The Zong and the Cost of a Life

There are stories that linger quietly in the shadows of history, waiting for someone to bring them into the light. The story of the Zong is one of those. In 1781, a British slave ship named the Zong threw more than one hundred and thirty enslaved Africans into the Atlantic Ocean. This was not an accident or a tragedy of the sea. It was a calculated decision made by the crew to preserve their water supply, but more importantly, to protect their financial interests. The lives lost were not seen as human but as cargo, and the legal battle that followed revealed a society willing to reduce human suffering to a matter of insurance claims.

This story is painful but necessary to remember. It shows how systems can normalize violence when it aligns with profit, and how the value of life can be distorted by economic interests. The legacy of the Zong is not just a historical fact; it echoes in policies and practices today that treat people as costs rather than human beings.

A rendering of a turbulent Atlantic horizon at dusk, with faint silhouettes of chained figures beneath the waterline

The Tragedy of the Zong

The Zong set sail with over 400 enslaved Africans packed tightly below deck. These people had already endured unimaginable horrors: kidnapping, forced marches, confinement in barracoons, auctions, and the brutal middle passage. When the ship’s water supply ran low, the crew decided to throw 133 people overboard. Their reasoning was chillingly practical: the ship’s insurance would cover the loss of “cargo” thrown overboard but not those who died from disease.

This decision was not about survival; it was about money. The crew prioritized financial reimbursement over human life. Men, women, and children were sacrificed to protect profits.

The Courtroom and the Value of Life

When the case reached court, the question was not whether the killings were wrong. No one disputed that lives were lost. Instead, the legal debate focused on whether the ship’s owners were entitled to insurance money for the lost “cargo.” The court did not treat the deaths as murder but as a financial loss.

This legal framing reveals how deeply embedded the dehumanization of enslaved people was in society. The law treated human beings as property, and their deaths as a matter of accounting. This was the moral math of empire, where atrocity became administrative.

How Systems Normalize Violence

The Zong case exposes a dangerous pattern: when harm aligns with financial incentives, systems can begin to permit and normalize violence. This is not just a story of the past. Today, we see echoes of this logic in policies that treat communities as expenses, budgets that accept premature death as a tradeoff, and courtrooms where only certain lives are deemed worthy of justice.

For example, environmental policies that allow pollution in low-income neighborhoods treat those communities as expendable. Healthcare systems that ration care based on cost calculations risk valuing some lives less than others. The Zong reminds us how this logic can take root and persist.

Remembering the Zong as an Act of Recognition

To remember the Zong is to refuse the language of dehumanization. It is to recognize the humanity of those who were lost and to challenge the systems that allowed their deaths to be reduced to financial calculations. The ocean has kept its memory, and we owe it to those lives to keep ours.

Remembering is not just about honoring the past. It is about understanding how history shapes the present and committing to a future where every life is valued equally.

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-Smart Brown Girl