Zong Massacre (1781): Murder at Sea and the Insurance Case

The Zong massacre was the killing of more than 130 enslaved Africans thrown overboard from the British slave ship Zong in the Caribbean Sea from 29 November 1781. The ship’s owners then claimed insurance for the dead as lost cargo, and the resulting court case, Gregson v Gilbert, exposed the logic of the slave trade to the British public. The Zong became one of the most powerful symbols used by the abolition movement.

Background: the ship and its owners

The Zong was originally a Dutch ship named the Zorg. It was captured by the British off the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) in February 1781, during the war between Britain and the Dutch Republic, and was bought by a syndicate of Liverpool merchants led by William Gregson. Gregson’s partners, who included his sons and other Liverpool traders, were experienced investors in the slave trade.

Command was given to Luke Collingwood, who had previously served as a ship’s surgeon on slaving voyages but had never captained a ship. The Zong was small, and it was heavily overloaded: when it sailed from the African coast on 18 August 1781, it carried around 442 enslaved Africans, far more than a ship of its size could safely hold, together with a crew of about seventeen.

Liverpool was by then Britain’s leading slave-trading port, sending out more slaving voyages than London and Bristol combined in many years of the late 18th century. War with France, Spain and the Dutch Republic had disrupted shipping, and merchants who could get captives to the Caribbean expected high prices. The Zong’s owners hoped to profit quickly from a ship that had cost them little.

Like other slave ships, the Zong was insured. Under the marine insurance practice of the time, enslaved people were treated as goods. Underwriters did not usually pay for captives who died of disease or “natural” causes, but they could be liable for cargo thrown overboard in a genuine emergency to save the rest of the ship, a principle known as general average or jettison.

The voyage

The crossing of the Atlantic, known as the Middle Passage, was long and deadly. Overcrowding, disease and malnutrition killed a number of Africans and crew members during the voyage; by late November dozens of the captives had died.

Navigational mistakes made things worse. When Jamaica came into sight around 27–28 November, it was apparently mistaken for Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti), and the ship sailed on to the west before the error was realised. The Zong was now well past its destination and had to beat back against the wind, adding days or weeks to the voyage.

The killings

On 29 November 1781 Collingwood gathered his officers and proposed throwing some of the captives overboard. He argued that the water supply was running low and that, if the Africans died of thirst on board, the loss would fall on the owners, whereas if they were jettisoned to preserve the ship, the insurers would pay. The first mate, James Kelsall, is recorded as having objected at first, but the crew carried out the plan.

That evening the crew threw 54 women and children through the cabin windows into the sea. On 1 December, 42 men were thrown overboard. In the following days a further group of about 36 people were killed, and around ten more are reported to have jumped into the sea themselves rather than submit. Heavy rain fell on 1 December, allowing the crew to collect water, yet the killings continued.

Accounts give slightly different totals, but most historians put the number deliberately killed at about 130 to 133, with about ten more dying by jumping. One man is said to have climbed back on board unseen.

Later testimony suggested that the crew chose victims who were sick or weak, as these were the people least likely to sell for a good price in Jamaica and most likely to die anyway, which would have left the loss with the owners. The shackled captives below deck could hear what was happening above, and survivors are said to have pleaded to be allowed to go without food and water rather than be thrown into the sea.

Arrival in Jamaica and the insurance claim

The Zong reached Black River, Jamaica, on 22 December 1781 with 208 surviving Africans, who were sold. Collingwood died a few days later. When the ship was examined, it was found to have had a significant quantity of water remaining, which became central to later arguments that there had been no real necessity.

The Gregson syndicate then claimed against its insurers for the murdered captives, at about £30 per person. The underwriters refused to pay.

Gregson v Gilbert

The owners sued in London. In March 1783 the case was tried before Lord Mansfield and a jury at the Guildhall, and the jury found for the owners, treating the killings as a lawful jettison of cargo. The underwriters, named in the case as Gilbert and others, applied for a new trial.

The appeal was heard in the Court of King’s Bench in May 1783 before Mansfield and two fellow judges, Francis Buller and Edward Willes. The owners’ counsel, the Solicitor General John Lee, argued that the case was no different from throwing horses overboard, a comparison that shocked observers. New evidence showed that rain had fallen and that the ship had not been in such desperate need.

Mansfield and his colleagues ordered a new trial, noting that the necessity had not been proved and that the shortage might have been caused by the captain’s own errors. There is no record that the retrial ever took place, and the owners appear to have dropped the claim. Crucially, the court treated the matter as an insurance dispute; none of the judges suggested that murder had been committed.

The judges’ reasoning has been widely discussed by legal historians. Mansfield remarked that the case of slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard, in the sense that the law treated them as goods for insurance purposes; at the same time, his decision to reopen the case made the owners’ claim impossible to sustain. Historians such as James Walvin and Andrew Lewis have shown how the surviving reports, based partly on the shorthand notes commissioned by Granville Sharp, preserved details that might otherwise have been lost.

Equiano, Sharp and the campaign

On 19 March 1783 Olaudah Equiano, the formerly enslaved writer and campaigner, called on Granville Sharp to tell him about the case, which had been reported in a London newspaper. Sharp, already known for his part in Somerset v Stewart, hired a shorthand writer to record the King’s Bench hearing.

Sharp then tried to bring a prosecution for murder against the crew and wrote to the Admiralty and government ministers urging action. Nothing came of these efforts. He did, however, circulate accounts of the case to churchmen, politicians and campaigners, and his papers kept the story alive.

Influence on abolition and memory

The Zong did not change the law directly, but it helped turn moral unease into an organised movement. Thomas Clarkson and other writers used the case to show that the trade reduced human beings to commodities and corrupted those who took part in it. In 1787 Sharp and Clarkson were among the founders of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

The case was discussed in Parliament during the debates that led to the regulation of slave ships from 1788, and it remained part of abolitionist literature until Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807. Equiano’s own memoir, The Interesting Narrative, published in 1789, reached many of the same readers.

The Zong has had a long afterlife in art and literature. J. M. W. Turner’s painting The Slave Ship (1840), showing bodies in a stormy sea, is widely thought to have been inspired in part by accounts of the Zong. In recent decades the massacre has been the subject of Fred D’Aguiar’s novel Feeding the Ghosts (1997), M. NourbeSe Philip’s poetry collection Zong! (2008) and James Walvin’s history of the case.

In 2007, during the bicentenary of the British abolition of the slave trade, a sailing ship standing in for the Zong was brought to London, and the case itself features in the 2013 film Belle, about Lord Mansfield’s great-niece. Annual commemorations are held in Britain and the Caribbean.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1781, February: The Dutch ship Zorg is captured off the Gold Coast and renamed the Zong.
• 1781, 18 August: The Zong sails from Africa with about 442 captives.
• 1781, 27–28 November: Jamaica is sighted but mistaken for Saint-Domingue.
• 1781, 29 November: The crew throws 54 women and children overboard.
• 1781, 1 December: 42 men are killed; heavy rain falls the same day.
• 1781, 22 December: The ship reaches Black River, Jamaica, with 208 survivors.
• 1783, March: A jury at the Guildhall finds for the owners.
• 1783, 19 March: Olaudah Equiano tells Granville Sharp about the case.
• 1783, May: The Court of King’s Bench orders a new trial in Gregson v Gilbert.
• 1807: Parliament abolishes the British slave trade.

Why it matters

The Zong massacre revealed, in a single voyage and a single court case, how the Atlantic slave trade treated human beings as insured property. The fact that the killings were argued over as a question of insurance rather than murder shocked many Britons and gave the abolition movement one of its most enduring and painful examples.