Over the course of nearly four centuries, the Atlantic slave trafficking system saw 12.5 million Africans trafficked from their homelands to the Americas. A devastating 1.8 million of those souls perished during the voyage, enduring scarcely imaginable conditions of overcrowding, filth, and illness. Some chose to end their suffering by leaping overboard, while still more were forcibly cast into the sea.
In The Zorg, author Siddharth Kara weaves together two parallel narratives. The first chronicles a horrific incident aboard the namesake slave ship—the systematic drowning of 132 captive individuals by its British crew. The second story examines 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 committed campaigners. Among them was Olaudah Equiano, who authored one of the few surviving first-person accounts of the Middle Passage, calling it “a scene of horror almost inconceivable”.
The account originates in Liverpool, a port city that at the peak of its economic power was responsible for 40% of Europe's slave trafficking. Financing slavery was a lucrative venture for everyone from the elites to the common people. One such investor, William Gregson, saved up his wages from rope-making, ploughed them into the slave trade, and rose to become a wealthy burgher and later mayor. Gregson provided the funds for the slave ship The William, which departed from Liverpool for West Africa in October 1780 under Captain Richard Hanley. Its hold was filled with trade goods like tobacco, firearms, knives, and various “India goods” such as chintz and cowrie shells—the shells being a standard rate in the purchase of human beings.
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 permission to capture Dutch ships at sea—a de facto license for privateering. The Zorg was soon captured by a British captain and held off the Gold Coast. Meanwhile, Captain Hanley, during one of his voyages, picked up a fleeing British governor named Robert Stubbs, who had been expelled for corruption.
When Hanley reached Cape Coast Castle—a stronghold with a notorious holding cell beneath it—he took command of the captured Zorg. He proceeded to grossly overload it with enslaved people, put a dozen of his own crew on board, and made Luke Collingwood, a ship's surgeon of dubious nautical skill, its captain. In August 1781, the Zorg finally left Accra carrying 442 enslaved Africans, 17 crew members, and one notorious passenger: the former governor, Robert Stubbs.
Kara is particularly skilled at using contemporaneous sources to vividly reconstruct the general hell of being transported on a slave ship.
The Zorg's journey was fraught with calamity. "The flux" swept through the vessel, and then scurvy. The captain fell ill, lost his senses, and appointed Stubbs. Thus, “a ship full of decay and death was being commanded by a passenger.” Kara effectively employs eyewitness accounts to illustrate of the unmitigated terror. The powerful testimony of Alexander Falconbridge, a doctor who became an activist, describes how the enslaved people's skin was often worn down to the bone from being packed on bare wood, their flesh pinched and torn between the planks.
By late November 1781, the Zorg was far from Jamaica and critically short on water. The crew resolved to jettison a number of the captives, who had already suffered through months of appalling conditions below deck. This monstrous act was not motivated by preserving life—the Africans had begged 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 did cover cargo jettisoned out of “necessity” for the ship's safety. Over a period of 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.
Back in Liverpool, investor William Gregson was unhappy about the financial return on his investment. He filed an insurance claim for £30 per lost slave—a considerable sum in today's money. The insurers declined to pay. In March 1783, Gregson took them to court and was awarded a trial by jury, with his lawyers arguing that throwing the enslaved people overboard had been “necessary.”
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.” Just twelve days after the trial, an published essay appeared in a prominent English newspaper. The author, who claimed to have been present the court proceedings, argued compellingly against slavery, using the Zorg case as a prime example of its inherent evil. Olaudah Equiano read the letter and took it to the abolitionist Granville Sharp, who petitioned for a new trial. At the subsequent hearing, the events on the Zorg were reviewed in forensic detail, exactly what the abolitionists had wanted.
In the spring of 1787, the initial group of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade first met. Over the following years, they petitioned, orated, lobbied tirelessly, 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.
The debate over who or what deserves credit for abolition remains contentious. The Zorg's influence, 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 widespread in human history, its abolition following a prolonged public movement was unprecedented, serving as an affirmation to the power of persistent activism, the pen, and unwavering persistence.
In contrast to his other work—such as the Pulitzer finalist Cobalt Red—Kara has had to fill in certain lacunae in the historical record. Consequently, speculative passages sit awkwardly next to rigorously researched accounts, giving the book a slightly chimeric feel. Part thriller and part historical analysis, The Zorg ultimately manages to shedding light on one of history's most horrific episodes, using compelling prose and meticulous research to assemble a account that haunts the reader well after the final page.
