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Over the spanning nearly four hundred years, the transatlantic slave trade saw 12.5 million Africans forcibly taken from their continent to the Americas. A devastating 1.8 million of those individuals perished during the Middle Passage, enduring unfathomable conditions of overcrowding, filth, and illness. Many took their own lives by leaping overboard, whereas still more were callously thrown into the sea.

A Tale of Two Stories

In The Zorg, author Siddharth Kara presents two interconnected narratives. The first details a harrowing incident aboard the eponymous slave ship—the systematic drowning of 132 captive individuals by its British crew. The second story explores how this atrocity played a pivotal role in the ending of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, driven in large part by the dedicated work of a dazzling array of committed campaigners. Among them was Olaudah Equiano, who wrote one of the rare first-person narratives of the Middle Passage, calling it “a scene of horror almost inconceivable”.

The Roots in Liverpool

The tale begins in Liverpool, a port city that at the peak of its prosperity was responsible for 40% of Europe's slave trafficking. Financing slavery was a lucrative venture for not just the wealthy to the common people. One such investor, William Gregson, accumulated his wages from his trade, ploughed them into the slave trade, and rose to become a prominent citizen and later mayor. Gregson financed the slave ship The William, which departed from Liverpool for West Africa in October 1780 under Captain Richard Hanley. Its hold was loaded with commodities like tobacco, firearms, knives, and so-called “India goods” such as chintz and cowrie shells—the shells being a common currency in the acquisition of enslaved people.

A Ship Seized

Around the same time, a Dutch slave vessel named the Zorg (later referred to by the British as the Zong) had departed the Netherlands. With Britain declaring war on the Dutch in late 1780, the Royal Navy granted 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, during one of his voyages, picked up a fleeing British governor named Robert Stubbs, who had been removed for corruption.

The Nightmare Passage

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

Kara excels in using historical documents to vividly reconstruct the general hell of being transported on a slave ship.

The Zorg's journey was fraught with calamity. Dysentery swept through the vessel, and then scurvy. The captain succumbed to sickness, 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 sheer horror. The powerful testimony of Alexander Falconbridge, a doctor who became an activist, details how the captives' skin was often worn down to the bone from lying on bare wood, their flesh caught between the planks.

A Calculated Atrocity

By late November 1781, the Zorg was still far from Jamaica and critically short on water. The crew resolved to throw overboard a number of the enslaved Africans, who had already endured months of appalling conditions below deck. This unspeakable act was not motivated by preserving life—the Africans had begged to be spared, even without water rations—but by cold economic greed. Ship insurance policies did not cover losses from natural causes, but they would pay for cargo jettisoned out of “necessity” for the ship's safety. Over several days, the crew murdered “those Africans who would be worth less at auction”—the infirm, the sick, including women and children, even a baby born during the voyage.

Insurance and Injustice

Back in Liverpool, investor William Gregson was dissatisfied with the profit on his venture. He filed an insurance claim for £30 per lost slave—a considerable sum in today's money. The insurers declined to pay. In March 1783, Gregson sued and was awarded 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.” Just 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, argued compellingly against slavery, citing the Zorg case as a prime example of its brutality. Olaudah Equiano saw the letter and brought it to the abolitionist Granville Sharp, who petitioned for a new trial. At the following hearing, the events on the Zorg were reviewed 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 following years, they wrote letters, orated, lobbied tirelessly, and meticulously documented 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.

An Enduring Impact

The question of who or what should be credited for abolition is contentious. The Zorg's influence, 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 sustained public movement was historic, serving as an affirmation to the power of persistent activism, the pen, and relentless persistence.

Kara's Narrative Method

In contrast to his other work—such as the Pulitzer finalist Cobalt Red—Kara has had to address certain gaps in the historical record. At times, speculative passages sit awkwardly next to scrupulously factual accounts, giving the book a slightly hybrid feel. A blend of narrative suspense and part serious nonfiction, The Zorg nevertheless manages to illuminating one of history's most horrific episodes, using compelling prose and meticulous research to create a account that haunts the reader well after the final page.