Why the killing of 130 people was treated as an insurance case

The days-long massacre and insurance claim that still haunts England Three seasons into Stuff the British Stole, one thing is clear: the Brits took a lot that wasn't theirs. Much of it was tangible, inanimate objects, from the Rosetta Stone to the Parthenon Marbles. But a lot wasn't. The story of my family offers but one example. Where others have detailed accounts of births, deaths and marriages — even middle names of centuries-old relatives — there's a gaping hole in our lineage. We don't know exactly how we ended up in Jamaica, where we settled in a small town outside of Black River in St Elizabeth Parish. Most of what we do know boils down to the fact that our ancestors landed there hundreds of years ago after arriving from somewhere in Africa, possibly Nigeria. And that they were enslaved. They could have arrived in the Caribbean on any number of the ships that departed from English ports headed for the west coast of Africa with goods on board to trade for people. There, enslaved Africans were put onto vessels bound for places including Jamaica, where many were forced to work on sugar plantations. Those ships then returned to England with the goods those people produced. More than one million Africans were forced to undergo this journey to the Caribbean between the 17th and 19th centuries. For all my family knows, our ancestors could have arrived in Jamaica aboard the Zong in 1781. Centuries after its fateful journey from modern-day Ghana to Black River, the story surrounding this infamous, British-owned slave ship still plagues the descendants of those who survived the transatlantic slave trade. That voyage played a part in reshaping the world as we know it By the time the Zong departed the Gold Coast of Africa for Jamaica on August 18, thousands of other slave ships like it had already sailed that very route. It should have been an uneventful journey; 11 weeks at sea at the most. Except, the owners of the Zong were especially greedy. The Gregson syndicate, a group of Liverpool merchants and politicians who funded more than 150 slave voyages, wanted to maximise their profits. So, they packed the hull of the ship with hundreds more people than the vessel was designed to carry. They also installed an inexperienced leader, who presided over a relatively small crew compared to the 442 enslaved Africans aboard the ship. Professor James Walvin, an expert on the transatlantic slave trade, describes it as a "floating problem before it left Africa", and a "nightmare no-one could imagine". Indeed, it didn't take long for the ship to veer off course; for the Africans ripped from their ancestral lands to contract illnesses such as dysentery; for water supplies to apparently dwindle to worrying levels. With almost 70 people reportedly dead by late November, the crew was getting desperate. That's when the idea supposedly struck; to resolve the water shortage, they decided to push people overboard. It started on November 29. The slavers apparently first assembled a group of 54 women and children, deemed less valuable than the grown men, and threw them into a watery grave. "They do it at night so that no-one sees anything, and they seize women and children first. Of course, what they hadn't bargained for was the noise," Walvin tells Stuff the British Stole. "People don't go to their deaths willingly. There's this extraordinary screaming, resisting, on the deck." The massacre is believed to have lasted days. That first group of women and children was reportedly followed by a group of 42 enslaved men on December 1. One of the Africans who spoke English is said to have told a member of the ship's crew that some of the other enslaved people offered to go without water if it meant lives would be spared. Despite this, the killings continued the next day, with a further 36 men apparently sent to their deaths. What happened next only added to the horror The Zong eventually landed in Black River, with just 208 of the original 442 enslaved Africans reported alive. It's there that the ship's Captain, Luke Collingwood, is believed to have died of illness. Prior to the voyage, the Gregson syndicate had taken out insurance on their "cargo" for "loss en route", a relatively common safeguard for the times. The Africans on the Zong were reportedly valued at 30 pounds each. "But the loss en route is if they revolt, if there's a rebellion and you kill them, then you can claim for their loss. If they simply die, you can't claim for it," Walvin explains. After news of the deaths reached England, the Gregson syndicate decided it was time to collect. Priscellia Robinson is a barrister and activist of Jamaican descent who's studied the Zong. She explains the insurance company refused to pay up when the Gregson syndicate failed to produce the logbook from the journey. So, in March 1783, the Zong's owners took their claim to court. It's a concept that Robinson still can't get her head around. "It gives us an idea what British society were thinking in regard to African chattelled enslavement. People can just be thrown overboard, murdered, and under English law, this was purely an insurance case," she says. "[The syndicate] argued it was an absolute necessity to throw over these enslaved Africans because if not, everyone would have perished, because there is not enough water on that ship. "The other side argues the only reason it was done was because insurance would pay." Further complicating matters, the only two available witnesses said the decision to throw the enslaved people overboard was made by Captain Collingwood — who died two years before the trial. In the end, the jury sided with the Gregson syndicate. The act of throwing more than 130 people aboard the Zong to their deaths was found not only legal, but necessary. Then one remarkable man raised his voice When court reporters of the day repeated the horrific details of the case in the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, Olaudah