The Zorg by Siddharth Kara | Blackwells.co.uk

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Images credit to BBC History.

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The Zorg tells the astonishing yet little-known story of one of the most consequential ships that ever crossed the Atlantic. Its fateful voyage in 1781 distils centuries of the Atlantic slave trade into a single journey which altered the course of history. By the time its journey ends, the Zorg had become the first undeniable argument against slavery. It was the one slave ship to stand for them all.

New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize Finalist Siddharth Kara brings history to life in this page-turning account of The Zorg's voyage from the high seas to the High Court that sparked the human rights campaign to end the slave trade.

Exposing the harsh reality of the slave trade through the lens of the Zorg's voyage from the Netherlands to West Africa and from there onto the Caribbean, where a series of unpredictable weather events and navigational errors led to the ship sailing off course and running low on supplies. To save the crew and the most valuable slaves, the ship's captain threw more than a hundred slaves overboard, only to then claim for their loss on insurance.

For the first time, concepts such as human rights and morality entered the discourse on slavery in a courtroom case that boiled down to a simple yet profound question: were the Africans on board the Zorg people or cargo? The case of the Zorg catapulted the nascent anti-slavery movement to one of the most consequential moral campaigns that changed the course of history.

Millions of slaves would eventually be freed because the Zorg showed the world for the first time that the Atlantic slave trade was a morally bankrupt system of greed and violence that unleashed incalculable misery on the people of Africa, while generating tremendous wealth for the slave merchants who financed the thousands of voyages that crossed the Atlantic.