Dan Snow's History Hit - Massacre on the Slave Ship Zong

Episode Date: April 4, 2023

Please note, this episode contains descriptions of racial violence that some listeners may find disturbing.In November 1781, a British slave ship carrying hundreds of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic began to run out of water. The ship was called the Zong, and her crew decided to save their own lives by throwing enslaved Africans overboard. In a sinister twist, they would later file an insurance claim on the lives of those they killed, treating them simply as cargo. This appalling episode has since become known as the Zong Massacre and was a key catalyst in the fight for the abolition of the slave trade. So what exactly happened on that fateful day, and what did this event mean for the abolitionist movement? Dan is joined by Giles Terera, award-winning actor and star of the London production of Hamilton, to talk about this massacre and its legacy.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. In 1781, a ship carrying enslaved Africans across the Atlantic found itself running short on water. The crossing had taken a lot longer than planned. The solution was to dump a good portion of those still living African enslaved people into the ocean. That would free up water for the rest of the crew and the cargo, and the ship's company also knew that they'd be able to claim the loss of the enslaved Africans as cargo with their insurers. That shocking massacre led back in Britain to an upsurge in abolitionist activity. It saw people like Olodaoda Aquiano and Granville Sharp

raise awareness of the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade and was an important step on the road to its eventual abolition. I'm very excited in this podcast to be talking to a hero of mine, Giles Torreira. He is the award-winning actor, playwright, writer. He was in the UK version of Hamilton, for which he received rave reviews. And he's now gone and written a play, also about the late 18th century,

about the Zong Massacre. It's called The Meaning of Zong, and it's in London's Barbican Theatre in April. Go and get your tickets, everybody. I'm the world's biggest Hamilton fan. Aaron Burr was the tragic hero of Hamilton in so many ways. So having Charles Trower on the podcast is very exciting indeed. And I will certainly be going to his play, The Meaning of

Song. Enjoy this chat. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Charles, thanks so much for coming on the pod, buddy. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. In the late 18th century, how many enslaved African people, men, women, and children, were being shipped across the Atlantic? Do we have a yearly figure? Was this the peak in the late 18th century?

It's about 50,000 people a year going across the Atlantic. And as the abolitionist movement got together, and people started becoming aware of what... Because the whole thing about the transatlantic slave trade was that it happened miles away. It happened far away from the ordinary people's lives. So once ordinary people in Britain became more aware of it, and people started to join up and do something about it, in fact, the slave trade increased in the last 10 years before it was abolished. So at the point that our play happens, it was about 50,000 people a year. And what kind of conditions, when you were doing this research, what was that experience like? There are a number of experiences, but we tend to think about, or I did at the time, I didn't really know as much about this period and Britain's involvement in the transatlantic

slave trade as I thought. I kind of knew the American side of things, you know, the movies and Gone with the Wind and 12 Years a Slave and Roots and that kind of stuff, plantations. But I didn't really know about the role that Britain played in it. And the trafficking of people, the business that Britain was involved in. So you'd go to the West Coast of Africa and you would buy human beings at various different places. And then you would load your ship and then you would go across the Atlantic so the conditions were as horrific as one could imagine I suppose most people would imagine they are but also the thing which really struck me was how young the people were who were being

trafficked across again because maybe America and that idea of plantations and generations of people and older people and stuff is kind of image. But actually, in terms of taking people from Africa, you want young, healthy people. So there is literature that we have about the kind of human beings that you are looking for and the kind of age 18 to 25 and very healthy young people. But it was young people who were being trafficked, which is initially what I thought, okay, well, a young person's experience in the story that I'm telling, I deal with people who kind of fight back

and resist and survive this situation. So, but in answer to the question, I think it was as bad as you can imagine. And on certain ships, like in the ship in our story, is overloaded with the amount of people that would normally be on a ship of this size. The ship is 100 tons, and therefore a ship would usually carry a certain amount of people according to the tonnage of the ship. Whereas in this case, in the Zong, the owners were greedy,

and so they overloaded the ship. So the conditions were worse on this ship than normal, if one could say that. People chained cheek by jowl in crawl spaces and, you know, extreme heat and the weather that you get on an Atlantic crossing. You raised a really interesting point there that I've been reading a lot about recently, and that's like giving these people agency.

You know, there are so many accounts now that I didn't know about of these Africans refusing to go quietly and like fighting on the ships, trying to take the ships over. Like there's a real scholarship now coming out about this. Yeah. And I mean, anyone would, everyone resists when you have horrendous events like this, no matter where it is in the world or what country, people resist. The human instinct is to resist. That would be the same here or anywhere else in the world. And I think that was very much in evidence during the transatlantic slave trade.

