The Zong: A Massacre, the Law & the End of Slavery

Copyright © 2011 James Walvin

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Walvin, James.

    The Zong : a massacre, the law and the end of slavery / James Walvin.

      p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Zong (Slave ship) 2. Slave-trade—England—Liverpool—History—18th century. 3. Slave-trade—Jamaica—History—18th century. 4. Slaves—Violence against—History—18th century. 5. Mass murder—History—18th century. 6. Seafaring life—History—18th century. 7. Trials—England—London—History—18th century. 8. Marine insurance—Great Britain—History. 9. Slavery—Law and legislation—Great Britain—History. 10. Antislavery movements—Great Britain—History.  I. Title.

    HT1164.L5W35 2011

    306.3'62094275309033—dc22

2011001489

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Michael Craton

Contents

Cover

Half Title

Title

Copyright

Dedication

List of Illustrations and Maps

Acknowledgments

1 A painting and a slave ship

2 The city built on slavery

3 Crews and captives

4 The making of the Zong

5 All at sea

6 An open secret

7 In the eyes of the law

8 A matter of necessity

9 In the wake of the Zong

10 Abolition and after

11 Remembering the Zong

Notes

Further Reading

Index

List of Illustrations

1  ‘Liverpool from the Mersey, No. IV’, engraved by Robert Wallis after a picture by Samuel Austin, published in Lancashire Illustrated, 1831.

2  Frieze depicting African heads on the Town Hall, Liverpool.

3  ‘A Liverpool Slave Ship’ by William Jackson, c. 1780. Courtesy of National Museums Liverpool.

4  ‘Two prospects of Cape Coast Castle’ by Mr Smith, 1727, in A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels by Thomas Astley, 1745–47, vol. 2, plate 65, facing p. 605. From www.slaveryimages.org, sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia Library (2-605).

5  ‘Negro canoas carrying slaves aboard at Manfro’, in A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels by Thomas Astley, 1745–47, vol. 2, plate 61, facing p. 589. From www.slaveryimages.org, sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia Library (2-589a).

6  Leg shackles, drawing by Jean Boudriot, Traite et Navire Negrier l'Aurore, 1784 (Paris, 1984).

7  Position of slaves in the hold, drawing by Jean Boudriot, Traite et Navire Negrier l'Aurore, 1784 (Paris, 1984).

8  ‘Representation of an Insurrection onboard a Slave-Ship’, fold-out drawing in Carl B. Wadstrom's An Essay on Colonization, particularly applied to the Western coast of Africa, 1794–95. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

9  Slaves being ‘polished’ on arrival, in The Maroon: or, Planter life in Jamaica by Mayne Reid, 1864. General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

10  Portrait of Equiano, frontispiece to The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, written by himself, vol. I, 1789.

11  Detail from ‘The Sharp Family’ by Johan Joseph Zoffany, 1779–81. National Portrait Gallery, London. Lent by Trustees of the Lloyd-Baker Settled Estates, 1978.

12  Detail from a portrait of William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, by John Singleton Copley, 1782–83. National Portrait Gallery, London.

13  Thomas Clarkson, print by Charles Turner after Alfred Edward Chalon, 1828. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

14  Description of a Slave Ship, London, 1789. Rare Book Collections, Princeton University Library.

15  ‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’, Wedgwood jasperware cameo, c. 1787. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

16  Kaskelot, replica of the Zong, 29 March 2007. Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images.

1 A view of Liverpool from the Mersey conveying a sense of the city's shipping, shipbuilding and associated industries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the background are the King's Dock, the King's Tobacco Warehouse and the Herculaneum Pottery.

2 The links between Liverpool and Africa were literally set in stone in the 1750s – in the elaborate friezes depicting African heads on the city's Exchange, now the Town Hall.

3 Cape Coast Castle, headquarters of the Royal African Company, and a formidable fortress that dominated the Gold Coast. Its vast underground vaults, constructed as prisons in the 1680s, could hold up to a thousand slaves awaiting shipment. It was here that the Zong was purchased in 1781.

4 African canoes transporting slaves from the coast to awaiting slave ships, off Elmina.

5 A Liverpool slaver, around 1780, at the height of the city's slaving activity. The four ventilation ports in the lower hull are a giveaway for the ship's main business, as are the small boats being rowed by Africans towards the vessel, and the predominantly wooden buildings on the coastline – almost certainly intended to represent West Africa.

