Two hundred and twenty-nine years ago this month the slave ship Zong left Africa for Jamaica loaded with newly captured people, of whom an even larger number than usual were doomed to die on the voyage. When by the end of November sixty potential slaves had died of disease, the captain, Luke Collingwood, ordered his crew to throw more than a hundred more sick men overboard. His excuse (that there was not enough water to go round) was a lie, for when the ship docked in Jamaica just before Christmas it still had 420 gallons of water on board). The captain’s real reason was that his employers would be able to claim insurance money on slaves lost overboard, but not for those who died of “natural” causes. Some of the victims resisted, either by killing themselves before they could be killed or by trying to climb back on board. Some of the crew must have talked later, because a public outcry resulted and a court case was brought. The Solicitor-General, however, ruled that insurance taken out on property could not deal with questions of morality. No action was taken against the ship-owners, who duly received their compensation. However, the case did galvanize British, white popular opinion against the slave trade.

This information is provided by Dr Isobel Grundy, University of Alberta, and comes from Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, Cambridge University Press, by subscription: see http://orlando.cambridge.org.