who had been sidelined because he had argued with Cornwall, was reinstated to take command.
Under Kelsall’s command, surviving crew members convened on the 29th of November and unanimously made a gruesome decision to throw enslaved Africans overboard. For them, these humans were merely cargo and, for a ship that had been insured, the full cost of the slaves could be reclaimed from the insurance company. This was where the cold arithmetic of the slave trade met the logic of marine insurance. Under the insurance arrangements of the period, an enslaved person who died from illness or thirst was ordinarily treated as a loss to the owners. But if part of the “cargo” was deliberately jettisoned to save the ship and the remainder, the owners could make a claim under the principle of general average. The logic was simple albeit horrifying: a captain who sacrificed part of a ship's cargo in order to preserve the rest could seek compensation from the insurers for what had been sacrificed.
The enslaved Africans aboard the Zong had been insured at about £30 per person. On paper, the distinction was horrifying: allowing people to die naturally meant the owners bore the loss; throwing them into the sea could turn their deaths into an insured loss. Human beings had been reduced entirely to property, and that property had been insured.
Considered less valuable than men, 54 women and children were the first victims of this cruel decision, pushed, one by one, into the sea. This, however, was not the end of the atrocity. Two days later, on the 1st of December to be precise, the crew pushed another group of 42 men overboard and finally, a group of 38. Watching this, 10 other slaves chose to jump overboard themselves. Of these, one managed to climb back on board.
And then came a detail that would later become crucial in court: heavy rain fell during the period of the killings. The crew’s justification rested on the claim that the ship was running dangerously short of fresh water, yet the rainfall enabled the crew to collect additional water. Kelsall later stated in an affidavit that the rain fell heavily for more than a day on 1 December, allowing six casks of water to be collected, enough, by his account, to supply the ship for another 11 days. The fact that people continued to be thrown overboard even after rain had fallen would become one of the strongest pieces of evidence against the claim that the killings had been an unavoidable act of necessity.
A final count of the massacre remains disputed. The commonly cited figure is 132 people killed through the jettisoning of enslaved Africans and the subsequent suicides, although Kelsall later gave an estimate of 142 deaths. Yet, when the Zong ship arrived in Jamaica on the 22nd of December, only 208 of the approximately 442 enslaved people who had left Africa remained aboard. The ship still had approximately 420 imperial gallons of water when it reached Jamaica, further weakening the argument that the killings had been unavoidable because of an absolute lack of water.
In January 1782, the survivors were taken to market in Jamaica and sold at an average price of £36 per person. The ship had crossed the Atlantic with more than four hundred captive human beings; it reached Jamaica just before Christmas with fewer than half still alive.
Accounts from Robert Stubbs stated that the discrepancy in the number of enslaved people was caused by the killing of about another 30 on the last lap of the journey.
The Trial
Back in England, after learning what happened to its cargo, the owners of Zong filed an insurance claim for the loss of 132 enslaved Africans. The underwriters, denying the claim, argued that Zong’s crew members were responsible for the loss in view of their actions.
On the 6th of March 1783, the owners sued the insurance company in court in London, arguing that they were entitled to compensation in view of the terms of the insurance policy both parties had agreed to. And indeed, the case was one, not for the murder of 132 humans but for the compensation of unavoidable cargo loss occasioned by circumstances beyond control. The insurance company was therefore ordered to pay £30 per slave claimed as lost cargo.
During an appeal made by the insurance company, a new fact surfaced. Apparently, before the murder of the third and final group of enslaved Africans, it had rained. Ordinarily, this rain could have been collected and used to replenish the Zong’s freshwater stores. In view of this, Lord Mansfield ordered a new trial. Unfortunately, this new trial never took place.
Granville Sharp, already known for his campaign on behalf of enslaved people in Britain, learned of the massacre through the formerly enslaved writer and campaigner Olaudah Equiano and began pushing the case into public view. Sharp wrote to newspapers, government officials and others in an effort to expose what had happened. The first known newspaper report appeared in March 1783, bringing the case to a wider audience.
Legacy
The Zong came to represent the brutality of the transatlantic slave trade and was subsequently invoked by British abolitionists in their campaign against the institution. The massacre's immediate effect on public opinion was limited, but as Granville Sharp and other abolitionists circulated accounts of the case, it became an increasingly powerful example of the horrors of the Middle Passage.
In 1787, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded. The following year, Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act 1788, its first legislation specifically regulating the British slave trade. The Act sought to reduce overcrowding by limiting the number of enslaved people that could be carried aboard British slave ships. Later legislation further restricted the ability of slave-ship owners to use insurance to recover losses arising from the deliberate killing of enslaved people.
These developments did not end the trade however. Abolitionists continued their campaign for decades. In 1807, Parliament abolished Britain's participation in the transatlantic slave trade. Slavery itself was abolished throughout most of the British Empire by the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which came into effect in 1834.
The Zong's memory has been immortalised through various works. In 1840, J. M. W. Turner exhibited The Slave Ship, a painting depicting an enslaving vessel casting enslaved people into a turbulent sea, with sharks and other creatures gathering around them. Turner had been influenced by Thomas Clarkson's writings on the slave trade, including the account of the Zong massacre, and the painting became one of the most enduring artistic representations of the violence of the Atlantic slave trade.
In 1997, British writer, Fred D’Aguiar, wrote the novel “Feeding the Ghosts,” a fiction inspired by the accounts of the slave who survived the massacre by climbing back on the ship. Another literary work depicting the massacre and the court case on the Zong, called, ‘An African Cargo’ was introduced to the public in 2007 by Margarate Busby. In the same year, the British government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport sailed a replica of the Zong on the River Thames in London, in commemoration of the event.
In 2008, M. NourbeSe Philip published Zong!, a collection of poems constructed from the language of the legal record itself, deliberately dismantling and reworking the document through which the massacre was preserved. More recently, Giles Terera's play The Meaning of Zong, first staged in 2022, returned to the massacre and the 1783 legal proceedings.
