A Horrific Tale of the Slave Trade, Destined to Become a Classic
(Africans had been trying to end the slave trade more than three hundred years before this story. )
"In 1526, the king of the Kongo, Nzinga Mbemba (who by this time had adopted the Christian name of Afonso I) began writing a series of twenty-four letters to the Portuguese King Joao III appealing for an end to the slave trade. While a trading relationship had been in place between Portugal and Kongo since the 1480s, Afonso was increasingly unhappy that the relationship between both countries had degenerated into one in which the slave trade had become increasingly important. This source is a part of the Christianity and Slavery in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1480s-1520s teaching module."
"In the powerful new history “The Zorg,” Siddharth Kara tells a shocking story of mass killing, human baseness and the seeds of conscience.
By Marcus Rediker
Marcus Rediker teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and is the author of “The Slave Ship: A Human History.”
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THE ZORG: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery, by Siddharth Kara
Within the blood-soaked history of the Atlantic slave trade, the vessel long known as “the Zong” stands out. It was a death ship of raging mortality on which the slavers, in 1781, decided to throw scores of enslaved sick people overboard to collect insurance premiums.
The gruesome history of the Zong has long inspired artists, poets, novelists and playwrights, ranging from J.M.W. Turner to Robert Southey, M. NourbeSe Philip, Fred D’Aguiar and Giles Terera. The tale of mass murder at sea has been kept alive over many generations by critics of slavery and empire.
Siddharth Kara’s powerful new history of the horror begins, authoritatively, by explaining that for more than two centuries we have gotten the name of the ship wrong: It was in fact a Dutch vessel called “the Zorg,” which in cruel irony meant “care” or “concern.”
Kara provides a microhistory of the ship and its most fateful voyage, narrating in gripping detail every stage of its violent and historic trans-Atlantic journey.
The Zorg, captured as a prize during the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War in February 1781, would sail in August from the Gold Coast, bound for Kingston, Jamaica, with an overloaded 442 enslaved men, women and children and an undersize crew of 17. The former slave ship surgeon Luke Collingwood, who had little navigational experience, was named captain by a representative of the Liverpool merchant William Gregson.
The Middle Passage was a nightmare. Dysentery, or the “bloody flux,” ravaged the enslaved on the lower deck, the crew in the steerage (who also had scurvy and likely malaria) and, most likely, the captain in his cabin. Poor planning and management resulted in a severe shortage of water, while navigational errors turned an already long voyage into a deadly crisis.
Though it remains unclear who made the decision to begin throwing the enslaved overboard — it could have been the ship’s delirious captain, the first mate or the veteran slave trader and passenger Robert Stubbs — Kara suggests the decision was made in the hope of collecting shipowner insurance payments for jettisoned “cargo.”
Beginning on Nov. 29, the crew threw 122 people, mostly women and children, through an officer’s cabin window into the sea, knowing that hungry sharks followed in the wake of slave ships. Another 10 enslaved people seized the chaos of the moment to commit a final act of resistance, jumping into the water to die.
On Dec. 22, the Zorg sailed into Black River, Jamaica, with only 208 enslaved people still living.
Back in England more than a year later, the shipowner Gregson filed a novel insurance claim for 30 British pounds per head, alleging that dire circumstances had required the crew to throw “cargo” overboard.
The insurers refused to pay and the owners sued in February 1783. A jury ruled in favor of the shipowners. The insurers appealed and the case came back to court for a hearing in May. Britain’s chief justice ordered a new trial, speculating that the cause of mass death had been partly crew incompetence, but at that point Gregson withdrew the claim.
Meanwhile, the antislavery activist Granville Sharp, informed about the case by the formerly enslaved abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, publicized the atrocities and denounced the slave trade as a system of murder.
Kara has done impressive research in the archives of the Royal African Company, England’s chartered slave-trading operation, and its successors, through which he narrates the complicated politics of commerce on the West African coast and describes as much as possible about the voyage itself. He illuminates the main players in the drama as he depicts the stages of enslavement, transport, sale and the legal jockeying that followed the voyage.
The portraits of social life in the coffles (human trains) and the slave-trading forts on the Gold Coast are wrenchingly vivid. The narrative necessarily contains speculation — “would haves” and “may haves” — because we have few documents to describe much of the voyage, including how the enslaved understood their own experience. Even so, the book is in the end a model of sophisticated research, lucid writing and engaged conscience.
In the final chapter, “A Victory for the Whole Human Race,” Kara draws a line of causation from the atrocities aboard the Zorg to Equiano, then from Equiano to Sharp and Thomas Clarkson (two of England’s most important abolitionists), then on to abolition of the slave trade and finally to Frederick Douglass and the destruction of slavery itself.
The connections are real but the conception of causation is too narrow. The tale of the Zorg was all about “greed and murder,” as Kara’s subtitle announces, but it is serious overreach to claim that it inspired “the abolition of slavery,” which didn’t arrive in the British Empire for another 57 years (in 1838) or in the United States for 84 years (in 1865), after thousands of other actors who knew nothing about the Zorg had attacked and subverted the institution.
While the Zorg affair was indeed a critical event in the abolition of the slave trade, here too we must allow for other causal forces. Nine of the 12 men who met with Sharp and Clarkson to found the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in May 1787 were Quakers, among whom a debate about slavery had raged since 1688, long before the killings aboard the Zorg. Their fellow Quaker Benjamin Lay had denounced the slave trade as organized mass murder half a century earlier.
The limited conception of causation, from great man to great man, also obscures the massive resistance of enslaved people themselves against the institution of slavery and reduces most of them to suffering victims.
“The Zorg” remains a book of great importance and one that will likely become a classic. It takes a respected place within a growing historical literature about the slave ship in general, which was a hybrid of factory, warship and floating prison, a technological marvel in its day and a social world all its own.
Even if the Zorg and the ensuing debate were not quite what the author makes them out to be, they will always be a potent exposé of the ancient clash between humanity and property.
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