In November of 1781, one hundred and thirty-two Africans were killed by the crew of the slave ship Zorg. Undermanned and incompetently governed, the Zorg had spent the days leading up to this mass murder mistaking Jamaica for Hispaniola and running perilously short of water. So perilous, in fact, was their position (or so the crew of the Zorg would later claim), that they had no choice but to sacrifice some of the hundreds of men, women, and children who had spent the last several months starving and naked and deprived of even enough space to lie fully flat to save the whole. Unpleasant, sure, but unavoidable.

They started with women and children. On the first day, the crew threw fifty-four people into the sea to drown or face the sharks that habitually followed slave ships. One of those they killed was a new mother who had given birth while imprisoned on the Zorg. Another was her infant son.

When they heard the cries of those being forced out of the cabin windows, the slaves who understood enough English to do so determined that the lack of water was the stated reason. One man tried to reason with his enslavers, offering that, if a lack of water was to blame, all of the Africans would go without until they reached Jamaica. The crew rejected his pleas and threw him overboard.

The Zorg arrived in Jamaica with less than half of the Africans that it had set sail with still alive. Their prize for survival was the island’s sugar plantations, where newly arrived slaves had an average lifespan of three years.

These deaths may have remained a relative unknown in the history of the transatlantic slave trade (a mortality rate of over fifty percent was high but not unheard of on a slave ship) if the owner of the Zorg had not decided to attempt to claim the deaths as losses with his insurance company. The subsequent trial determined that, as any necessity that warranted killings resulted from the crew’s own incompetence, an insurer could not be held liable for the deaths. There was never a successful attempt to prosecute the crew for murder.

Even though the Zorg is still relatively well-known today (as far as 18th century slaving vessels go), I had not heard about it until I read Siddharth Kara’s 2025 book of the same name, which also includes the illuminating subtitle “A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery.” (I relied heavily on his telling for the details above.)

As that subtitle suggests, Kara makes the case in his book that the story of the Zorg was so influential in its awfulness that it inspired many of the leading abolitionists of the day into a more fervent attack on the institution of slavery. Several, including Olaudah Equiano, Thomas Clarkson, and Granville Sharp, were deeply affected by the account of the Zorg and would continue to reference it in their writings and arguments against institutionalized slavery.

I don’t know that I fully buy Kara’s thesis—that the Zorg can be counted as the primary animating force behind the eventual abolition of slavery—but he did convince me that, even in moments of absolute depravity, there are people who will see such gross injustices and find themselves unable to remain silent about it. These people spent all of their lives fighting the great evil of their age—one of the greatest evils of any age—with the confident knowledge that they would not see it fall in their lifetimes. They come to us, flattened of most faults by the iron of time, as heroes.

We are living in an age when heroism seems naive. Quaint. And why not? What a thin comfort to know that in two hundred years, the popular consensus will be that you were correct. How much suffering must be endured now to nudge the needle of history even a mere degree?

There’s no moral arithmetic that guarantees the eventual alleviation of our current moment. There wasn’t any in 1781 either. There’s just the people who did it anyway.

Annaka Koster

Annaka Koster (’18) graduated from Calvin with majors in English and history and the University of Michigan a couple years later as a “master” of information science. She’s now a public librarian in her hometown. Outside the library, Annaka can be found doing a sundry of nerdy things, including reading comics, playing board games, and mourning her pet snail, Clive.