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  • The Zong and the Lord Chief Justice
  • Jeremy Krikler (bio)

Of the countless slave-ships of the British Empire, only two can lay claim to an infamy that extends beyond the world of scholars: the Brookes and the Zong. The Brookes, the sketches of which were used by the abolitionist movement in its campaign to end the slave-trade, has provided one of history's most instantly recognizable images of dehumanization.1 The diagrams of the ship – revealing how Africans were stowed as cargo – still function today as an ideographic shorthand for extremes of exploitation. When, in the late-apartheid period in South Africa, an artist sought to convey black miners' experience of regimentation, poverty and overweening employer power, it was to the Brookes that he turned. In an unforgettable image in an animated film, the pattern created by the underground drilling mutates into a rendering of a cross-section of the ship, the bodies of the slaves lined up like corpses.2

If the Brookes is an emblem of dehumanization, the Zong operates on another, more mind-reeling, level because of the nature of the killings which occurred aboard the ship in 1781. As is well known, the Zong left west Africa in that year carrying several hundred slaves for sale in the West Indies. By the time it reached the Caribbean, an epidemic – probably of dysentery – raged on board, killing scores of slaves and some of the crew. Because of an error of the Captain, the ship passed its destination, Jamaica, and – with water supplies running low – a decision was taken to throw to the ocean those slaves deemed too ill to survive (or, perhaps, too ill to be sold in the slave-markets of Jamaica). Over 130 slaves were thus put to death, the vast majority heaved, bound, off the boat, some jumping to their fate to avoid being shackled before they were thrown overboard. The mass murder took place in three separate acts on different days and continued despite the replenishment of water supplies through the falling of a bounteous rain. The owners of the ship subsequently claimed insurance on the murdered slaves, arguing that the killings had taken place to enable the remaining slaves and the crew to survive. In 1783 a first trial – purely on the matter of insurance – found in favour of the slavers. The insurers however brought the matter to court again. This time the case was presided over by the Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, and he suggested that the insurers might not be liable to pay compensation for the murdered slaves: a new trial would have to take place to determine the issue definitively. It never did, the slave-traders by then evidently considering that their claim was too risky.3

In a way that the Brookes could not, because the imagery associated with that ship is too depersonalized and static, the Zong has come to exemplify [End Page 29] evil beyond imagining. It does so for a number of reasons. Not only did the ship see the mass murder of defenceless people, those responsible for the atrocity (or seeking profit from it) were relatively unashamed, to the extent of openly admitting to (and justifying) the murders in court. And, finally, the owners of the ship sought to capitalize on the murders by claiming insurance on the massacred slaves.

The Zong has often appeared in histories of slavery and the slave-trade, generally in a few lines, paragraphs or pages.4 Its events are recounted to evoke the atrocities of the slave period as well as the brutality of the slave-trader's calculus, in which the slave was reduced to a monetary value: a mere commodity on which to claim insurance. The tragedy features also as an important moment in the narrative of the abolitionist movement. Recent works by Simon Schama and Adam Hochschild are bringing the Zong to a wider audience, while Ian Baucom has offered a vast literary and philosophical meditation upon its significance.5 In theatre, meanwhile, the tragedy of the Zong figures in Liz Kuti's The Sugar Wife, recently staged in Dublin and London.

Given the already formidable corpus of writings on the Zong, one...

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