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Why Is It We Never Hear of the Zong Massacre?
Murder Doesn’t Apply When All you Kill is Cargo
Several factors make the Zong Massacre of 1781 a unique event. Most massacres of Black enslaved people or Black American citizens have been initially portrayed as race riots or rebellions. The Zong Massacre was completely one-sided, and no such claim could be made. Often, the number of people killed is grossly underestimated. In this Case, the effort was to be as accurate as possible, because an insurance claim depended upon it. Lastly, the massacre occurred at sea and not on dry land.
There’s an expression, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it were easy, everyone would do it.” Crossing the Atlantic with a cargo of enslaved people is hard, and the Captain and crew of the slave ship Zong were woefully unprepared. In the 1780s, British-built ships typically carried 1.75 slaves per ton of the ship’s capacity; on the Zong, the ratio was 4.0 per ton. A British slave ship of the period would carry around 193 enslaved people, and it was highly unusual for a vessel of Zong’s relatively small size to bring so many.
The 17-man crew was far too small to maintain adequate sanitary conditions on the ship. Sailors willing to risk disease and rebellions on slave ships were difficult to recruit within Britain and were harder to find for a vessel captured…
