by Simon Schama
When the surgeon had finished his morning tour, the dead were brought up. Sometimes they were still shackled to the living. Since it was easier to get the pair of them on deck before loosing the irons, the live black was regrettably obliged to witness the disposal of his dead companion as the battenboards at the waist of the ship were lowered and the body cast overboard.1 No one was happy about this, other than the schools of sharks that had learned to follow the ships. Such a loss of investment—thirty guineas written off for each adult negro! And since Liverpool and Bristol underwriters had been careful to exempt them-selves from making good any losses from “natural wastage,” an especially heavy toll of blacks could eliminate the profit from a voyage altogether.
There was, however, a loophole, and Captain Luke Collingwood, the master of the Zong trading from the Slave Coast of Africa to Jamaica on the account of Messrs Gregson (John, James and William), Cave, Wilson and Aspinal, believed he had found it. If circumstances should arise when a parcel of a cargo had, perforce, to be jettisoned in order to save the remainder, the insurers were liable for the full value of the abandoned goods. In November 1781, bound for Jamaica and with negroes dying at an alarming rate, Collingwood, who apparently had once been a doctor himself, believed that such circumstances had in fact arisen.2 He had begun the voyage at São Tomé island off the coast of Gabon on the 6th of September with a full complement of 440 slaves. The traders’ euphemism for these goods was “live cargo.” But by November, death had eaten away the inventory: 60 slaves had already perished from a foul fever that had also carried off 7 of the 14 white passengers. To make matters worse, the voyage of the Zong had been prolonged by a navigational error so gross that it would have been hard to credit had this not been Collingwood’s first command. Jamaica had been in sight; but for some reason Collingwood supposed the shore to be that of Santo Domingo/St Domingue, the island divided between the French and Spanish, both of whom, in 1781, remained at war with Britain. Denied the prospect of safe harbour and worried about privateers, Collingwood had ordered a course hard to the lee, which had extended his sailing by a wholly unnecessary week.
Down in the hold, amidst the slop of mucus, blood, shit, piss and black vomit, slaves continued to sicken.3 From the beginning, the Zong had been a mistake. When she was taken as a prize from the Dutch, someone had misread the “r” of the name painted on its side as an “n.” So the Zorg, the “Care,” had become in name a sunny, sing-zongy vessel of old Africk, destined for fair winds and prosperous trade. But, truly, Zorg it stayed, a shipload of worry.
On the 29th of November Collingwood summoned his officers and suggested a course of action that he represented as a mercy killing. With so many blacks grievously sick, it would be, he asserted, “less cruel to throw wretches into the sea than to offer them to linger out a few days under the disorder with which they were affected.”4 Moreover, he said, their unexpectedly protracted journey had depleted the water supply, without which not only the slaves but the crew and passengers would suffer and perhaps perish. To conserve what water there was for the healthy meant, regrettably, the sacrifice of the ill. This particular problem evidently came as a surprise to the first officer, James Kensal. There remained on board three butts which, when inspected, proved to be some seven to eight inches short of full, but at a consumption rate of just over four pints a day for adults, it was enough, Kensal supposed, to get the ship to Jamaica, Tobago or St Lucia, whichever was closest for resupply. And this was not to count the water stored in “spirit casks,” which, although disagreeable to the palate, could be resorted to for the preservation of life.5 So Kensal, who was accustomed to seeing sorry things and to doing them himself, nonetheless spoke up against the “horrid brutality” of Collingwood’s proposal.6 The captain then made his instruction an order.
