The Zorg: meticulously researched book is likely to ‘become a classic’

In September 1781, a slave ship known as “the Zorg” set sail for Jamaica from Africa’s Gold Coast. Originally a Dutch vessel, the Zorg had been captured by a British captain and heavily overloaded with slaves. It left the Gold Coast with 442 Africans held captive below decks, and an inadequate crew of 17.

As Siddharth Kara relates in this harrowing but fascinating book, “the Zorg’s trans-Atlantic crossing plumbed the depths of human depravity”, said Amanda Brickell Bellows in The Wall Street Journal. Dysentery and scurvy ravaged the vessel, killing or incapacitating many on board. Supplies of food and water ran dangerously low.

Days from Jamaica, the crew of the Zorg “huddled together and devised a murderous plan”. Rather than arriving at their destination with scores of “dead or dying” (and therefore commercially useless) slaves, they decided to throw them overboard. In total, “more than 123 captive men, women and children” were disposed of in this way.

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Kara argues that this “unspeakable plan of action” was driven by “economic greed”, said Farrah Jarral in The Guardian. While maritime insurance didn’t cover the deaths of slaves from natural causes, it was possible to claim for slaves thrown overboard, by portraying them as “jettisoned” cargo. And sure enough, the ship’s Liverpudlian owner duly filed a claim for the lost slaves, and then, in 1783, took the insurers to court when they refused to pay.

Kara suggests that the resulting “public exposure of the Zorg murders” helped kick-start the anti-slavery movement – which led, ultimately, to the passing of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807. Blending “powerful storytelling” with meticulous research, “The Zorg” “effectively illuminates one of the darkest chapters in our history”.

It is indeed a “shameful” story, and Kara has undertaken a “vast amount of research”, said David Mills in The Times. It’s a pity, then, that his book is “clumsily constructed and badly written”. Moreover, his shaky grasp of nautical matters (no sail is “fastened by a shroud”, they are for masts) makes it “difficult to have faith in the veracity of his colour”.

I have some reservations about “The Zorg”, said Marcus Rediker in The New York Times. But it offers deeply researched and “wrenchingly vivid” portraits of the slave trade – including the horrific conditions in the slave-trading forts on the Gold Coast. As such, it “takes a respected place within a growing historical literature about the slave ship”. It is a “book of great importance”, which is likely to “become a classic”.