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Over the spanning nearly four hundred years, the Atlantic slave trafficking system saw 12.5 million Africans trafficked from their continent to the Americas. A staggering 1.8 million of those individuals died during the voyage, enduring scarcely imaginable conditions of overcrowding, squalor, and disease. Some took their own lives by leaping overboard, while others were forcibly cast into the sea.

A Tale of Two Stories

In The Zorg, author Siddharth Kara weaves together two interconnected narratives. The first details a horrific incident aboard the eponymous slave ship—the deliberate murder of 132 captive individuals by its British crew. The second story examines how this atrocity came to influence the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, driven in large part by the dedicated work of a coalition of abolitionist activists. Among them was Olaudah Equiano, who authored one of the few surviving first-person narratives of the Middle Passage, calling it “a scene of horror almost inconceivable”.

Liverpool's Central Role

The tale originates in Liverpool, a port city that at the height of its prosperity was responsible for 40% of Europe's slave trafficking. Financing slavery was a highly profitable venture for not just the elites to the common people. One such investor, William Gregson, saved up his earnings from his trade, invested them into the slave trade, and eventually became a wealthy burgher and later mayor. Gregson provided the funds for the slave ship The William, which set sail from Liverpool for West Africa in October 1780 under Captain Richard Hanley. Its hold was filled with trade goods like tobacco, firearms, knives, and so-called “India goods” such as chintz and cowrie shells—the latter being a standard rate in the purchase of enslaved people.

The Capture of the Zorg

Concurrently, a Dutch slave vessel named the Zorg (later referred to by the British as the Zong) had departed the Netherlands. With Britain at war with the Dutch in late 1780, the Royal Navy gave British ships permission to capture Dutch ships at sea—a virtual sanctioning of privateering. The Zorg was subsequently taken by a British captain and anchored off the Gold Coast. Meanwhile, Captain Hanley, on a slaving expedition, picked up a fleeing British governor named Robert Stubbs, who had been removed for corruption.

A Voyage into Hell

When Hanley arrived at Cape Coast Castle—a stronghold with a notorious slave dungeon beneath it—he assumed control of the captured Zorg. He then severely overcrowd it with enslaved people, put a dozen of his own crew on board, and appointed Luke Collingwood, a ship's surgeon of dubious seamanship, its captain. In August 1781, the Zorg finally left Accra carrying 442 captives, 17 crew members, and one notorious passenger: the former governor, Robert Stubbs.

Kara is particularly skilled at using contemporaneous sources to vividly reconstruct the collective nightmare of being trafficked on a slave ship.

The Zorg's journey was fraught with disaster. "The flux" ravaged the vessel, followed by scurvy. The captain fell ill, lost his senses, and appointed Stubbs. Thus, “a ship full of decay and death was being commanded by a passenger.” Kara effectively employs period testimonies to illustrate of the unmitigated terror. The graphic testimony of Alexander Falconbridge, a doctor who became an activist, describes how the enslaved people's skin was frequently rubbed raw to the bone from being packed on bare wood, their flesh pinched and torn between the planks.

The Unspeakable Decision

By late November 1781, the Zorg was far from Jamaica and dangerously short on water. The crew made the decision to jettison a number of the captives, who had already suffered through months of appalling conditions below deck. This monstrous act was not motivated by ensuring survival—the Africans had begged to be allowed to live, even without water rations—but by cold economic greed. Ship insurance policies did not cover deaths from natural causes, but they did cover cargo discarded out of “necessity” for the ship's safety. Over several days, the crew drowned “those Africans who would be worth less at auction”—the infirm, the sick, including women and children, among them a baby born during the voyage.

The Courtroom Battle

Back in Liverpool, investor William Gregson was dissatisfied with the profit on his venture. He filed an insurance claim for £30 per drowned captive—a considerable sum in today's money. The insurers declined to pay. In March 1783, Gregson took them to court and won a trial by jury, with his lawyers arguing that throwing the enslaved people overboard had been “necessary.”

The Spark for Abolition

According to Kara, “there is a direct line of causality between the public exposure of the Zorg murders and the first movement to abolish slavery in England.” Merely twelve days after the trial, an published essay appeared in a widely read English newspaper. The author, who claimed to have attended the court proceedings, made a powerful case against slavery, citing the Zorg case as a prime example of its brutality. Olaudah Equiano read the letter and took it to the activist Granville Sharp, who filed a motion for a new trial. At the following hearing, the events on the Zorg were examined in forensic detail, precisely what the abolitionists had wanted.

A Sustained Campaign

In the spring of 1787, the founding members of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade first met. Over the subsequent years, they wrote letters, orated, organized campaigns, and gathered evidence on the particulars of the slave trade. “Their efforts,” Kara writes, “would lay a blueprint for the pursuit of social justice.” After years of setbacks, the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was enacted in 1807.

A Lasting Legacy

The question of who or what deserves credit for abolition remains contentious. The Zorg's legacy, however, is visibly captured by J.M.W. Turner's famous painting, The Slave Ship, which was based on the events of 1781. While slavery has been near-universal in human history, its abolition following a prolonged public movement was historic, serving as an affirmation to the power of persistent activism, the pen, and relentless persistence.

The Author's Approach

Unlike his previous books—such as the acclaimed Cobalt Red—Kara has had to address certain gaps in the historical record. At times, speculative passages sit awkwardly next to rigorously researched accounts, giving the book a slightly chimeric feel. A blend of narrative suspense and part serious nonfiction, The Zorg ultimately succeeds in illuminating one of history's darkest chapters, using compelling prose and documented fact to assemble a account that stays with the reader long after the final page.