In August of 1781, captain Luke Collingwood left Africa with more than four hundred slaves with the intent to sell them in Jamaca. Accustomed as we are to massive cruise ships that can carry, on average, three thousand people, this number does not seem particularly high. However, for the time, it was customary for the average slave ship to cary a capacity of 1.75 slaves per ton. The Zong carried a ratio of 4.0 persons per ton (2). This practice caused multiple problems, not the least of which could potentially include a shortage of water or food. 

With this in mind, a scarcity of water was claimed to be the primary reason for which, upon approaching the island of Jamaica, more than 130 african slaves were jettisoned over board. A rough fifty of these included women and children (2). “Overcrowding, malnutrition, accidents, and disease had already killed several mariners and approximately 62 Africans” (2). 

As explains Anita Rupprecht in her essay, “A Very Uncommon Case” she summarizes simply that, “it is the narrative fact that Luke Collingwood ordered the jettison of 132 living Africans, and that he did so in order to make an insurance claim” (1). The reality of the matter is, whatever claims the slave traders may have made in regards to limited water supplies, it was primarily the “sickness and mortality” (1) that came from the manor of transporting the slaves that caused the massacre of the Africans. In an attempt to recuperate potential losses in profit if the disease was allowed to persist and spread aboard the ship, the Gregson slave-trading sydicate that owned the ship filed for insurance based on the claims the crew members gave. 

Though the lower courts upheld the case given in favor of the ship owners, in a later appeal, it was revealed that the Zong was not, in fact, short of water at the time of the jettison of the slaves. In said appeal, the claims of the insurers were upheld, thereby ruling against the claims of the syndicates (2). 

The abolitionists of the time viewed the Zong case as a rallying point and Granville Sharp, a prominent abolitionist, had “no patience with formal arguments about insurance law. The ‘transaction’ in question was about life, not property” (1), and could not “ignore the case of Zong. It almost too perfectly, and gruesomely, dramatised the horrific consequences of legal perversion in the name of profit: maritime insurance, that perfectly prudent commercial ‘safety net’, also sanctioned calculated mass murder” (1). He, in effect, advocates for the humanization of the slaves and tries to put his readers in a place to sympathize with them, exploring in his writings the dehumanization and disempowering of the African during the middle passage (the voyage between Africa and the Americas) (1). For Sharp, “the line of argument was uncomplicated. The legal definition of slave humanity legitimised murder” (1).

The tragedies of the Zong did not end with Sharp. His work was built upon by other abolitionists - more notibally by William Wilberforce who referenced the Zong in speeches to the House. The case of the Zong, though sad in it’s reality, marks a huge stepping stone in the process in the abolition of slavery. In 1788, seven years after the diseased slaves were jettisoned into the ocean, the Slave Trade Act was passed, which amongst other things as the first law passed regulating slave trade, limited the number of slaves that could be carried per ship. Further laws were added in 1791 that “prohibited insurance companies from reimbursing ship owners when enslaved people were murdered by being thrown overboard” (2). All culminating in the eventual abolition of slavery in 1807.

Works Cited

(1) Anita Rupprecht (2007) ‘A Very Uncommon Case’: Representations of the Zong and the British Campaign to Abolish the Slave Trade, The Journal of Legal History, 28:3, 329-346, DOI: 10.1080/01440360701698494

(2)“The Zong Massacre Begins.” African American Registry, 29 Nov. 2021, https://aaregistry.org/story/the-zong-massacre-episode-begins/.