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Throwing Slaves Overboard to Drown and Other Dark Moments From History

Khalid Elhassan July 26, 2020 35 min

Plateau - Slave ship — Slave ship hold. History Channel

35. Insuring Slaves

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. While crossing the Atlantic loaded with slaves, navigation mistakes caused the journey to take longer than expected. As a result, the food and water ran low. So the captain decided to reduce the number of mouths to feed and water by throwing over 130 Africans overboard.

When the Zong’s owners made a claim for the murdered slaves, the insurers refused to pay on grounds that the claimants had murdered the slaves they now wanted to get paid for. So the Gregson syndicate sued – and won in a jury trial. In Gregson v Gilbert (1783) 3 Doug. KB 232, it was held that murdering slaves was legal in the circumstances of the case, which meant that the insurers could be made to pay up.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.