13. A Longer-Than-Expected Voyage’s Hellish Consequences
The Zong Massacre was saved from vanishing into historic obscurity only because, when the ship finally reached port in Jamaica, its owners filed an insurance claim to recover the value of the slaves whom their captain had thrown overboard. It was the subsequent litigation, and the legal precedents set, that preserved the details of the Zong Massacre for posterity. The record shows that the Zong was owned by Liverpool’s Gregson Slave-Trading Syndicate. In what was common business practice at the time, the syndicate took out insurance on the lives of their human cargo.
The Zong, with a crew of 17 men captained by a Luke Collingwood, a former ship’s surgeon, set sail with 244 slaves in its hold. The voyage was Collingwood’s first command at sea. Between the new commander’s inexperience, navigational mistakes, and a crew that was considered too small by contemporary standards for a vessel the size of the Zong, the Atlantic crossing took longer than expected. As a result, food and water provisions ran low. So the captain decided to reduce the number of mouths to feed and water, and threw 130 Africans overboard.