All the same, it had been no easy thing. Collingwood had taken on himself the work of selecting. He had gone below, swinging a lamp into the fetid rankness, to decide who would live and who would not. There had been some nonsense spoken about lots being cast so that the blacks would know in advance who was to be sacrificed, but to what end except to create inconvenient terror and make a hard task harder? So, ignorant of their imminent end, 132 shackled Africans in varying states of sickness and distress were brought up on deck and sat down amidships. There was nothing untoward in this. To preserve the “live cargo,” weather permitting, blacks were set on deck each day, fastened by a long chain that passed through their leg irons and locked at a ring-bolt fastened to the deck. Should any trouble threaten, the swivel-guns, mounted at the gunwales, barrels pointing inwards, would make a menacing sweep.7 It was the fact that the chains were not fastened to the ring-bolt on this occasion that must have triggered unease. And before they knew it the officer had shouted something, the crew had laid hands on them and the first had been cast over. With the children it could not have been much labour, made light and soft from their sickness as they were. But with the adult men and women two crewmen were needed, sometimes even a third, before the blacks could be turned on their backs and thrown into the waves, their bodies briefly arcing in the light before the plunge.
As the remainder suddenly comprehended what was to be done to them, the screaming and flailing against the shackles started, and then, from those already in the water, there was some further impotent thrashing until the waves closed over them. Scenting a meal from the wounds opened by the chafing of the irons, sharks slid economically towards their prey. The crew were too busy to be bothered. After the first dozen or so had been thrown into the sea, even the squeamish Kensal did Captain Collingwood’s bidding without a grumble. And when there was a reckoning, it was found that fifty-four had been cast over. Next day, the 30th of November, another “parcel” of forty-two met the same fate. One of the passengers, Robert Stubbs, erstwhile governor of Annabona Island, the slave depot, and thus much inured to witnessing indelicacies, later testified that he had indeed seen bodies thrown over the side but, if it please Your Honour, had been below betimes and so was not able to recollect just who had done the work. Mr Stubbs did, however, credit the captain’s argument that, had not the thing been done, “they all apprehended they should have died from want of water.”8
Then, as if in confirmation that it had been right to cast so many black Jonahs overboard, there came a heavy squall, which delivered so much rain that the ship’s butts, casks and puncheons brimmed with ample water for all, crew and slaves, sound and sick alike. So there was now no cause, even if the captain’s account was to be believed, for any further doing away with negroes. But Collingwood’s mind was now a very abacus of gain and loss, and was this not a most commercial age? With Jamaica almost (again) in sight, the last parcel of thirty-six were prepared. But while some were being set in chains and fetters so that they might sink with merciful promptness, another ten leapt into the sea of their own accord, their unshackled arms freed to swim, achieving a last moment of liberty in their inevitable end. One man, however, managed to swim unseen to the stern of the Zong, clutched a hanging rope and, after an interval when the watch had retired, clambered back on board. Discovered, he was graciously granted his life. As for those who had jumped, this was a matter of complete indifference to Luke Colling-wood. They had saved his exhausted crew the trouble, and the result was the same. But could he in all conscience claim the value of those last ten from the insurers as jetsam if they had not actually been jettisoned?
The sun warmed the air, damp breezes blew, terns skimmed the waves, dipping here and there. The Caribbean water lapped green and pale against the reef, flecked with rills of foam where the coral broke the surface. It was as though nothing untoward had happened—nothing, really, to be exercised about.
UNLESS, that is, you were Granville Sharp. On the 19th of March 1783, some fifteen months after the killing of the Zong slaves, Sharp was called on by a Mr Gustavus Vassa. Vassa, whose African name was Olaudah Equiano, was one of the best known of the educated, free Christian blacks in London, an impassioned enemy of
the slave trade and writer of indignant letters to the newspapers on behalf of his oppressed brethren. In 1789 his autobiography would be the first bestseller published by a black writer, and Vassa/Equiano would become a paragon for all those who defended Africans against the slavers’ truism that they were an inferior species of humanity, more brute than man. The story that Equiano told (and he must certainly have told it long before it was published) was a prodigious odyssey from enslavement to hard-won emancipation, from unlettered anguish to articulate rage and from spiritual desolation to a state of grace. It was, in other words, a story that an age of tender sensibility could not resist. And it was, besides, an adventure to compare with the most dashing of romances and the most epic of travel yarns. And some of the tale, according to Vincent Carretta, may be too good to be true.9
Equiano’s Narrative says he was the son of a well-to-do Igbo chief who owned slaves himself, as a young boy was then kidnapped by slavers, taken across the Atlantic and sold in Virginia to a naval lieutenant who, like many fellow officers, also traded in the merchant marine. But a baptismal certificate and a naval document discovered by Carretta record his birthplace as South Carolina. According to the Narrative, it was Lieutenant Michael Pascal who, on board the Industrious Bee, had told Equiano that henceforth he was to be Gustavus Vassa. Just why he should wish his personal slave to take the name of the Swedish kings rather than the usual Scipio, Pompey or Caesar, remains a mystery, unless perhaps Pascal had served on a vessel of that name to which he still had some sort of sentimental attachment. He would rather be called Jacob, Equiano told his master, a presumption for which he was liberally cuffed for as long and as often as it took to have him answer, like an obedient puppy, to his designated pet name.
