The Zong Massacre: Catalyst for Abolition and a Legacy of Resistance

The British slave ship Zong was dangerously overcrowded, carrying aabout 470 enslaved Africans far more than it could safely hold. Disease and dehydration spread rapidly onboard. Faced with worsening conditions, the crew made a horrifying choice: to throw people overboard and claim it was out of “necessity.”

In late 1781, over the course of just a few days between November 29 and December 1-132 enslaved Africans were deliberately cast into the ocean. The reason? To collect insurance money. If the enslaved died of illness, no compensation would be paid. But if they were declared “lost at sea,” the ship’s owners believed they could file for reimbursement as though they had lost cargo.

The case went to court but not as a trial for murder. Instead, it was treated as a property dispute. The lives lost were reduced to mere commodities, equated with goods or livestock. The owners pursued insurance claims for their “lost property,” and the legal system debated whether killing human beings for financial gain was justified.

The Zong Massacre stands as one of the most brutal examples of the dehumanization at the heart of the transatlantic slave trade. It awakened many to the cruel, profit-driven nature of slavery and became a rallying point for the abolitionist movement in Britain.

Olaudah Equiano, a formerly enslaved African and prominent abolitionist, played a key role in bringing attention to this atrocity. His advocacy helped ensure the massacre would not be forgotten.

More than 130 people were murdered not for anything they had done, but because their captors valued money more than human life. They had names, families, and dreams. They were not cargo. They were people.

We remember the Zong to honor those lives and to confront the horrors of a system that treated Black life as expendable. May their memory never fade.