The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery

In this enthralling and elegant history, Pulitzer finalist Kara (Cobalt Red) revisits the notorious 1781 voyage of the British slave ship Zorg, also known as the Zong. Near its destination in Jamaica, the crew threw overboard 132 of the 443 slaves they were transporting, including children and babies, later asserting they did it to conserve drinking water. The investors’ insurance claim for the murdered slaves led to an explosive London court case, and the massacre became an abolitionist rallying cry. Kara makes the incident partly into an age-of-sail epic of bad luck and hubris: delayed for over a month by storms and amateurish navigation mistakes, the ship’s inexperienced captain failed to properly inventory water supplies. But even more so, Kara’s account is a stomach-churning study in slavery’s demented economic calculus as he seeks to prove what many abolitionists charged at the time: that the crew murdered the most weakened slaves just before docking because their insured value was greater than the price they would fetch at market. However, Kara intriguingly pegs as the crime’s mastermind not the captain, but the ship’s only passenger, disgraced former British colonial governor Robert Stubbs, whose sinister earlier dealings in Africa form a major through line of the narrative. The result is both a harrowing glimpse of slavery’s horrors and an incisive investigation into one of history’s most reviled crimes. (Oct.)