History Snapshot: The Zong Slave Massacre of 1781

November 29, 1781 Captain Luke Collingwood of the British slave ship the Zong ordered 132 captive Africans from Ghana thrown into the sea. The Zong departed the coast of Africa on 6 September 1781 with 470 slaves. Human chattel was such a valuable commodity at that time, many captains took on more slaves than their ships could accommodate to maximize profits. The Liverpool-based ship was en route from Africa to Jamaica, there to exchange its human chattel for New World produce bound for the European market. The Zong’s captain, Luke Collingwood, overloaded his ship with slaves and by late November many of them had begun to die from disease and malnutrition. During the journey, sickness caused the deaths of seven of the 17 crew members and over 50 slaves, because they were stranded in the “Doldrums” and needed to lighten the ship the crew felt it was best to also clear the sickest of the slaves. Over a three-day span beginning Nov. 29, Collingwood had 133 still-living, but sick slaves cast overboard; in part, because he felt he could declare it as an insurrection which gave the owners of the ship an opportunity to claim insurance losses. Upon the Zong’s arrival in Jamaica, James Gregson, the ship’s owner, filed an insurance claim for their loss. Gregson argued that the Zong did not have enough water to sustain both crew and the human commodities. The insurance underwriter, Thomas Gilbert, disputed the claim citing that the Zong had 420 gallons of water aboard when she was inventoried in Jamaica. Despite this, the Jamaican court in 1782 found in favor of the owners. The insurers appealed the case in 1783 and in the process provoked a great deal of public interest and the attention of Great Britain's abolitionists. The leading abolitionist at the time, Granville Sharp, used the deaths of the slaves to increase public awareness about the slave trade and further the anti-slavery cause. It was he who first used the word massacre. The case then came before the lord chief justice, Lord Mansfield, who in a previous judgment had ruled that there was never a legal basis for slave ownership within England under English law. This ruling helped propel the abolitionist movement in England, but it wasn’t until 1833 that slavery was abolished in the colonies.

Photo: Underwater sculpture off Grenada commemorating slaves thrown overboard during the Middle Passage.

 

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/jan/19/the-story-of-the-zong-slave-ship-a-mass-masquerading-as-an-insurance-claim

https://aaregistry.org/story/the-zong-massacre-episode-begins/