Zong!

Notanda

Notanda This page intentionally left blank There is no telling this story; it must be told: In 1781 a fully provisioned ship, the Zong,1 captained by one Luke Collingwood, leaves the West Coast2 of Africa with a cargo of 470 slaves and sets sail for Jamaica. As is the custom,the cargo is fully insured.Instead of the customary six to nine weeks,this fateful trip will take some four months on account of navigational errors on the part of the captain. Some of the Zong’s cargo is lost through illness and lack of water; many others, by order of the captain are destroyed:“Sixty negroes died for want of water . . . and forty others . . . through thirst and frenzy . . . threw themselves into the sea and were drowned; and the master and mariners . . . were obliged to throw overboard 150 other negroes.”3 Captain Luke Collingwood is of the belief that if the African slaves on board die a natural death, the owners of the ship will have to bear the cost, but if they were “thrown alive into the sea, it would be the loss of the underwriters.”4 In other words, the massacre of the African slaves would prove to be more financially advantageous to the owners of the ship and its cargo than if the slaves were allowed to die of “natural causes.” Upon the ship’s return to Liverpool, the ship’s owners, the Messrs Gregson, make a claim under maritime insurance law for the destroyed cargo, which the insurers, the Messrs Gilbert,refuse to pay.The ship’s owners begin legal action against their insurers to recover their loss.A jury finds the insurers liable and orders them to compensate the ship’s owners for their losses — their murdered slaves.The insurers, in turn, appeal the jury’s decision to the Court of King’s Bench, where Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice of England presides,as he would over many of the most significant cases related to slavery.5 The three justices, Willes, Buller, and Mansfield, agree that a new trial should be held. The report of that decision, Gregson v. Gilbert, the formal name of the case more colloquially known as the Zong case, is the text I rely on to create the poems of Zong! To not tell the story that must be told. “The most grotesquely bizarre of all slave cases heard in an English court,” is how James Walvin, author of Black Ivory, describes the Zong case.6 In the long struggle in England to end the transtlantic slave trade and,eventually,slavery,the Zong case would prove seminal: “The line of dissent from the Zong case to the successful campaign for abolition of slavery was direct and unbroken,however protracted and uneven.”7 I have found no evidence that a new trial was ever held as ordered, or whether the Messrs Gregson ever received payment for their murdered slaves, and, long before the first trial had begun, the good Captain Collingwood who had strived so hard to save the ship’s owners money had long since died. 189 It is June — June 15, 2002 to be exact, a green and wet June in Vermont. I need — I must, I decide — keep a journal on the writing of Zong! I have made notes all along but there is a shift: “Am going to record my thoughts and feelings about this journey,” I write, “as much a journey as the one Captain Collingwood made; like him I feel time yapping at my heels — have but 3 months to deliver this ms.”8 I flirt with the idea of immersing myself in as much information as I can find about this incident involving the slave ship, Zong. I begin reading a novel about it, but am uncomfortable: “A novel requires too much telling,” I write,“and this story must be told by not telling—there is a mystery here — the mystery of evil (mysterium iniquitatis to quote Ivan Illich).”9 Should I keep on reading? “If what I am to do is find their stories in the report – am I not subverting that aim by reading about the event?” I have brought two legal texts with me toVermont,one on contracts,the other on insurance law — a branch of contract law. The boredom that comes with reading case after case is familiar and, strangely, refreshing, a diversion from...