Equiano paid attention. Not only was he a formerly enslaved Nigerian — he was also a prominent abolitionist who went on to publish a book about his experiences in 1789. "This Black African male said, 'Something needs to be done about this … We need to lobby and ask for this case to be dealt with as a form of murder'," Robinson explains. Equiano contacted prominent white abolitionist Granville Sharp for help publicising the case. Together, the pair lobbied all who would listen to fight against the slave trade, referring to the Zong as a symbol of the trade's depravity. "Lots of people in England had no idea what was going on," says conservative politician, theologian and ethicist Lord Nigel Biggar. Despite their best efforts, Equiano and Sharp never secured a murder trial. But the case was brought back into court on appeal a few months after it was first heard. It was then one of the two witnesses changed his story and revealed it had rained the day before the killings began. There had been drinking water on the Zong. The Gregson Syndicate's case collapsed following this revelation, and while a retrial was ordered by the presiding judge, the slavers didn't pursue it. The insurance company never paid out. But, looking back now, Biggar sees a clear link between the Zong and the end of "the gravest crime against humanity", which the UN General Assembly declared the transatlantic slave trade in March. "[The Zong] helped to broadcast the horrors of slavery which helped to mobilise a widespread popular movement for the abolition of slave trading in the British Isles," he explains. "It took years of consistent commitment on the part of abolitionists. But by 1833, sufficient members of Parliament had been persuaded to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire." The following year on August 1, more than 800,000 Africans were declared emancipated, or to be set free from enslavement. Still, the abolition of slavery didn't happen cleanly As part of the Slavery Abolition Act, it was decided Britain would compensate slave owners for their "lost property" to the tune of 20 million pounds — 40 per cent of its national budget at the time. This is equivalent to about 17 billion pounds today, according to a BBC estimate. Some recognisable names are listed in the Slave Compensation Commission's records of the recipients. The likes of George Orwell and David Cameron's families are named. Newly emancipated Africans, however, received no support from the British government. In fact, the former slave owners won another concession; on introduction of the Act in 1833, all those over the age of six who had been enslaved were turned into "apprentices" and made to continue working without compensation for years. In 1838, emancipation was finally achieved. Biggar understands people who can't comprehend why slave owners were compensated instead of those who were enslaved. He levels another question in response: "What would you have had the [government] do? Not compromise and have slavery extended?" The UK only finished repaying the full cost of that compromise in 2015. This means there are people living and working in the UK today who helped repay the people who once enslaved their ancestors through their taxes. Priscellia Robinson is one of them. And, as someone who spent a few years working in call centres and pubs in the UK in the early 2010s, so am I. Not only will we never really know where we came from or what languages our ancestors spoke — we'll never learn exactly how our respective families ended up in Jamaica. And we helped compensate the people responsible. Robinson, whose family is also from Black River, explains this is why it feels like the story of the Zong and what came after that fateful voyage has been following her for her entire life; it's symbolic of everything that was taken. "My identity, who I am, where I come from. I'm searching for that every single day trying to put pieces together," she says. "That can never really be restored." Memorialising people you can't even name Processing all this loss — not only of countless lives, but of knowledge and culture — is a complicated thing with no real end for the Caribbean diaspora. As a Trinidadian-British artist whose work explores the enduring legacies of colonialism, Karen McLean decided in 2023 to look to one of the few things she could control: the way we remember the people who were thrown overboard the ship that helped change history. "What really disturbed me as much as the event itself was the absence that surrounded it," she says. "I could not understand how 130 people could just be absent from public consciousness. "I needed to humanise it. I needed the public to look them in their eyes and understand the story." Over the course of about a year, she worked alongside a group of seven women who helped her quilt more than 130 unique heads — one for all those who died after being thrown overboard the Zong. They wrapped each head in cotton wadding in a process intended to mimic mummification, before covering them in vibrant Yoruba, Asante, Fante and Igbo cotton textiles; these tribes were among those the enslaved Africans on the Zong are whispered to have been stolen from. In September 2024, Stitching Souls: Threads of Silence was finally put on display at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool — beneath the towering portraits of local 18th century merchants including George Case, who co-owned the Zong. McLean knows her work can't provide closure in the "conventional sense". "But art creates a space where difficult histories can be acknowledged, and it can try to restore the humanity of our ancestors whose names, stories and voices have been erased," she considers. "The trauma is usually carried in silence. For the descendants of people whose histories were erased, that act of remembrance is profoundly important." It's one of the only things the likes of myself, Karen McLean and Priscellia Robinson have.