6 The ultimate security of the slave ships: Africans in fetters and manacles.

7 Crowding on board made the voyage a living hell for the Africans below deck, enraging some and driving others to despair.

8 The fear of all slave traders: an African revolt on board a slave ship. The crew have retreated behind the barricado and fire upon the rebelling slaves.

9 Sailors routinely cleaned Africans on arrival in the Americas so that they fetched the best selling price. They would be scrubbed, oiled and buffed; scars and other evidence of trauma and sickness would be disguised.

10 Olaudah Equiano, a key spokesman for Africans in the abolition campaign, in a frontispiece to his best-selling self-published autobiography of 1789.

11 Granville Sharp, the pioneering and steadfast friend of Africans and their claims to human rights in the late eighteenth century.

12 Lord Mansfield, the judge at the centre of legal debates about slavery in England – and, more particularly, about the Zong in 1783.

13 Thomas Clarkson, surrounded by his collection of African artefacts and, on the mantelpiece, busts of Wilberforce and Sharp. Clarkson was the resolute foot-soldier of the British abolition campaign after 1787.

14 The graphic images of the Brookes slave ship, here reproduced on an abolition pamphlet printed by the Quaker James Phillips, captured public imagination and helped turn opinion against the slave trade.

15 The assertion of human rights, ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’, became an immensely successful icon in the campaign against the slave trade, here represented by a Wedgwood cameo.

16As part of the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade act in 2007, a replica of the Zong sailed along the Thames.

Acknowledgments

I COULD NOT HAVE WRITTEN THIS BOOK WITHOUT THE HELP and encouragement of a number of colleagues and friends. My warmest thanks go to Heather McCallum of Yale University Press, who not only commissioned the book, but stuck with it through thick and thin. Rachael Lonsdale's editing greatly improved my early draft. And Judith Wardman proved an exemplary copy-editor. Thanks also to Charles Walker for his efforts on my behalf.

I also owe a great deal to Yale University. Colleagues at the Yale Center for British Art made my stay there both congenial and productive. Among colleagues at Yale I would like to single out Gillian Forrester, Hazel Carby, David Blight and Dana Schaffer. Caryl Phillips in particular has listened with great interest to my preoccupation with the Zong, in locations as far afield as Ilkley and Sydney. He also made it possible for me to make my first visit to Ghana's slave forts. David Richardson, exemplary scholar and friend, answered my regular queries promptly and with great patience. Avner Offer, always generous with his time and thoughts, steered me towards literature and ideas I had not previously considered.

I benefited greatly from discussing the Zong at different academic venues. At Yale (thanks to the Gilder Lehrman Center and the Department of African-American Studies), at the University of Freiburg (courtesy of Frans Bruggemeier), at the University of Nottingham (thanks to Dick Geary). Simon Lewis was my host at the College of Charleston. At Monticello, I would like to thank Mary Scott-Fleming and Andrew O'Shaughnessy.

Research for this book has been greatly helped by the hospitality of a number of friends, especially Byron Criddle in London and Fred Croton and Selma Holo in Los Angeles. In Jamaica, old friends again made me welcome and at home, and I thank Joan and Peter McConnell, Robert and Billie Clarke, and David and Andrea Hopwood. My greatest academic debt, however, is to the anonymous reviewer of my initial draft. That long, detailed and perceptive criticism enabled me to write the book which follows.

CHAPTER 1

A painting and a slave ship

O N 19 M ARCH 1783 G RANVILLE S HARP, A HUMBLE CLERK IN the Ordnance Office, but already well-known to England's black community for his indefatigable efforts on their behalf, noted in his diary: ‘Gustavas Vasa a Negro called on me with an account of 130 Negroes being thrown Alive into the sea from on Board an English Slave Ship.’ ¹ Thanks mainly to a detailed report in a London newspaper, the news of the killings quickly spread. To many, even the bare details seemed scarcely credible. In the last weeks of 1781, the crew of the Zong, a Liverpool-registered slave ship, had thrown 132 Africans overboard to their death. The ship was en route from Africa to Black River in Jamaica, had overshot its destination and was running short of water. It was reported that the ship's captain, Luke Collingwood, had ordered the Africans killed, in three batches, in order to reduce the demand for water and to ensure that ‘marketable’ slaves would survive to landfall in Jamaica. ²

The atrocity might have passed virtually unnoticed but for one extraordinary fact: the syndicate of Liverpool businessmen who owned the Zong took their insurers to court to secure payment for the loss of the dead Africans.³ The shipowners were pursuing their claim under well-established protocols of maritime insurance which accepted that enslaved Africans on board the Atlantic ships were insured as cargo. Moreover, under certain circumstances, the loss of those Africans could be claimed on the ship's insurance.⁴ In 1783, however, Granville Sharp and his African informant, Gustavus Vassa (better-known today as Olaudah Equiano), saw the story in an utterly different light. To them (and, as the news spread, to an expanding army of outraged British critics) the Zong’s owners were demanding money for over a hundred human lives brutally and purposefully cut short.

