Each time the words Slave trade or Slavery is mentioned, what comes to the mind of many are cotton plantations in Alabama and Mississippi.

There are so many written accounts of American Slavery; movies like Django and 12 years' a slave have helped to portray further the reality of the enslaved Africans  who lived in America 200 years ago.

But what many are unaware of is the dark, covert and terrible side of British history and how they sent thousands of Africans to work in plantations in the Caribbeans; after all, Britain fought against slavery and abolished the Slave trade for 32 years before America did.

Thousands of British families, many of them whose surnames still ring a bell in our society, grew rich on the slave trade and the sale of slave-produced sugar. Still, the British historians buried the awkward chapters of their stories by referring to former slave traders and Slave owners as “West India merchants” and “West India planters”, respectively.

These British 'West Indies Traders and Planters' went as far as America and Caribbeans to settle slaves on plantations. These acts went on for hundreds of years until an incident occurred; that incident is called the Zong Massacre.

In 1781, under the command of Luke Collingwood and his crew, the Slave ship Zong departed the coast of Africa on the 6th of September with 470 enslaved Africans

Four hundred and seventy people were many, but it didn't deter the traders; the ship's Captain wanted to make as much profit as possible. 

 By the time they arrived at an Island that they had thought was Jamaica, people in the ship had already begun to die;  by November 29th, 1781, 2 days after they arrived at the island, they had lost seven crew members and over 50 slaves to disease and malnutrition.

According to Folarin Shyllon in his book "In Black Slaves in Britain", He stated, 

"Chained two by two, right leg and left leg, right hand and left hand, each slave had less room than a man in a coffin."

This led to widespread disease, exacerbated by malnutrition; the 'merchandises' were treated like animals.

Desperate to provide the ship owners, James Gregson, and several others who owned a slave ship firm in Liverpool, the opportunity to claim the loss on their insurance, Collingwood pulled his crew together. They told them that if the sick slaves died a natural death, the responsibility would be on them as the ship's crew, but if the slaves were thrown over while still alive for the safety of the ship it would be under the responsibility of the underwriters. 

 The Law reads as follows:

"The insurer takes upon him the risk of the loss, capture, and death of slaves, or any other unavoidable accident to them: but natural death is always understood to be excepted: by natural death is meant, not only when it happens by disease or sickness, but also when the captive destroys himself through despair, which often happens: but when slaves are killed, or thrown into the sea to quell an insurrection on their part, then the insurers must answer." 

 Collingwood convinced his crew; he and his men spent the next three days throwing slaves into the sea.

Out of 133 slaves, one managed to escape and climb back onto the boat; the last ten victims didn't wait to be thrown in like the rest; they leapt into the sea triumphantly embracing death."

When they returned to England, James Gregson and the other co-owners of the ship claimed the full value of the murdered slaves from the insurers. To back their claim, they claimed the crew had to throw the slaves over the ship because of water depletion.

But this was a lie, and the insurance company knew that. The Zong ship had 420 gallons of water to spare.

They went to court; in 1782, a Jamaican court  found in favour of the owners. The insurers went ahead to appeal the case in 1783. However, they lost, the case built quite a stare that Granville Sharp, a leading abolitionist at the time, got to know about it and used the deaths of the slaves to increase public awareness about the slave trade and further the anti-slavery cause.  It was he who first used the word massacre; that was how Zong massacre exposed British Slave Trade.

Granville Sharp was able to bring in new converts like Olaudah Equiano, Thomas Clarkson and Reverend John Ramsay.  

These three, in turn, inspired the actions of William Wilberforce, (Wilberforce University, A HBCU,was named after Wiliam Wilberforce and was established in 1856) 

Who led the successful campaign to have Parliament abolish slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833.

The Aftermath of the Slave Ban.

Even after the abolition act was passed, formerly enslaved people were committed to slavery in another term called  'apprenticeship',

Here, they served  six to twelve years of further unpaid services.

 According to the Slave Compensation Commission: a body created by the British government to evaluate the claims of the enslavers after the Parliament passed the  Slavery Abolition Act, the British enslavers received a total of £20m (£23bn in today’s money), that sum represented 40% of the total government expenditure for 1834. 

The British borrowed such a large sum of money for the Slavery Abolition Act that it wasn’t paid off until 2015.

So ironically, the descendants of the transatlantic Slave trade helped to pay off the debt through taxes.

Do you want to know more about Black history? 

Subscribe to our newsletter and follow us across all social media platforms!

Work Cited

USA today

Blackpast.org

BBC

The Guardian

Umich.edu

Bond vigilantes