And the stories of that resistance are not as well documented as some of the other tragic elements of it. But actually there's a great strength, I think, in my people who were taken. And there's a historian called Marcus Rediker that you've heard of, an American guy. And he's great because he always talks about writing history from the bottom up. Whereas actually, when I started looking at this subject matter, I found that

most of the Africans were nameless, were ageless, were cultureless. They were just sort of numbers per ship. Whereas actually, there's a huge amount of information about the people who experienced those crossings. If you kind of just dig around, there's a huge amount of information about the people who experienced those crossings. If you kind of just dig around, there's a lot of information about people's ages, where people came from, what language they spoke, what religions they were. And Marcus Reddick is one of the people who really did that work. At the time, one of the people who really kickstarted the abolitionists, you've got Granville Sharp, who we have in our story, but you also have Thomas Clarkson and Wilberforce,

are the three people that most people know. And Thomas Clarkson was great because he's the guy who goes around the docks in England trying to find out information, trying to talk to sailors, trying to talk to the sailors who've been on the ships and just find out information that might help the abolitionist cause. And in doing so, finally, he kind of gets to draw information out of these sailors and these crew members. And you get this wealth of information firsthand about not only the conditions of the ship, not only the class structure that happens within the ship, but also the Africans who were taken and the victims of the trade. So you have incredible bits of information about people's names and people's religion

and people's language and people's culture, who people were, what they said, how they behaved, so that you really can understand people rather than just numbers or facts and figures in this horror. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the Zong Massacre, Giles Torreira's new play.

More coming up. So tell me a little bit about those people and those details for the ship that crossed the Atlantic in the second half of 1781, the Zong. Who was aboard? second half of 1781, the Zong, who was aboard? There's a very wealthy, successful businessman in Liverpool who starts out as a rope maker in Liverpool and he ends up becoming very successful off the back of that and then goes into the slave trade and then comes very, very successful off the back of that and then

goes into politics and becomes the mayor of Liverpool at one point, William Gregson. And then after a while, he decides to go back into the slave trade. So he sends a ship over to the west coast of Africa. And while they're there, they find another ship at port, which has been captured from the Dutch by the English, and it's just sat there. So they buy this second ship, and they say, okay, right, we could have two crossings for the price of one, basically.

They restock, and that ship that they find is called the Zong. It has a couple of hundred Africans who are on board the ship. There's hardly any crew. So from the original ship that sails across, they take the surgeon from that ship and say, you're going to captain the ship. They find a crew, they purchase some more Africans, and they set sail across the Atlantic.

The ship takes about 100 days to cross instead of the usual 60. It's overloaded with 400 plus Africans, a crew who don't really understand each other. There's some Dutch, there's some French, there's some English crew. You have a captain who was the surgeon from the original ship. He's not a particularly experienced captain. So this voyage sets across, takes 100 days to get across the Atlantic. And by the time they get to Jamaica,

where they're headed, they claim to have run out of water. So at that point, someone decides that what they're going to do is throw some of the Africans into the sea in order that they can claim insurance on the money going back to Liverpool. Because the whole of the transatlantic slave trade is built on insurance, as any other industry is. So they

have an idea that their cargo, as they see it, is worth more to them in insurance rather than losing value for when they get to their market, which is in Jamaica. So this massacre happens over the course of three days. They get back to England and the insurers refuse. It ends up at a court in Guildhall and the court finds in favour of the ship owners, the Gregsons, at which point the insurers appeal. There's an appeal hearing in Westminster Hall in London, at which point a guy hears about it in London, a former enslaved African called Olaudah Equiano, who is now a very well-known figure in British history. He hears about this story, reads about it in the paper, and goes to someone he knows called Granville Sharp, who at that point is the kind of one-man abolitionist movement. He's the guy who

you go to if you can get away from one of these ships and find yourself in London and need help. He teaches himself the law, and so he can help Africans who are in distress in London. So Olaudah goes to him, and the two of them try and kind of use this story to bring awareness to the British public of the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. So it's actually Equiano's hustle, right? This is not something so egregious that the whole of the world's press was suddenly talking about. No one wanted to know about it. And the implication is that this kind of stuff had been happening before, but this is the one that luckily Equiano just was able to latch onto and get traction with.

Yeah, and the timing of these things is right. Things like that had happened before, but it hadn't been sort of latched onto in the same way. But during the hearing, during the course of the hearing, certain evidence comes out in the testimonies of the people involved in the ship. The first mate of the ship is called and he has a testimony. And he says that during the course of the three days, there was one African who spoke, who was elected to speak on behalf of the Africans who were on the ship, who happened to speak English, immediately I was like, okay, who's that? Who's that person who, one, could speak English? Why could they? Why was that person elected on behalf of the others to say, okay, you're going to speak and try and stop this massacre from happening? So immediately I was like, okay, I don't know who that person's name was or where they're from but immediately I'm like okay well there's something about that person which I'm really interested in terms of a story and then the second person we know about is during the course of the three days

the testimony says one of the Africans who was thrown from the ship managed to hold grab hold of a rope that was hanging from the ship and hung on in the sea and then managed to pull themselves back up onto the ship. So when I read that, I thought, okay, well, that's a story that I want to know about. Who was that person? And what is it like to be in that situation where you're hanging on a rope? One way is death and drowning and the sharks that were inevitably following the ships. And then the other way, if you go up the rope, you've got people who are murdering you. They also say that that person was discovered the next morning by the crew and was suffered to live, is their words. They suffered

