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On September 6th, 1781, a slave ship Zong left the African coast with over four hundred slaves. During this time frame, slave commodities were very valuable for labor both domestic and plantation services. With the demand for slave labor so high, captains of slave ships often overlooked the regulations of ships and overcrowded their ships in order to gain more money. Often, it was successful on the captain’s part; however, it was usually bad, and more than often deadly news for the enslaved people who were being sold across the Atlantic. Like many ships at the time, the Zong’s captain Luke Collingwood had too many enslaved people on his ship during its voyage. The Zong massacre could have been avoided, but due to a mass of unfortunate mistakes it became an event that began to change the world.
After nearly three months at sea, slaves began dying due to disease and malnutrition. To make matters worse, the Zong sailed into an area that prolonged their stay at sea. As a result of it being stranded, nearly half the crew and fifty of the enslaved people died due to sickness. The Zong captain decided on throwing cargo overboard in order to save the ship and collect the insurance as a result. Over the next weeks, the surviving crew threw 132 slaves overboard. The crimes of the Zong Captain and crew did not go unnoticed. They did not get the insurance money, but instead they went to court. They did not realize that their greed and court case would later help abolish slavery in the future. Throughout time, people have dissected the Zong massacre as much as they could. And even though it was one ship that did what many other ships were doing, the Zong affected history and destroyed the future of slavery. Because of the various different ways authors took to interpret the unfortunate event that is the Zong massacre, authors create a more fleshed out narrative of an event that affected a world dependent on slavery.
In Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History describes the event as a “melancholic version of modernity” and”the process quite literally sounds the depths of the event-structure of historical meaning” (Juengel, 148). The massacre and what happens afterwards are the center of the book and overall focus of the book. Ian Baucom suggests that the Zong massacre is a result of financial capitalism, which Giovanni Arrghi “associates with transitional oscillations in the history of capitalism” (Optiz, 252). Baucom struggles with viewing the Zong “event” as more of a romantic historical event. The Zong insurance contract is used as allegory for capitalism. Baucom finds new ways to view the Zong massacre by not just limiting to the singular narrative but also focusing on “a densely theoretical work of cultural history” (Juengel, 148).
The article “A Chain of Murder in the Slave Trade: A Wider Context of the Zong Massacre” tries to look at the massacre in a different angle. Jeremy Krikler’s article focuses on bringing to light the concerns of commerce but also includes culture as well as the context of the time. The argument of the article is “this process habituated surgeons and captains… to the possibility of death (at the hands of African controllers) of the captives they deemed unfit for the African slave trade” (Krikler, 394). Krikler suggests that medical health became connected to the decision “of whether or not to accord commodity value to the captive” (Krikler, 394).
The Zong: A Massacre, the Law, and the End of Slavery by James Walvin argues that the Zong massacre was the beginning towards abolition of slavery. Walvin creates a narrative with “rich, contextual details that flesh out the business of slaving while explicating how Britons came to perceive the extermination of 132 Africans… as cruel and immoral” (Sears, 890). The Zong massacre opened up people’s eyes, showing the true cruel nature of the slave trade. Walvin brings up the idea that the success of a ship was based on “an experienced, savvy captain who can manage men and cargo and navigate business situations” (Sears, 891). However, the Zong captain mentioned before made terrible decisions one after the other that ultimately resulted in the death of innocents.
Many authors saw the Zong massacre in different ways whether it was more of a medical, culture, or just a humane approach. As informative as these parts are, it would be nice to see more of a human side. Most sources focus on the court case and nothing else. It is difficult to find sources for Zong and making it more publicized and showing how it changed how the world viewed its actions is very significant. The primary sources show that human side. It shows key players and what the culture was like before the Zong massacre happened. They never diminished the pain the enslaved people went through. In the end, the many ways the authors took allowed readers from today to see the Zong massacre as a single moment that represented a difficult time in human history. And through that event, the world noticed its crime and began to change, even if it was a slow process.
Works Cited
Juengel, Scott. The American Historical Review 114, no. 1 (2009): 148-49. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30223651.
Krikler, Jeremy. “A Chain of Murder in the Slave Trade: A Wider Context of the Zong Massacre”. Colchester: University of Essex, 2012.
Opitz, Andrew. “Atlantic Modernity and the Wreckage of History.” Cultural Critique, no. 68 (2008): 251-54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25475467.
Sears, Christine E. 2013. The Zong: A Massacre, the Law, and the End of Slavery by James Walvin. Journal of World History. 24, no. 4: 890-892.