Pascal repaid Equiano’s loyalty with doubtful currency, giving him a close-up view of what it meant to fight an imperial war against the French. Everywhere the action was hot, there were the lieutenant and his black. And as the British Empire acquired fresh territories and military glory, Equiano acquired an accelerated education in the ways of a world at war. At Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island off Nova Scotia, as marines were being landed, Equiano saw an order of the supervising officer halted as a musket ball passed through the officer’s open mouth and out again through a cheek. Later that day a cheerful Highlander put into Equiano’s hand the freshly cut scalp of an Indian chief. In 1759, serving in Admiral Boscawen’s war fleet, fetching powder and cartridges in the thick of the night battle against the French and Spanish, his ship’s rigging shredded, main and mizzen masts broken like a child’s rickety limbs, Equiano escaped splinter and shot while “many of my companions…in the twinkling of an eye, were dashed to pieces and launched into eternity.” Equiano’s own “annus mirabilis” was consummated with the baptism that, he understood over-optimistically, would not only bring him to the saving light of the Gospel but would also guarantee his emancipation. How could his liberty be denied, seeing that he had been baptized at the very crib of Empire—St Margaret’s Chapel, Westminster—situated as it was between Parliament and the Abbey?
Agonizingly close, British freedom was snatched from Equiano when his master, Pascal, to whom the slave had faithfully and tenderly ministered even as he lay wounded, and who had seemed so extremely solicitous to his man, nonetheless unceremoniously sold him at the end of the war. Well, he was short of funds. This was the way of the world. To make matters worse, the master had taken Equiano’s best coat and his Bible before trading his man. Terrified now that he would end his days as a field slave on some West Indian plantation, Equiano fortunately now became the property of a (relatively) benign Philadelphia Quaker, Robert King. Although in the America of the 1760s virtually all the tiny band of abolitionists were Quakers, the reverse was by no means invariably true. Robert King was just one such slaveholding Friend, owning plantations in Montserrat and trading in the islands and on the mainland from a small fleet of sloops. Much taken with Equiano’s learning and abilities, King employed him as mercantile clerk, courier, island trader (handler, amongst other things, of “live cargo”) and even as inspector of estates, where Equiano reconciled himself to the dirty work by believing he could do something to mitigate its extreme cruelty.
But there was such wickedness done beneath the Almighty’s sun! Equiano learned of black girls, not ten years old, who had been raped and the white perpetrator untouched, whilst a negro caught with a white prostitute was “staked to the ground and cut most shockingly and then his ears cut off bit by bit.” In palmy Montserrat, beneath the growly, puffing volcano, Equiano was a favoured man, a trusty man, a knowledgeable man, and so listened in silence as a trader bragged airily of selling forty thousand negroes and of cutting off the leg of one who had tried to run away. He saw fathers torn from their children, mothers muzzled with iron bits and masks, scalding sealing wax dropped on the backs of discovered stowaways; lightweight blacks sat on merchants’ scales to be sold, like groceries, by the pound. In South Carolina, which may have been his birthplace, he saw celebrations for the repeal of the hated Stamp Tax while slaves were whipped, and in Georgia he was beaten himself. His craving for freedom became urgent.
