The Zong Massacre

On This Day in History: November 29, 1781

“Chattel” is personal property other than land. It is a thing that is owned that the owner can do with what they please. Chattel slavery treated people as things with no rights at all, and the owner could not only murder them with no legal consequences, such as toss them off a slavery ship to drown, but could also collect on the insurance.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: November 29, 1781--

Luke Collingwood was a murderous piece of shit. He’d been the surgeon on the slave ship William, and apparently didn’t give a shit about the Hippocratic Oath, because on his very first command, of the British slavery ship Zong, he decided to murder over a hundred human beings he considered mere cargo.

As a surgeon his job had been to select enslaved people in Africa for transport based on perceived health. Often, when a surgeon rejected an enslaved person deemed too weak, the African enslaver murdered the person right in front of the surgeon. Saying no, as surgeons often did, was sentencing the enslaved to death. Humanity did not exist in the slavery trade; it was only about the money.

Collingwood was a shit navigator and had taken on too many slaves for transport, and over fifty had already died from sickness due to overcrowding and malnutrition. The ship got lost on the trip from Africa to the Americas, and ran low on drinking water. To “solve” the problem of not having enough water, they threw 132 enslaved overboard beginning on November 29, 1781. Another ten leaped to their drowning deaths in acts of defiance.

Once it arrived in Jamaica, one of the ship’s owners, James Gregson (another piece of shit) filed an insurance claim for the loss of “cargo” on the voyage. The insurance underwriter disputed the claim and there was a trial that found for the enslavers. But then there was an appeal and the enslavers lost. The trials gained much public attention, and British abolitionist Granville Sharp referred to the event as the “Zong Massacre.”

Sharp tried to have charges brought against the crew for murder, but John Lee, Britain’s solicitor general, refused, saying, “What is this claim that human people have been thrown overboard? This is a case of chattels or goods. Black people are goods and property; it is madness to accuse these well-serving honorable men of murder . . . The case is the same as if wood had been thrown overboard.”

That statement tells you all you need to know about such people.

Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down. The holidays are coming and they make great gifts.