Granville Sharp and the Zong Massacre: Sharp’s Uncovered Letter to the British Admiralty ed. by Michelle Faubert (review)

Michelle Faubert’s Granville Sharp’s Uncovered Letter and the Zong Massacre details her discovery of a fair copy manuscript of a letter that the British abolitionist Granville Sharp wrote and addressed to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty in 1783. The letter was part of Sharp’s campaign to seek justice against the crew of the British slave ship Zong for the murder of 132 enslaved black Africans. In November 1781, while heading toward Jamaica, the crew bound and shackled together 122 enslaved people and threw them overboard. Another ten were so moved by terror, according to Sharp’s letter, that they jumped over the side of the ship, bringing the total dead to 132. Upon arriving at a port in Jamaica, the crew filed an insurance claim for the lost human “cargo.” They justified the murders with the specious claim that the ship was low on water, and they all would have perished if they had not decreased the number of passengers. Contradicting that account, witnesses insisted that sickness pervaded the ship and compromised the quality of the enslaved black Africans. Consequently, the crew killed the sickliest of the lot—by drowning them—to avoid taking a financial loss on deaths that otherwise were uninsurable. In his letter, Sharp insists that the Admiralty prosecute the crew for murder. Until now, this official account by Sharp of the Zong Massacre and his efforts to intervene was lost in the archives of the British Library. Faubert’s book provides a detailed discussion of her efforts to recover that manuscript. Her meticulous work pays off for students and scholars of Granville Sharp and the British abolitionism movement. Bringing into clearer focus Sharp’s abolitionist efforts in the 1780s, Faubert has composed a book that is both engaging and informative.

A compact read, the book contains a strong critical apparatus that contextualizes Sharp and the Zong Massacre. In an introduction and six chapters, Faubert reviews the scholarship on Sharp, challenging what she argues is a misconception that the philanthropist’s focus on abolition waned in the early 1780s before being reignited at the end of the decade with the Sierra Leone settlement project. To the contrary, Faubert insists, Sharp intended to publish this letter in 1783 to fuel the call for abolition. She also provides some valuable nuance about the details surrounding the Zong Massacre itself and the role of key figures, beyond Sharp, like the black African abolitionist Olaudah Equiano. Importantly, she ends the book with a complete transcription and images of the fair copy manuscript of Sharp’s letter. For sure, the book is a useful teaching aid for introductory college-level classes or for scholars just coming to the subject matter. Scholars who have done more extensive work on Sharp and the British abolitionist movement might find the book most useful for its many nuances. For example, Faubert clarifies the relationship between Sharp and Equiano and illuminates the limitations of Prince Hoare’s influential biography of Sharp, which remains a central text in studies about Sharp’s life.

Also worth noting is the book’s hybrid form. It is as much a memoir as it is a critical study of Sharp and the Zong Massacre. Faubert describes in detail her process of performing archival work—the uncertainty, the frustration, the elation, and eureka moments—all while reminding us of the collaborative nature of scholarship. On several occasions, she quotes from archivists at the British Library and elsewhere to validate her conclusions. By interweaving her personal story into the larger critical argument, Faubert offers an invaluable perspective on research as both process (in the archives) and product (the monograph).

Faubert makes a number of valuable contributions. One minor drawback, though, is that the book does not offer much textual analysis of Sharp’s manuscript. The book focuses more on the text as object, with little attention...