He could have had worse masters than Robert King, he knew. But then he would rather have had no masters at all. In his growing agitation to get away, Equiano made the mistake of taking lessons in navigation from a bosun on one of King’s sloops. On learning of this iniquitous betrayal, the master flew into a rage, accused his man of ingratitude and told him he would have no recourse now but to sell him, however invaluable he had proved. But King was pre-empted, literally, by one of his captains, who had taken such a shine to Equiano as to pay him sufficient wages, over the years, to cover the price of his redemption. Although King was much displeased to be so presumptuously put to the test of his liberal opinions, and of his casual promise to manumit Equiano some day, the captain shamed him into it. “Come, Robert,” he said, jovially clapping the merchant on the back, “I think you must let him have his freedom. You have laid your money out very well; you have received good interest for it all this time and here now is the principal at last. I know GUSTAVUS has earned you more than a hundred a year and he [as a free man] will still save you money as he will not leave you.”
However grudging, Friend King did what he had pledged. Equiano could hardly believe it:
These words of my master were like a voice from heaven to me: in an instant all my trepidation was turned into unutterable bliss…My imagination was all rapture as I flew to the Register Office [to have the manumission document drawn up]. “Heavens! Who could do justice to my feelings at this moment? Not conquering heroes themselves in the midst of a triumph—Not the tender mother who has just regained her long-lost infant and presses it to her heart—Not the weary hungry mariner at the sight of the desired friendly port—Not the lover when he once more embraces his beloved mistress after she has been ravished from his arms…The fair as well as the black people [in Savannah] immediately styled me by a new appellation—to me the most desirable in the world—which was “Freeman.”
Needless to say, Equiano’s manumission was no warranty against the unscrupulous, who, in the years that followed, often threatened him with re-enslavement. Sometimes these constant dangers moved him to despair. But the articulate fashion in which he defended himself made potential captors nervous, especially when he mentioned the names of influential gentlemen with whom he appeared acquainted or even connected (tangling with the expensive pest Granville Sharp was to be sedulously avoided). One of the gentlemen, and Equiano’s employer, was Dr Charles Irving, the Great Desalinator, who busied himself making saltwater sweet. Equiano acted as Irving’s general factotum, and in that capacity, both with and without him, embarked on travels as extensive as any Grand Tour. In Naples he saw Vesuvius erupt. In Turkish Izmir he was offered two wives and ate locusts, which he thought remarkably like French beans, only longer. In the Arctic Ocean, with Dr Irving still furiously desalinating as long as the closing ice floes permitted, the bla
ck man saw Horatio Nelson try to kill a white bear and “vast quantities of sea-horses”—which may have been walruses, since he describes them neighing “exactly like any other horses.” Back in the Caribbean, Equiano was shipwrecked and survived in a small boat with the help of Miskito Indians, whose potent liquor fermented from roasted pineapples he greedily drank from gourds. Squatting on leaves in the forest village, he ate dried turtle and saw vertical alligators, suspended live from trees before being slaughtered for a feast—a delicacy Equiano could not quite bring himself to share, though he regretted the discourtesy.
Back in London dressing hair, playing the French horn, telling stories, writing to the gazettes, allowing himself to be noticed, periodically taking merchant voyages again, Equiano was fretful for the state of his soul. Encyclopedically, as the sceptical philosophers counselled, he sampled what the Quakers, the Catholics, and even the Jews had to offer, although his stays in perfumed Izmir had made him think so well of the Turks that for a while Islam seemed much the most promising road to grace and mercy. Then one day he stepped into a plain Methodist chapel where the room rang with Hallelujahs. Born aloft to the crest of the ecstasy, something evidently distant, and yet very close, spoke to Equiano more strongly of God’s love than anything he had ever before experienced. He trembled with the sweetness of recognition. “This kind of Christian fellowship I had never seen, nor ever thought of seeing on earth. It fully reminded me of what I had read in the holy Scriptures, of the primitive Christians who loved each other and broke bread, in partaking of it from house to house.”