In The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery, Pulitzer Prize finalist Siddharth Kara gives us a unique perspective on the transatlantic slave trade through an account of a fateful journey of a British ship called Zorg.
Zorg, or sometimes called Zong in historical documents, was initially a Dutch and later British ship that was one of the many ships that took part of the inhumane transatlantic slave trade in the 18th century. What marks the story of the Zorg out is the extraordinary number of enslaved people who were deliberately drowned during a particular journey in 1781, when the ship almost lost its way in the sea due to perhaps incompetent leadership. Kara notes that it is this intentional killing of about 133 enslaved people (which included men, women, and children), and a subsequent insurance claim to recover the value of the lost slaves, that sparked a conversation about the cruelty of the slave trade. Whether these human beings were killed to save the lives of many others on board as the ship got lost on its way, or whether these killings were motivated by the possibility of an insurance fraud, remains a mystery to this day. While it would take almost another century before slavery can be finally abolished in the Americas, Kara holds that this was the pivotal moment in the abolitionist movement first in Europe, and later in the world.
I call this a historical narrative purposefully. Kara’s book bears evidence of meticulous historical research on the intricacies of the transatlantic slave trade, information about the slave ports in what was called the Gold Coast, and especially detailed accounts of the life histories of the key characters involved in what is known in historical accounts as the Zorg (or Zorn) massacre. A significant part of the book is also devoted to court procedures investigating the massacre, as well as the various letters and petitions written by abolitionists who were moved by the Zorg incident.
However, much of the book reads like a historical fiction, with an element of mystery. While it is inevitable that while recreating a series of historical events one must rely on speculation to some extent, at least a third of the book reads like a gripping tale that unfolds over several weeks of a somewhat misguided journey between the Ghana and Jamaica. Perhaps such speculative narrative style is intentional, since no one knows for sure what exactly had happened in the Zorg that motivated the murder of 133 human beings. Incidentally, it is precisely this more historical fictive parts that make the book a compelling read. I will not elaborate more about the most intriguing part of this book, for fear of spoiling it for potential readers. Instead, I will focus on some of the important contributions of this book to our collective understanding of the nature of the transatlantic slave trade that galvanized the economies of both Europe and the USA, and surprisingly, to some extent, some coastal societies of Africa as well.
One of the biggest contributions of this book is perhaps to lay out the nuances of the slave trade. It was institutionalized, politicized, and involved various African powerhouses that rivalled with each other. Hence, while the story of the slave trade is one of European (and later American) greed, we learn that it is also about power consolidation of local kingdoms such as the Ashante who traded for gunpowder and weapons with European traders in exchange of slaves to bolster their hold on Ghana. The story of Zorg caught the attention of the abolitionists, because the death (read murder) of an astounding number of enslaved people was brought to public attention as an insurance lawsuit by Zorg’s owners to recover the cost of lost cargo. The series of lawsuits that followed were not about the murder, but rather about the possibility of insurance fraud. And perhaps this, more than anything else, continues to move us as readers, as it did the abolitionists centuries ago.
Zorg is also remarkable in its ability to give us a visceral account of the cruelty of the slave trade. While a few of us might have already seen diagrams of slave ship holdings, Kara’s account makes us feel, smell, and almost see the conditions in which enslaved humans had been transferred across the sea for months at end, inevitably leading to the death of many during these journeys. It is this aspect of the book that surprisingly makes it most accessible to most of the readers. For readers who are not history aficionados the first third of the book might be a bit too dry to navigate, as there are too many historical facts and often the chapters go dizzyingly back-and-forth in time. But stick with it, it proves to be one of the most gripping accounts of human greed that we have read in a while.
