The Zorg
A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
"A book of great importance and one that will likely become a classic." - New York Times Book Review
One of The New York Times' 100 Most Notable Books of 2025
A Time Magazine Must-Read Book of 2025
A New Yorker Essential Read
From the Pulitzer Finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives
Perfect for fans of David Grann’s The Wager and The Wide, Wide Sea by Hampton Sides
In late October 1780, a slave ship set sail from the Netherlands, bound for Africa’s Windward and Gold Coasts, where it would take on its human cargo. The Zorg (a Dutch word meaning “care”) was one of thousands of such ships, but the harrowing events that ensued on its doomed journey were unique.
By the time its journey ends, the Zorg would become the first undeniable argument against slavery.
When a series of unpredictable weather events and navigational errors led to the Zorg sailing off course and running low on supplies, the ship's captain threw more than a hundred slaves overboard in order to save the crew and the most valuable slaves. The ship's owners then claimed their loss on insurance, a first for slaves who had not been killed due to insurrection or died of natural causes.
The insurers refused to pay due to the higher than usual mortality rate of the slaves on board, leading to a trial which initially found in their favor, in which the Chief Justice compared the slaves to horses. Thanks to the outrage of one man present in court that day, a retrial was held. 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 people or cargo?
What followed was a fascinating legal drama in England’s highest court that turned the brutal calculus of slavery into front-page news. The case of the Zorg catapulted the nascent anti-slavery movement from a minor evangelical cause to one of the most consequential moral campaigns in history―sparking the abolitionist movement in both England and the young United States.
The Zorg is the astonishing yet little-known true story of the most consequential ship that ever crossed the Atlantic.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This riveting history introduces a little-known massacre that tipped the first domino towards ending the slave trade. The Zorg recounts an ocean voyage where, short on food and water, slave traders threw dozens of enslaved people overboard, only to make an insurance claim for those they murdered. This sparked a British court case, where for the first time, the humanity of the enslaved was taken seriously. Author Siddharth Kara makes meticulous use of ship logs, court transcripts, and testimony to demonstrate how an act of greed and murder became a flashpoint that turbocharged the abolitionist movement. Kara depicts the intricacies of the slave trade with heartbreaking detail, making for a transportive (if challenging) read, while ensuring that the court battles underpinning this harrowing story are balanced with compassion and recognition of the victims’ humanity. Whether you’re intrigued by forgotten yet pivotal moments in history or just in need of a story that shows that humanity and justice are achievable goals, The Zorg is an urgent read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this enthralling and elegant history, Pulitzer finalist Kara (Cobalt Red) revisits the notorious 1781 voyage of the British slave ship Zorg, also known as the Zong. Near its destination in Jamaica, the crew threw overboard 132 of the 443 slaves they were transporting, including children and babies, later asserting they did it to conserve drinking water. The investors' insurance claim for the murdered slaves led to an explosive London court case, and the massacre became an abolitionist rallying cry. Kara makes the incident partly into an age-of-sail epic of bad luck and hubris: delayed for over a month by storms and amateurish navigation mistakes, the ship's inexperienced captain failed to properly inventory water supplies. But even more so, Kara's account is a stomach-churning study in slavery's demented economic calculus as he seeks to prove what many abolitionists charged at the time: that the crew murdered the most weakened slaves just before docking because their insured value was greater than the price they would fetch at market. However, Kara intriguingly pegs as the crime's mastermind not the captain, but the ship's only passenger, disgraced former British colonial governor Robert Stubbs, whose sinister earlier dealings in Africa form a major through line of the narrative. The result is both a harrowing glimpse of slavery's horrors and an incisive investigation into one of history's most reviled crimes.