The resulting legal dispute between the shipowners (Gregson) and the insurers (Gilbert) ensured that the story of the Zong was transformed from a murderous secret among the small handful of sailors who carried out the killings, and their employers in Liverpool, into a highly visible political and legal issue. The consequences of the Zong affair were enormous. The very name – the Zong – quickly entered the demonology of Atlantic slavery, and came to represent the depravity and heartless violence of the entire slave system. The legal and political arguments about the Zong inevitably spawned an abundance of contemporary paperwork: legal documents, press coverage, contemporary commentaries, shipping records, correspondence. But we have no surviving picture of that ship. One painting, however, has, over the years, come to be closely associated with the Zong. Indeed scholars from various disciplines have, mistakenly, accepted that the painting was directly inspired by that tragic ship. Today, if anyone wishes to use a visual representation of the Zong, they are very likely to turn to J.M.W. Turner's masterpiece The Slave Ship, with its haunting portrayal of black bodies drowning beside a ship threatened by a looming storm.⁵

Turner's painting, first exhibited in London in 1840, poses troubling questions about what it depicts, as well as why it was painted. Why kill Africans at sea when the sole aim of the slave trade was to sell them for a profit in the markets of the Americas? Why did Turner decide to paint this picture thirty-three years after the British had abolished the slave trade in 1807, when by all rights it should have been a fading memory? And further, why do scholars and others continue to regard this picture as representative of the slave trade itself, when in fact it portrays, not a profitable commerce in humanity, but its very opposite: the calculated killing of Africans at sea?

For all that, The Slave Ship remains an astonishing artistic achievement, and to scrutinise the painting at close hand is to be confronted by the realities of the Atlantic slave ships. Legions of people must have seen copies of Turner's painting in one form or another, and even in a poor reproduction it remains a remarkable image. But to study the original painting, in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, came as something of a shock. For a start, it is small, measuring only three feet by four feet, and on the day I spent in its company, it was sharing an exhibition wall with another painting. I had fully expected it to have a wall of its own, to offer an uncluttered assertion of Turner's genius, as well as to testify to the appalling importance of its subject matter. I had wanted it to hang alone, if only to confirm its centrality in my own imagination. During the time I had been working this book, I had turned time and again to this particular painting. Like many others I assumed – and was led to believe by what I read – that The Slave Ship was indeed the Zong itself. I even had a postcard of the painting on my desk as I wrote this book. But my mind's eye had always conjured forth a very different image from the reality facing me in Boston. I had expected – hoped – to see an immense painting, primarily (I suspect) because of the enormity of the subject matter. If ever there was a subject that demanded a significant physical presence, this was it. The Slave Ship was not at all what I wanted.

Still, nothing could minimise the painting's impressiveness and impact – notwithstanding its size. I stood before it much longer than I had for any other painting, occasionally moving left and right, closer or further away, all the while negotiating the crowds flowing through the astonishing treasures housed in the gallery. I broke away to visit other exhibits, then returned, later in the day, to look at it again, and to renew acquaintance with what had become a horrible fascination. It is, after all, a painting which tells a terrible story.

Turner's Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying (better known as The Slave Ship) is one of his finest, perhaps even the finest of his paintings. It is a dazzling picture, filled with mesmeric confusions, images and colours. The painting is a mosaic of perplexing issues. At times it is hard to see what Turner is trying to convey, though the picture's basic components seem clear enough. There is a sailing ship in the distance, about to be engulfed by a typhoon. In the foreground, black people are drowning in a turbulent ocean. In one corner there is a confusion of fish, birds, limbs – and chains. The whole seems a clutter of almost surreal confusion, with shackles and chains appearing to defy physical laws, rising above the waves instead of sinking to the ocean bed. And what are those outstretched arms and hands? A final despairing wave from wretches doomed to a terrible fate? The fishes’ staring eyes seem to gawp at the viewer, as they home in to feast on a fettered leg, while hungry seagulls flap above the human and watery mayhem, ready to pounce on whatever scraps of flesh the fish might miss.

