Murdered and Raped
African men, women, and children forcibly transported aboard the Liverpool slave ship Zong experienced one of the most horrible atrocities committed during the era of the Atlantic slave trade.
In September 1781, the Zong sailed from the Gold Coast to Jamaica. Overloaded, it carried 440 enslaved Africans when its size could accommodate only half of this number. When the ship approached Jamaica, a few crew members were ill, and 60 African captives had already died. But a navigation error led the ship to pass Jamaica, therefore dramatically increasing the voyage’s length. At this point, crew members already realized that water reserves were insufficient. Under the conditions of poor hygiene in an overcrowded ship in which captives and crew members were ill and needed to remain hydrated, a great disaster was imminent. Disease also started spreading. Thus, Captain Luke Collingwood, who was reportedly very ill, or whoever was replacing him, ordered crew members to throw the sick captives overboard in order to keep the salable ones alive, knowing that insurers would not pay claims for captives deceased after disembarkation. Once the decision was made, the crew threw 54 women and children into the sea. Two days later, 42 men were pushed overboard. Sometime after that, 38 more Africans were thrown into the sea. Ten other captives who realized what their fate would be preemptively jumped into the sea. Upon the Zong’s arrival in Jamaica, the shipowners requested that their insurers pay for the loss of these enslaved Africans. The total number of African captives killed aboard the Zong remains unclear, even though the legal hearings estimated that 122 enslaved persons were murdered.78Depicted in novels, paintings, poems, artistic performances, and plays, the tragedy of the Zong inspired the abolitionist movement to denounce the horrors of the slave trade.
Nineteenth-century British artist Joseph Mallord William Turner took inspiration from the tragic fate of the Zong to produce his famous painting Slave Ship (originally titled Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On).79 Displayed today in the United States at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the painting shows a slave vessel lost in a dramatic background of clouds and waves. In the foreground, a rough sea, along with sharks, swallows the bodies of the enslaved Africans who were thrown overboard.80 Turner’s Slave Ship, symbolizing the Zong’s case, became a quintessential representation of the atrocities committed against enslaved Africans during the Middle Passage.Ship captains selected, punished, and discarded the bodies of African captives. No one was spared, not even the babies. In the early sixteenth century, Gonçalo RoĂz, the captain of the Portuguese slave ships Feco and Galocha, ordered that living enslaved babies be thrown overboard to allegedly spare the lives of enslaved African mothers.81 Captains and members of the crew also raped and murdered enslaved women and girls during the Atlantic crossing. In May 1791, ship captain John Kimber sailed from Bristol on board the ship Recovery to the port of New Calabar in West Africa. After a few weeks trading on the coast, about three hundred enslaved African men, women, and children were embarked on the vessel, headed to Jamaica.82 Before the Recovery’s departure, the ship surgeon Thomas Dowling was treating one enslaved girl nearly fifteen years of age “who had been afflicted with a virulent gonorhea [sic], and lethargy, or drowsy complain, of which latter ailment he could never learn the cause.”83 Feeling so ill, the girl stopped eating and could not join the other captives who were forced to exercise on the deck. The captain “was so irritated” that he “flogged her himself with a whip, the handle of which, was one foot long, and the lash, two.” Three weeks after sailing from Africa, “he beat her in this manner with uncommon severity.” Then on December 22, when the ship was about seven hundred miles from Grenada, Kimber perceived she was not dancing with the other enslaved women on the deck, and ordered a cabin boy to bring a rope to torture the girl. The body of the sick enslaved girl was lifted from the deck, and held suspended for several minutes, as the captain flogged her.
Letting down her weak and wounded body, he slapped her on the face, saying “the bitch is sulky,” then repeated the operation several times for nearly thirty minutes. Seriously injured, the unnamed girl was dead three days later.84 Kimber was also accused of killing another girl named Venus during the same dreadful voyage of the Recovery. After the murders, disease continued to attack the Recovery’s human cargo. Nearly 30 percent of the African captives transported from West Africa to Jamaica perished during the Middle Passage.The murders of two enslaved girls on board the Recovery exposed the sadistic nature of physical punishment and sexual violence inflicted on enslaved women in the context of the Atlantic slave trade.85 Sexually abused African women and girls regularly contracted gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases during the long waiting period in a barracoon and aboard the slave ship.86 Ship captains and crewmen frequently sexually assaulted enslaved women. This continuous violence cannot be dissociated from the exemplary punishment inflicted by Kimber on the enslaved girl. As in the Zong case, the torture and the two murders on board the Recovery fueled the abolitionist campaign and were denounced by William Wilberforce during a historic parliamentary speech on April 2, 1792, in which he called for the end of the slave trade.87 The brutal homicide of the unnamed girl also inspired visual renderings such as the colored satirical engraving The Abolition of the Slave Trade by Scottish cartoonist Isaac Cruikshank. He depicts her naked body suspended by her ankle from a rope over a pulley, while the ship captain whips her. Not surprisingly, in both cases, Kimber was acquitted.
Mortality of African captives on board slave ships varied over time and depended on transportation conditions. Although the average mortality rate during the Middle Passage in the North and South Atlantic systems was 20 percent, the death toll decreased in the second half of the eighteenth century.
But this context kept changing. After the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 and its prohibition in various nations, slave merchants persistently overloaded the vessels with many more captives than they could accommodate in order to make as much profit as possible. Conditions of transportation dramatically worsened in the period of the illegal slave trade to Brazil and Cuba between 1831 and 1867. During this time, overcrowded slave vessels led mortality rates to jump to nearly 30 percent. Following continued British pressures to end its slave trade, Brazil enacted the FeijĂł Law of November 7, 1831, which banned the importation of enslaved Africans. In the two decades after this prohibition, slave traders illegally transported to Brazil more than one million enslaved Africans in overcrowded vessels.88 In 1838, the 96-ton schooner Providência transported from Mozambique to Brazil 472 men, women, and children. Only 422 arrived alive in Rio de Janeiro. The 45-ton yacht Mariquinhas disembarked 201 enslaved Africans on a Brazilian beach in Pernambuco in 1843.89 Slave merchants preferred these smaller two-masted vessels such as the yacht and the schooner because they were faster and decreased the chances of being intercepted by the British squadrons.90 But slave traders also used large slave ships to engage in similar atrocious practices. On February 1859, the US vessel Memphis (a 798-ton ship constructed in New York) left New Bedford, Massachusetts, to trade in Ambriz in West Central Africa, transporting 1,970 enslaved Africans. Of the original human cargo, 1,700 enslaved persons disembarked alive in the Cuban slave port of Cárdenas.91 This horrible context added more terror to the already gruesome journey experienced by enslaved Africans carried by force to the Americas.