The Zong massacre was the mass killing of more than 130 enslaved Africans by the crew of the British slave ship Zong on and in the days following 29 November 1781. The Gregson slave-trading syndicate, based in Liverpool, owned the ship and sailed her in the Atlantic slave trade. According to the crew, when the ship ran low on drinking water following navigational mistakes, the crew threw enslaved people overboard into the sea. After the slave ship reached port at Black River, Jamaica, Zong’s owners made a claim to their insurers for the loss of the enslaved people.
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The Zong massacre was the mass killing of more than 130 enslaved Africans by the crew of the British slave ship Zong on and in the days following 29 November 1781. The Gregson slave-trading syndicate, based in Liverpool, owned the ship and sailed her in the Atlantic slave trade. According to the crew, when the ship ran low on drinking water following navigational mistakes, the crew threw enslaved people overboard into the sea. After the slave ship reached port at Black River, Jamaica, Zong’s owners made a claim to their insurers for the loss of the enslaved people. When the insurers refused to pay, the resulting court cases 3 Doug. KB 232) held that in some circumstances, the deliberate murder of enslaved people was legal and that insurers could be required to pay for those who had died. The jury found for the slavers, but at a subsequent appeal hearing the judges, led by Lord Chief Justice, the Earl of Mansfield, ruled against the syndicate owners, due to new evidence that suggested the captain and crew were at fault. Because of the legal dispute, reports of the massacre received increased publicity, stimulating the abolitionist movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The Zong events were increasingly cited as a powerful symbol of the horrors of the Middle Passage of enslavedpeople to the New World. The massacre has also inspired works of art and literature. It was remembered in London in 2007, among events to mark the bicentenary of the Slave Trade Act 1807, which abolished British participation in the African slave trade, though not slavery itself.
In 1791, Parliament prohibited insurance companies from reimbursing ship owners when enslaved people were murdered by being thrown overboard. The ship was not insured until after it started its voyage. Zong was paid for with bills of exchange, and the 244 enslaved people already on board were part of the transaction. The insurers, a syndicate from Liverpool, underwrote the ship for up to £8,000, approximately half the enslaved person’s potential market value. While the first command of Luke Collingwood, formerly the surgeon on the Zong, lacked experience in Africa, ship’s surgeons typically involved in selecting slaves for purchase in Africa. If a surgeon rejected a captive, that individual suffered a commercial death and was liable to be killed by the African traders. Historian Jeremy Krikler commented, that James Kelsall had already witnessed the mass-killing of enslaved people on Zong. He said that this may have prepared him to condone the massacre that took place on the ship. While Zong’s first mate was James Kelall, who was the first mate of the ship, it is likely that he was psychologically prepared to condone being killed by enslaved people in the first place. In early March 1781, the master of William purchased the ship on behalf of a syndicates of Liverpool merchants. The members of the syndicates were: Edward Wilson, George Case, James Aspinall and William, James, and John Gregson. The next year, the British 16-gun brig HMSAlert captured her on 10 February 1781 and Zong arrived at Cape Coast Castle, in present-day Ghana.
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This page is based on the article Zong massacre published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