Dominating everything – almost splitting the painting down the middle – is a dazzling sunset which ignites the entire ghastly scene. It is a vista of oceanic suffering; of dying humanity, unseen except for beseeching hands and one severed leg, soon to be devoured. This is a world of grotesque imagination, so vile in its detail that it almost beggars belief. Yet Turner's portrayal is far from imaginary. Africans had indeed been thrown to their deaths from Atlantic slave ships, most infamously (but, as we shall see, not only) in 1781 from the Liverpool-registered Zong. Turner's painting of 1840 is also a reminder of another, less well-known issue: that the Atlantic slave trade continued despite the Anglo-American abolitions of 1807 and 1808, and that enslaved Africans remained victim to periodic acts of atrocity on those later clandestine foreign vessels.

At the time when Turner was working on The Slave Ship, it had become clear that a number of such killings had recently taken place on Atlantic slave ships (mainly under Spanish and Portuguese flags). Accounts of those killings – all of them harrowing, some scarcely credible in their extreme horror – were widely publicised in parliament, in the press and in abolitionist literature, where they were used as part of the ever more aggressive drive against the continuing Atlantic slave trade.⁶

Despite the barbarity of these incidents, and despite the urgency they brought to the anti-slave-trade arguments in the 1820s and 1830s, they formed only one theme in a British abolition campaign whose prime aim was the ending of slavery in the British colonies. When full emancipation was finally achieved in 1838 (at a staggering cost of £20 million in compensation paid to the slave-owners) it prompted celebrations on both sides of the Atlantic. American abolitionists took great heart from British emancipation: it showed that slavery could be brought down, however severe the obstacles. The Americans thought the time was now ripe for abolitionists worldwide to come together to show their resolve and strength, and they proposed an international anti-slavery convention.

Thus, on 1 June 1840 the first World Anti-Slavery Convention opened in London's Exeter Hall. Appropriately, the opening address was given by Thomas Clarkson, who had been the indefatigable foot soldier of the abolitionist movement since its foundation in 1787. The convention was packed with an extraordinary collection of delegates: 250 from around Britain, and others from as far afield as Canada, the USA, Mauritius, Haiti and Sierra Leone. There was also a sizeable female presence (although an argument ensued about whether women should have full delegate status – it was refused).⁷

The convention met in Exeter Hall, a large new building, capable of providing a public meeting place for thousands of people, and located opposite the current Savoy Hotel on the Strand. Had the 1,840 delegates been so inclined, they could have walked down the Strand, past the building work then taking place to construct Nelson's Column, and on to the Royal Academy in Trafalgar Square. There they would have found the Academy's annual exhibition of paintings.

On Monday, 4 May 1840, precisely one month before the Anti-Slavery Convention began, the Royal Academy had opened its seventy-second annual exhibition to the public. Two days later The Times’s review of the exhibition made plain its dislike of item 203: J.M.W. Turner's painting Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying. It is, said the reviewer,

irksome to find fault with so admirable an artist as Mr. Turner has been, but it is impossible to look at this picture without mingled feelings of pity and contempt. Such a mass of heterogeneous atoms were never brought together to complete a whole before. Amidst a regiment of fish and fowl of all shapes, colours, sizes, and proportions, is seen the leg of a negro, which is about to afford a nibble to a John Dory, a pair of soles and a shoal of whitebait.⁸

Many others disliked the painting – indeed, criticism was general and widespread. Reviewers in a number of the major newspapers and journals ridiculed its subject matter (suggesting that drowning slaves was horrific and unsuitable for depiction in paint) while others denounced its use of colour. The Slave Ship was a picture which provoked extreme and conflicting reactions. The Art Union of 15 May published perhaps the most caustic of comments on the painting: ‘Who will not grieve at the talent wasted upon the gross outrage on nature, No. 203’.⁹ Even people who liked certain aspects of the picture remained confused by it. Thackeray, for example, ‘treated Turner's painting with a mixture of admiration and contempt’. He praised the aesthetics of its colour, but denounced it for its treatment of the drowning slaves. He wrote of the ‘huge, slimy, poached eggs in which the hapless niggers plunge and disappear. Ye Gods what a middle-passage ‘.¹⁰

One man, however, admired it intensely. In the New Year of 1844, John Ruskin was given the painting by his father (who had bought it for 250 guineas).