that person to live. So I was really fascinated by who that person was and how that person chose to survive and what it is within them that would allow them to make that decision in that moment. So I was really inspired by those two people and wanted to try and tell a story from their perspective. So I just started to try and research about the whole story as much as I could, but also just try and make available these people and just try and find the people who might have lived in that experience it's been a journey but it's been a really fascinating one so you're now i mean as well as being a award-winning fantastic actor you're now a brilliant historian as well you're just

showing off there buddy but i didn't know about the story at all and i didn't know about the period of history from the british side interestingly enough we're talking about Hamilton, and the story happens exactly the same time as Hamilton is happening. So the massacre happens in 1781, and the trial is in 1783. And I just started it as I think Hamilton was happening. So by the time I came to be in Hamilton, I was quite, I was like, I know these people that you're talking about. Yes, it's on the other side of the Atlantic, but the period is exactly the same. So I had a lot of kind of learning to do. And I like history as well, which is why podcasts like yours are brilliant, because it allows you sort of a good way into really fascinating subjects, which might be kind of tricky and difficult at school. So I really love learning about history. And so I'm just

curious, you know. It must be so exciting having learned about the history, you're then allowed to start messing with it a bit, you know, not messing with it in a dramatic sense, but like, add the bits that the historical record doesn't include. And that's where the artistry comes in. And that must be a kind of separate and very cool bit of creativity. Yeah, I'm sure you know, when you start digging into historical documents and things that people actually said often it can be much more vivid and visceral and powerful than anything that a writer would kind of come up with and that was the case in the Zong when I what I really wanted to do initially was just I thought I'm going to give myself six months and I'm going

to do a lot of research and I'm going to try and bring together all of the documentation I can from the people involved in the story. Because a lot of them wrote their own memoirs. The trial itself, the Zong trial, was documented because Granville Sharp and Lauda Quiano went into Westminster Hall and they took a shorthand writer and so they documented the whole thing. So I immediately went down to Maritime Museum in Greenwich and booked an appointment and they brought out this 200 odd year old book, handwritten book. And there it was in sort of very illegible handwriting. But I just started to piece together as much as I could. I thought, well, I'll try and

do like a verbatim piece because the language they use is really amazing. Like the judge who presides over the whole case, Lord Mansfield, who was like the father of commercial law in that point. He presided over so much of what happened in the 18th century, massively important cases and pieces of law and changes and all that kind of stuff and he presides over this case and during it he's trying to qualify how people can be insured and whether or not it qualifies as the same as anything else which has been bought i.e sugar or rum cotton or anything that might happen to be coming across the Atlantic. And he's trying to qualify it. And he says, yes, the case of slaves is the same as if horses had been thrown overboard. Well, historians have latched on to that particular sentence because of this inhumanity, and it sort of sums up the horror of the whole situation. So I tried as much as possible to kind of bring together the actual language used by the people

and then like you say there were some gaps and you kind of then have to take a bit of artistic license and try and have a bit of imagination but using what was there you know what's actually historically accurate and so it's a lot of the words that we use are their words a lot of the lawyers the way they speak in the play is taken from what they actually said and it's powerful stuff this is a play set in the late 18th century with close attention to historical texts and documents and even the word spoken you've won awards for your performance in hamilton would this have happened without hamilton for you personally hamilton was happening i think lynn was writing, but I wasn't aware of what Hamilton was for a long time until just before

I auditioned, by which time it was on Broadway. And it was its peak in terms of the craziness that was Hamilton. So I was kind of late to the game. I didn't really hear about it while it was happening in America. So this is such a cool coincidence then? Yeah, it was. So by the time my agent was like, you should listen to Hamilton, I was like, okay, well, then they start talking about the Revolutionary War and they're talking about George III. And I'm like, well, I've been just researching that for the last year or so. So I felt I kind of knew the world a little bit before I started auditioning. So it did happen before Hamilton, but Hamilton certainly helped it.

Well, tell us how people can watch it. People can watch it. We're going to be at the Barbican in London at the end of April. And we're only there for a week. So if you do want to watch it, you can look it up on the Barbican website. Yeah, it'd be great to see people there. I mean, the subject matter is a pretty dark episode in British history, but actually, it's also about human rights. And it's about two or three people actually trying to do something about it, very much in the same way as happening now. Like in our headlines, we are talking about people in boats who are brown and black and what it is that we have an obligation to do about it as a society. And that is exactly the same as what happens in the Zong story. And so of course,

there are really horrendous things that happen, but there are also very strong, powerful things that happen, which are quite affirming in terms of the human spirit and the human capacity. So I'd encourage people to see if you're interested in any of those things. Well, I'm interested in all that, Giles. So I will be there. Thank you very much indeed. Congratulations. It must be incredible taking a project from research phase to writing to the big stage. So it's going to be so cool to see how it all goes i appreciate that it's really really good chatting to you thanks for having me on i appreciate it