The Zorg & Britain's Abolitionist Movement

 

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.

The "Best Books of 2025" are emerging and one non-fiction volume on a number of them is The Zorg. I will contritely return my library copy, a couple of days overdue. It was a compelling and disturbing story, told well. 

It is about a specific 18th century ship whose Dutch name ironically translates as "care" involved in the vast trade of enslaved human beings which resulted in immense wealth for a few. Overcrowded ships with incompetent crews carried kidnapped Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to British colonies. 

On one such voyage the Zorg encountered bad weather and navigational miscalculations led to diminishing food and water onboard. The captain ordered that 130 of the 442 captives be tossed overboard and when the ship returned to England the owners sued their insurers for losses, and a jury decided they must do so. An anonymous letter about the actual circumstances to a newspaper resulted in an expose piece and resulted in a new trial which overturned the previous ruling.

This publicity awakened the British public to the horrors of the slave trade and energized the abolition movement.   

I was particularly moved by the chapter called Victory for the Whole Human Race. It describes how Christians including Quakers, the converted slave ship captain, John Newton (author of the hymn Amazing Grace), William Wilberforce, and a host of others devoted themselves to the abolition of slavery despite repeated setbacks. In that era only 10 percent of British men and no women had the right to vote and many members of the House of Lords became wealthy from the New World plantations where enslaved people toiled. 

One of most influential of those Christians was Thomas Clarkson, someone I'd never heard of before. An Anglica priest, he wrote a number of essays decrying slavery beginning during his seminary days.  Over the course of decades he rode an estimated 60,00 kilometres doing research about the slave trade, interviewing those who had served on slave ships, and speaking to groups across England. Clarkson's health was seriously compromised by his relentless travel. 

Eventually the Slavery Abolition Act was passed in Britain 1838, the first of its kind in the world. The colonies, including Canada, followed suit, making this country a haven for self-liberated enslaved people from the United States. One of the concessions to get the act passed was paying the modern equivalent of billions of dollars in compensation to enslavers, an incurred debt for Britain only retired in 2015. 

This is a well-written book telling a story we all need to hear. 

Oh yes, the great British painter, JMW Turner, who believed in a Creator God, was inspired to paint the gruesome scene of the murders of the Zorg captives once the evidence came to light.