November 29th 1781: Zong massacre
On this day in 1781, hundreds of captured Africans were killed aboard the British slave ship Zong. The ship had left the African coast on September 6th carrying 470 slaves, which was far more than the ship could accommodate, but Captain Luke Collingwood insisted on taking more people to maximise his profits from selling them as slaves. The horrific, cramped conditions aboard the ship led to rapidly spreading disease and malnutrition, which claimed the lives of fifty slaves and seventeen crew members. In order to prevent further deaths and to allow himself to collect insurance money on the lost slave property, Collingwood decided to throw 132 sick and dying captives overboard, beginning on November 29th. Ten of the kidnapped Africans threw themselves to their deaths in an act of defiance against Collingwood’s barbarity. Upon the Zong’s arrival in Jamaica, the ship’s owner filed an insurance claim of £4,000 for the loss of the human cargo, asserting that the ship lacked the water supplies to sustain the full crew and captives. This claim was refuted, however, as it was soon discovered that the ship had 420 gallons of water aboard. Despite the weakness of the ship owner’s claim, a Jamaican court in 1782 ruled in their favour, forcing the insurers to pay out. The insurers appealed the court’s decision, and the ensuing legal battle soon acquired a moral element, as it enflamed the growing abolitionist movement in Great Britain. The high publicity around the case, and the fact that abolitionists like Olaudah Equiano and Granville Sharp used it to further the anti-slavery cause, led to a second trial in Britain ruling in favour of the insurers. However, prevailing inhumane attitudes towards the plight of the kidnapped Africans prevented criminal charges from being brought against those responsible for the massacre. Britain’s Solicitor General flippantly rebuffed the case, claiming that as slaves are legal property, the incident is akin to as if wood had been thrown overboard. The tragic deaths of hundreds of captured Africans, and the injustice of their murderers’ reprieve, did, however, strengthen the abolitionist movement. The Zong massacre provides one the darkest symbols of the horrific Middle Passage, and paved the way for the eventual abolition of slavery across the British Empire in 1833.
