Accounts Unpaid, Accounts Untold: M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and the Catalogue

You have heard this story before. In September 1781, a merchant ship called the Zong¹ sailed from the West coast of Africa with 470 or 442 or 440 slaves, seventeen crew members, and their Captain, Luke Collingwood. The ship was owned by Messrs. Gregson, a father and son enterprise based in Liverpool that excelled in moving ships through Atlantic waters at the “frenetic pace” required by the plantation economies in the Caribbean and the luxury commodity markets in Europe (Baucom 49). The Gregsons’ competence and efficiency were not reflected in the labors of Captain Collingwood; these were not commonalities among the men. Instead of the customary six to nine weeks, the journey took four months or eighteen weeks. By November 27th sixty or at least sixty Africans and seven crew members succumbed to a sickness that was ravaging the ship. Forty additional Africans could have thrown themselves overboard in response to the horrific site of seeing others of this “cargo” tossed into the sea. Collingwood, reasoning that the insurers would not compensate losses generated by sick cargo, devised a plan to throw live bodies overboard. He cited a lack of water to sustain them. This type of loss would be compensated under the insurance law that speculated on and secured the value of human cargo in the uncertain waters of the Atlantic.

Though not a uniformly popular decision among the crew, they carried out Collingwood’s orders. On November 29th, the crew heaved fifty four bodies into the water. On November 30th, they sent forty-two or forty-three overboard. On December 1st, it rained. Or, it rained for the first two days of December. The crew replenished their supply of water with six casks, which gives evidence that continuing the massacre was not necessary. Nevertheless, Collingwood ordered on December 2nd or 3rd to throw twenty-six more bodies overboard. It is possible that either ten of these jumped of their own volition, or ten bodies in addition to the twenty-six took themselves into the water. By some accounts, one survived and crawled back on to the ship.

Upon arrival, the ship contained 420 gallons of water. Of the 470 or 442 or 440 slaves, either 150, 133, 132, or 123 were thrown in the Atlantic. Forty or fifty may have jumped into the water to avoid being thrown or ordered to jump against their will. Thirty more were dead on arrival in Jamaica.² When the insurers refused to pay out for the losses incurred on the Zong, the Gregsons appealed to the courts. The first ruling favored the ship’s owners. The insurance company appealed to Lord Mansfield, who called the case “very uncommon” and suggested a new trial to settle the “payment of costs” (qtd. in Philip, Zong! 211). There is no evidence that a new trial was held, that any payment was meted out, or that Collingwood (safely dead by the time of the legal proceedings) was tried for murder.

You will hear this story again and again. The case became a touchstone for the abolitionist movement in Britain, and it has lodged itself in the minds of many dispossessed, diasporic Africans, Caribbeans, and British subjects from its contemporary moment to the present. Gustavus Vassa (also known as Olaudah Equiano) pressed the abolitionist Granville Sharp to bring a murder trial to the courts in the 1780s (Walvin 16). Though he failed, the Zong massacre found its way into the parliamentary papers associated with the 1807 British abolition of the slave trade. Seven years after the abolition of slavery, J. M. W. Turner was thinking about the Zong when he painted his Slave Ship, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying (1840) (Warner 2). David Dabydeen’s “Turner” (1994) ekphrastically imagines a monologue from a submerged body in Turner’s painting, and Michelle Cliff’s Free Enterprise (1993) devotes a chapter of ekphrastic language to the painting and the massacre. The 1990s also witnessed a novelistic retrieval and historical revisioning of the Zong event, with Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger (1992) and Fred D’Aguiar’s...