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Over the nearly four centuries during which the transatlantic slave trade operated, 12.5 million Africans were trafficked by Europeans to the Americas. 1.8 million of them perished on the voyage under scarcely imaginable conditions of overcrowding, filth and disease. Some threw themselves overboard. And others were thrown into the sea.
In The Zorg, Siddharth Kara tells two stories. The first is of a harrowing incident aboard the eponymous slave ship – the murder of 132 Africans by the British crew. The second relates how that event came to play a role in the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, in large part through the work of a dazzling array of committed campaigners. One of these was Olaudah Equiano, author of one of the few surviving accounts of the Middle Passage from the perspective of an enslaved person, in which he described it as “a scene of horror almost inconceivable”.
The tale begins in Liverpool, a city which at its economic zenith was responsible for 40% of the European slave trade. Investing in slavery was a profitable activity not just for the elites but for the lower classes as well. One investor, William Gregson, saved up his rope-making wages, ploughed them into the trade and eventually became a rich burgher and mayor of the city. Gregson financed the slave ship The William, which left Liverpool for west Africa in October 1780 with Capt Richard Hanley at the helm. It was loaded with commodities to trade at slave markets, such as tobacco, firearms, knives and “India goods” such as chintz and Maldive cowrie shells, 400lbs of which was “the going rate … per African male”.
Around the same time, a Dutch slave ship named the Zorg (later referred to by the British as the Zong) had departed the Netherlands. The Dutch had been supporting and supplying arms to the American revolutionaries and in December 1780, Britain declared war on them. The Royal Navy gave British ships permission to seize Dutch property at sea: carte blanche for piracy. The Zorg was captured by a British captain and anchored off the Gold Coast. Meanwhile, on one of his slave shopping trips, Hanley had picked up a fleeing British governor called Robert Stubbs who had been kicked out for corruption. Stubbs had been tasked with handing over gifts of gunpowder and brandy from King George III to the Asante Kingdom but had likely pilfered them, souring diplomatic relations and threatening the flow of slaves.
When Hanley arrived at Cape Coast Castle, a fortress at the centre of the British slave trade with a 1,000-capacity slave dungeon below it, he found the Zorg and took it on. He overloaded it with slaves, placed 12 of his own crew on it and made Luke Collingwood, a ship’s surgeon of questionable nautical competence, the captain. A few months later, in August 1781, the Zorg left Accra with “442 slaves, 17 crew, and 1 passenger”, the depraved former governor Robert Stubbs, on board.
The Zorg’s journey was fraught. Dysentery – “the flux” – tore through the ship. Scurvy followed. The captain sickened and became delirious, appointing Stubbs to take command. Thus, “a ship full of decay and death was being commanded by a passenger”. Kara is particularly skilled at using contemporaneous sources to bring to life the general hell of being trafficked on a slave ship. The testimony of Alexander Falconbridge, another ship’s surgeon turned abolitionist, is especially powerful. He describes how enslaved people’s skin was often rubbed down to the bone from lying packed close on bare wood, their flesh pinched and torn between the planks. Elsewhere a Liverpool captain’s eyewitness account describes “two Eboe women” who had “by some means got overboard to swim ashore” being devoured by sharks.
By late November 1781 the Zorg was miles from Jamaica and short on water. The crew decided to jettison some of the enslaved Africans, who had endured months in the obscene conditions below deck. What drove this unspeakable plan of action was not ensuring the survival of the people on board – the Africans had begged to be allowed to live even without water rations – but economic greed. Maritime insurance did not cover the death of enslaved people from natural causes, but did cover the “necessity” of throwing them overboard for the ship’s safety, for example, in the event of an insurrection. Over the course of several days, the crew drowned “those Africans who would be worth less at auction, either due to gender, age, or state of illness”: the weak, the sick, women and children, including a baby born during the crossing.
Back in Liverpool, when the sums were done, Gregson was not pleased with the return on his investment. He filed an insurance claim seeking £30 per lost slave – several thousand pounds today. The insurers declined to pay. In March 1783, Gregson took them to court and won a trial by jury, arguing that the throwing of the slaves overboard was “necessary”.
According to Kara, “there is a direct line of causality between the public exposure of the Zorg murders and the first movement to abolish slavery in England”. Twelve days after the trial, an anonymous letter was printed in one of England’s most widely read newspapers. The author, who claimed to have been in court when the case was heard, argued compellingly against slavery, with the case of the Zorg as prime example of its evil. Equiano read the letter and took it to Granville Sharp, an abolitionist friend, who filed a motion for a new trial. At a hearing to decide whether to proceed, the events on board the Zorg were reviewed with a forensic level of detail: exactly what the abolitionists had hoped for.
In spring 1787, the founding members of the Society for the Purpose of Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade first met. Over the subsequent years, they wrote letters, made speeches, organised petitions, lobbied parliamentarians and aristocrats and meticulously documented the particulars of the slave trade through archival research and fieldwork. “Their efforts,” writes Kara, “would lay a blueprint for the pursuit of social justice.” In 1807, after years of setbacks, the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was finally passed.
Who or what should get credit for the abolition of the slave trade is a matter of debate. That the Zorg was influential is evident in JMW Turner’s painting, The Slave Ship, initially titled Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, which was inspired by the events of 1781. Turner exhibited it in London in 1840 to coincide with the first World Anti-Slavery Convention. While slavery has been near-universal in human culture, its abolition following a sustained civil mass campaign was unprecedented, and an affirmation of the power of the pen, persistence and moral courage.
Unlike in his other work – including Pulitzer finalist Cobalt Red, which meticulously documented human rights abuses in the mines of Congo – Kara has had to fill in some gaps in the historical record. Imaginative flourishes sit awkwardly next to rigorously researched accounts, and the book has a chimeric feel. Part thriller, part serious nonfiction – whatever it is, The Zorg effectively illuminates one of the darkest chapters in our history, using powerful storytelling and documented fact to assemble a portrait that haunts the reader long after finishing it.
