The slave ship that changed history
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome back to the History Extra podcast. In 1781, the crew of a slave ship called the Zorg deliberately threw more than 130 enslaved Africans into the Atlantic. The atrocity and the extraordinary legal battle that followed would have far-reaching consequences for the history of slavery and abolition. In today's episode, you'll hear from Sid Arth Kara, whose book The Zorg investigates the ship's disastrous voyage and reveals how the case helped expose the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade to the British public. He was speaking to Eleanor Evans. And just before we start, please note this episode includes descriptions of themes and events that some listeners may find upsetting.
I wonder if we can start with the name The Zorg, because it's a tale that some people might have come across before under a slightly different name.
Why is the ship called the Zorg instead of the Zong?
Can we start there?
Yeah, that's the right place to start because one of the most important aspects of this book for me was to try and set the historical record straight. There's a lot of misunderstanding about the ship, what happened on the ship, and why it happened and who was responsible. But the starting point is the name of the ship itself, which uh for roughly 240 years has been known incorrectly as the Zong. And this is a word that has no meaning in any language. Most slave ships were named after the owner or given some other quaint name like Providence. But for reasons that come down to mistaking an R for an N in eighteenth century cursive handwriting, Uh the name Zong got set down in the historical record, when in fact
The name of the ship is Zorg, it's a Dutch ship, and Zorg has meaning in the Dutch language. It means care. Uh and that's the first thing, uh the first fact I wanted to set straight, among many others, relating to this ship and its journey.
So even if listeners will have come to it as the Zong, they might be aware that this is a hugely consequential moment in the story of slavery and its abolition. But your account goes into this in in very fine detail, laying out why it's so consequential and significant in this story. And what really came across from me, and what I've heard from other readers as well, is how much of this horror, this horrific story, is underpinned by a very crude and very in. human system of economics. I wonder if you can take us into this side of the story and the triangular trade as it was known.
Yeah, indeed. The Zorg, the next starting point for for your listeners to understand, first being to set the name of the ship right. The next one is to know that this is, I believe, the most consequential slave ship that ever crossed the Atlantic Ocean, amongst the 40,000 plus slave ships that did cross the Atlantic. And I say that because of the consequences of this ship's journey, which I'm sure we'll get into. But the Zorg. Zorg is our way into the first global economy, and the first global economy was erected around the slave trade. And it's known by scholars as the triangular trade. And it it essentially worked like this. Europeans loaded tradable goods on deep sea faring vessels. In Western Europe, tradable goods means things like knives and forks, it means gunpowder, it means alcohol, it means clothes, bandanas, linens, anything they could use to trade for human beings.
They loaded the ship. In Western Europe. Took about two months to get down to the Guinea coast, the coast of West Africa, and then bartered. These tradable goods for people. And throughout the course of the slave trade, there were fairly established metrics for what a person costs, be it a male, a female, the age, a child, and so on. Their state of health. This process took time. It didn't happen quickly. It could take a few months to load a slave ship with several hundred African people. And then the next leg of the triangle was to take those human beings to the other side of the Atlantic, to the sugar colonies, mostly in the Caribbean, as well as in Brazil, and then eventually in the American colonies as well.
Those people would then be sold to sugar planters in exchange for money.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:05–0:57
2
Why is the ship called the Zorg instead of the Zong?
0:57–7:48
3
How did the triangular trade operate and why was it so profitable?
7:48–15:39
4
What were the living conditions for enslaved Africans on the Zorg’s middle deck?
15:39–28:10
5
How did the crew decide to throw women, children, and men overboard?
28:10–43:02
6
What role did maritime insurance play in the Zorg massacre?
43:02–43:56