🔗 Share this article

Over the spanning nearly four hundred years, the transatlantic slave trade saw 12.5 million Africans trafficked from their continent to the Americas. A staggering 1.8 million of those individuals perished during the voyage, subjected to scarcely imaginable conditions of extreme confinement, filth, and illness. Many chose to end their suffering by leaping overboard, while still more were callously thrown into the sea.

A Tale of Two Stories

In The Zorg, author Siddharth Kara weaves together two interconnected narratives. The first chronicles a harrowing incident aboard the namesake slave ship—the systematic drowning of 132 captive individuals by its British crew. The second story explores how this event came to influence the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, thanks largely by the dedicated work of a dazzling array of abolitionist activists. Among them was Olaudah Equiano, who authored one of the rare first-person narratives of the Middle Passage, describing it as “a scene of horror almost inconceivable”.

The Roots in Liverpool

The account originates in Liverpool, a port city that at the peak of its economic power was responsible for 40% of Europe's slave trade. Investing in slavery was a lucrative venture for everyone from the wealthy to the common people. One such entrepreneur, William Gregson, saved up his wages from his trade, invested them into the slave trade, and rose to become a wealthy burgher and even mayor. Gregson financed the slave ship The William, which set sail from Liverpool for West Africa in October 1780 under Captain Richard Hanley. Its hold was loaded with commodities like tobacco, firearms, knives, and so-called “India goods” such as chintz and cowrie shells—the shells being a standard rate in the acquisition of human beings.

The Capture of the Zorg

Concurrently, a Dutch slave vessel named the Zorg (later anglicized by the British as the Zong) had left the Netherlands. With Britain declaring war on the Dutch in late 1780, the Royal Navy gave British ships authority to capture Dutch property at sea—a de facto sanctioning of piracy. The Zorg was subsequently captured by a British captain and anchored off the Gold Coast. Meanwhile, Captain Hanley, during one of his voyages, picked up a disgraced British governor named Robert Stubbs, who had been removed for graft.

The Nightmare Passage

When Hanley arrived at Cape Coast Castle—a fortress with a notorious slave dungeon beneath it—he assumed control of the captured Zorg. He then grossly overload it with captives, placed a dozen of his own crew on board, and made Luke Collingwood, a ship's surgeon of dubious seamanship, its captain. In August 1781, the Zorg left Accra carrying 442 captives, 17 crew members, and one depraved passenger: the former governor, Robert Stubbs.

Kara is particularly skilled at using contemporaneous sources to bring to life the general hell of being trafficked on a slave ship.

The Zorg's journey was plagued with disaster. Dysentery swept through the vessel, and then scurvy. The captain succumbed to sickness, lost his senses, and appointed Stubbs. Thus, “a ship full of decay and death was being commanded by a passenger.” Kara effectively employs period testimonies to illustrate of the unmitigated terror. The powerful testimony of Alexander Falconbridge, a ship's surgeon turned abolitionist, details how the captives' skin was often rubbed raw to the bone from lying on bare wood, their flesh pinched and torn between the planks.

A Calculated Atrocity

By late November 1781, the Zorg was far from Jamaica and critically short on water. The crew resolved to throw overboard a number of the captives, who had already endured months of appalling conditions below deck. This monstrous act was not motivated by ensuring survival—the Africans had pleaded to be allowed to live, even without water rations—but by cold economic greed. Maritime insurance policies did not cover deaths from natural causes, but they would pay for cargo jettisoned out of “necessity” for the ship's safety. Over several days, the crew drowned “those Africans who would be worth less at auction”—the weak, the sick, including women and children, among them a baby born during the voyage.

Insurance and Injustice

Back in Liverpool, investor William Gregson was unhappy about the profit on his venture. He submitted an insurance claim for £30 per drowned captive—a substantial sum in today's money. The insurers declined to pay. In March 1783, Gregson sued and won a trial by jury, with his lawyers arguing that throwing the enslaved people overboard had been “necessary.”

Catalyzing the Movement

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.” Merely twelve days after the trial, an published essay appeared in a widely read English newspaper. The author, who claimed to have been present the court proceedings, made a powerful case against slavery, using the Zorg case as a prime example of its brutality. Olaudah Equiano read the letter and brought it to the activist Granville Sharp, who filed a motion for a new trial. At the subsequent hearing, the events on the Zorg were reviewed in forensic detail, exactly what the abolitionists had hoped for.

The Road to 1807

In the spring of 1787, the founding members of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade convened. Over the following years, they wrote letters, orated, organized campaigns, and gathered evidence on the particulars of the slave trade. “Their efforts,” Kara writes, “would lay a blueprint for the pursuit of social justice.” After years of struggles, the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was enacted in 1807.

A Lasting Legacy

The debate over who or what deserves credit for abolition is a matter of debate. The Zorg's legacy, however, is powerfully evident in J.M.W. Turner's famous painting, The Slave Ship, which was inspired by the events of 1781. While slavery has been near-universal in human history, its abolition following a sustained public movement was historic, serving as an affirmation to the power of persistent activism, the pen, and unwavering persistence.

The Author's Approach

Unlike his previous books—such as the acclaimed Cobalt Red—Kara has had to fill in certain lacunae in the available documentation. Consequently, imaginative flourishes sit awkwardly next to rigorously researched accounts, giving the book a somewhat hybrid feel. A blend of narrative suspense and part historical analysis, The Zorg nevertheless manages to illuminating one of history's most horrific episodes, using compelling prose and meticulous research to create a account that stays with the reader long after the final page.