On this day and the days following, the crew of the British slave ship Zong massacred 143 enslaved Africans. The ship, with its ‘cargo‘ of 442 slaves – more than twice the number it could safely transport – left Africa on 6th September, but a breakdown in the chain of command, negligence and major navigational errors led to a serious lack of drinking water. Overcrowding, malnutrition, and disease had already killed several mariners and approximately 62 Africans, and the remaining crew members unanimously agreed to resolve the water shortage by throwing slaves into the ocean. The news that a mass murder had taken place aboard a British ship, and that the ship’s owners intended to profit from it through an insurance claim, fuelled the abolitionist movement which finally succeeded in having Parliament abolish the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807 and abolish slavery itself in most of the British colonies in 1833.
