Massacre on the Zong

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William Turner processed the incident, which has meanwhile become a symbol, in his painting The Slave Ship in 1840 .

The Zong massacre was a mass murder of enslaved Africans on the British slave ship Zong . Its crew threw around 142 people intended for sale into the sea on the crossing from Accra to Black River in Jamaica in 1781 in order to avert a feared water shortage due to a navigation error. On the ship, which was overloaded with 442 slaves to more than double the usual, the Jamaican coast had been mistaken for the French Saint-Domingue on Hispaniola .

The mass murder was also motivated by insurance issues; In the civil law dispute over the events, the insurance had to take action because the slaves had died at sea, i.e. while the insurance cover was in effect, and their killing was justified as an “emergency throw” to save the remaining “cargo”. A murder trial like the one Granville Sharp was attempting, however, was never conducted.

In contrast to the sinking of the Royal George , which at around the same time triggered funeral services and solidarity events throughout the Empire , the mass murder on the Zong initially remained completely without public echo. In the medium term, however, it played a role in the strengthening of the abolitionists at the end of the 18th century, who made the Zong a symbol of the cruelty of slavery.

literature

  • Ian Baucom: Specters of the Atlantic. Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Duke University Press: Durham, 2005.
  • Adam Hochschild : Break the Chains: The Decisive Struggle for the Abolition of Slavery. Klett-Cotta: Stuttgart, 2007. P. 101 ff.
  • James Walvin: The Zong. A Massacre, the Law, and the End of Slavery . Yale University Press, New Haven / London 2011, ISBN 978-0-300-12555-9 .