The Zorg

The slave ship widely known to history as the "Zong" was actually a Dutch vessel called the Zorg, meaning "care" in Dutch. The name "Zong" resulted from later readers misreading a handwritten r as an n. Author Siddharth Kara argues that this misnaming is only the first of many errors obscuring the truth of what happened aboard the Zorg in 1781. He contends that the massacre exposed the Atlantic slave trade as "a morally bankrupt system of greed and violence" (xiv) and became the catalyst for the first movement to abolish slavery in England.

Kara opens with a condensed history of the Atlantic slave trade, which began in the early 1500s after European demand for sugar drove the establishment of Caribbean plantations requiring massive enslaved labor forces. By the late eighteenth century, the British dominated the trade, with Liverpool controlling roughly 82 percent of all slaves trafficked by Britain. The American Revolutionary War sharply reduced Liverpool's slave disembarkations from over 21,000 in 1775 to about 4,000 by 1779.

On October 26, 1780, Luke Collingwood, a slave ship surgeon, departed Liverpool aboard the William after the wartime hiatus. William Gregson, a former rope maker who had risen to become one of Liverpool's most prominent slave merchants, financed the voyage. Gregson's nephew, Captain Richard Hanley, an experienced slave ship captain, commanded the vessel. James Kelsall served as second mate. The following day, the Dutch frigate De Zorg sailed from the United Provinces of the Netherlands, owned by the Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie, a Dutch slave-trading enterprise. Captain Jan Wilton headed for the Guinea coast of West Africa to purchase enslaved Africans, among them a pregnant woman Kara names Sia.

On December 20, 1780, Britain declared war against the Dutch, partly because the Dutch had allowed their Caribbean island of Sint Eustatius to serve as an arms conduit for American revolutionaries. On February 10, 1781, Captain William Llewellin of the British privateer HMS Alert captured the Zorg and two other Dutch ships near the Windward Coast of Africa. Llewellin transferred slaves between vessels, bringing the Zorg's total to 244 enslaved Africans, and sailed to Cape Coast Castle, Britain's slave-trading headquarters on the Gold Coast of modern-day Ghana.

The William had arrived weeks earlier. Hanley purchased the Zorg and its slaves using a bill of exchange, a written order promising later payment, drawn on the Gregson syndicate. He appointed Collingwood as captain, a curious decision given Collingwood's lack of navigational experience, and promoted Kelsall to first mate. Kelsall proved to be the ship's true navigator. The William departed for Jamaica, where Hanley died aboard on May 5, 1781.

Over the following months, Collingwood acquired roughly 200 more slaves for the Zorg. Robert Stubbs, a disgraced former governor of the British fort at Anomabu who had been expelled for corruption, boarded as the lone passenger. Llewellin described Stubbs as "a wicked and treacherous character" (66). On July 3, 1781, the Gregson syndicate secured an £8,000 insurance policy from underwriters led by Thomas Gilbert, valuing slaves at £30 per head. On August 18, the Zorg departed Accra carrying 442 slaves, 17 crew, and Stubbs, nearly double the standard slave capacity for a ship its size.

After provisioning at São Tomé, the Zorg crossed the Atlantic beginning September 6, 1781. Storms blew the ship off course. Dysentery and scurvy spread. Collingwood fell gravely ill and appointed Stubbs to command rather than Kelsall, the ablest navigator. On November 14, Collingwood suspended Kelsall and ordered him to stop keeping his journal, apparently to prevent any unfavorable record.

The Zorg sighted Tobago on November 18, 73 days after leaving São Tomé. Stubbs chose not to stop, fearing enemy occupation. Days later, the crew discovered that much of the water had leaked from damaged casks, yet Stubbs imposed no rationing. On November 27, a longitude reading by dead reckoning, a method of estimating position from speed, heading, and elapsed time, placed the ship south of Hispaniola. The reading was catastrophically wrong: The Zorg had already sailed past Jamaica. By November 29, the ship was roughly 330 miles off course with only days of water remaining. Kelsall was restored to duty, confirming he had not been consulted.

That evening, the crew resolved "that part of the slaves should be destroyed to save the rest" (125). Beginning that night, they forced 55 women and children through the cabin windows into the sea, including Sia and her baby. On December 1, they dragged shackled men from the hold. A man Kara names Kojo approached Kelsall and begged in English that the remaining slaves be spared. Kelsall ordered him thrown overboard. Over the following days, the crew murdered between 123 and 133 enslaved Africans. Ten more leaped overboard by suicide. One man clung to a rope on the ship's side for hours and climbed back aboard.

The Zorg reached Black River, Jamaica, on December 22, 1781, with water still on board, raising the question of whether the murders were ever necessary. Kara suggests the crew jettisoned those who would bring the least at auction to maximize profits and collect on insurance, and argues that Stubbs, not Collingwood as history has maintained, most likely devised this scheme. The surviving slaves were sold by scramble, a practice in which buyers rushed in to seize enslaved people at a fixed price. Collingwood died weeks later, and the ship's logbook disappeared.

On New Year's Day 1783, Gregson filed an insurance claim for the jettisoned slaves. When the underwriters refused to pay, he brought suit. At the trial of Gregson v. Gilbert on March 6, 1783, before Chief Justice Mansfield, Stubbs testified as the sole witness, and the jury found for Gregson without deliberation. Twelve days later, an anonymous letter appeared in the Morning Chronicle, and London Advertiser, reframing the case from property to murder. Olaudah Equiano, a formerly enslaved African who had endured the Middle Passage, the Atlantic crossing carrying enslaved Africans to the Americas, read the letter and brought it to Granville Sharp. Sharp was an advocate who had spent nearly two decades building legal arguments against slavery.

Sharp pressed for murder charges and secured a retrial hearing on May 21-22 in Westminster Hall. The underwriters' attorneys demonstrated that no necessity existed for the murders: The water supply would have sufficed at short allowance, and the crisis resulted from navigational error. The turning point came when attorney Samuel Heywood revealed that on December 1, it had rained and the crew caught six casks of water, yet they continued throwing slaves overboard. Mansfield granted a retrial, calling the rain "a material circumstance unaccounted for" (183). Gregson dropped the case rather than face further exposure.

Sharp used the hearing transcript as the centerpiece of his advocacy. His correspondence with Reverend Peter Peckard led Peckard, as vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, to set the 1785 Latin essay contest topic on the lawfulness of slavery. Thomas Clarkson, a divinity student, won first prize and resolved to dedicate his life to abolition. On May 22, 1787, 12 founding members established the Society for the Purpose of Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, with Sharp as chairman. Their campaign combined investigative research, parliamentary advocacy, and consumer boycotts, with William Wilberforce championing the cause in Parliament. The Dolben Act of 1789 became the first law regulating slave ships, eliminating the insurance loophole exploited in the Zorg case. After years of failed bills, the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade passed on March 25, 1807. The Slavery Abolition Act followed on August 28, 1833, freeing 800,000 slaves in the British Empire.

In an epilogue, Kara investigates the identity of the anonymous letter writer. Through analysis of the letter's references, writing style, and correspondence between Bishop Beilby Porteus and Sharp, he concludes that the author was James Ramsay, a former Royal Navy surgeon turned Anglican vicar who had witnessed slavery's horrors on Saint Kitts. Ramsay wrote anonymously out of fear of retaliation, fears justified when attacks following the publication of his 1784 Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves contributed to his death in 1789.