African Company of Merchants or Company of Merchants Trading to Africa
Company | Defunct
1750 CE to 1821 CE
The African Company of Merchants or Company of Merchants Trading to Africa is a British Chartered Company operating from 1752 to 1821 in the Gold Coast area of modern Ghana.
This coastal area is dominated by the indigenous Fante people.
It is established by the African Company Act 1750, and in 1752 replaces the Royal African Company
The latter had been established in 1660.
The assets of the Royal African Company are transferred to the new company and consist primarily of nine trading posts or factories: Fort William, Fort James, Fort Sekondi, Fort Winneba, Fort Apollonia, Fort Tantumquery, Fort Metal Cross, Fort Komenda, and Cape Coast Castle, the last of which is the administrative center.
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Zong, originally named Zorg (meaning "Care" in Dutch) by its owners, the Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie, had operated as a slave ship based in Middelburg, Netherlands, and had made a voyage in 1777, delivering slaves to the coast of Suriname, South America.
Zong is a "square stern ship" of one hundred and ten burden.
It had been captured by the British sixteen-gun brig HMS Alert on February 10, 1781.
By February 26, Alert and Zong had arrived at Cape Coast Castle, in what is present-day Ghana, which is maintained and staffed, along with other forts and castles, by the African Company of Merchants or Company of Merchants Trading to Africa.
The Castle is used as the regional headquarters of the African Company.
In early March 1781, Zong had been purchased by the master of William, on behalf of a syndicate of Liverpool merchants.
The members of the syndicate are Edward Wilson, George Case, James Aspinall and William, James and John Gregson.
William Gregson had had an interest in fifty slaving voyages between 1747 and 1780.
He had served as mayor of Liverpool in 1762.
By the end of his life, vessels in which Gregson had had a financial stake had carried fifty-eight thousand two hundred and one Africans to slavery in the Americas.
Zong had been paid for with bills of exchange, and the two hundred and forty-four slaves already on board were part of the transaction.
The ship is not insured until after it starts its voyage.
The insurers, a syndicate from Liverpool, underwrite the ship and slaves for up to £8,000, approximately half the slaves' potential market value.
The remaining risk is borne by the owners.
Zong is the first command of Luke Collingwood, formerly the surgeon on the William.
While Collingwood lacks experience in navigation and command, ship's surgeons are typically involved in selecting slaves for purchase in Africa, so their medical expertise supports the determination of "commodity value" for a captive.
If the surgeon rejects a captive, that individual suffers "commercial death", being of no value, and is liable to be killed by African handlers.
Sometimes these killings happen in the presence of the surgeon.
It is likely that Collingwood had already witnessed the mass-killing of slaves.
Zong's first mate is James Kelsall, who had also served on the William.
The vessel's only passenger, Robert Stubbs, is a former captain of slave ships.
In early 1780 he had been appointed by the African Committee of the African Company, as the governor of Anomabu, a British fortification near Cape Coast Castle in Ghana.
This position makes him also vice-president of the Africa Company's Council of the Castle.
Due to his ineptitude and enmity incurred with John Roberts, governor of the Castle, Stubbs had been forced out of the governorship of Anomabu by the Council after nine months.
Witness statements gathered by the African Committee of the Africa Company had accused him of being a semi-literate drunkard who mismanaged the slave-trading activities of the fort.
Stubbs is aboard to return to Britain; Collingwood may have thought his earlier experience on slave ships would be useful.
Zong has a seventeen-man crew when it leaves Africa, which is far too small to maintain adequate sanitary conditions on the ship.
Mariners willing to risk disease and slave rebellions on slave ships are difficult to recruit within Britain and are harder to find for a vessel captured from the Dutch off the coast of Africa.
Zong is manned with remnants of the previous Dutch crew, the crew of William, and with unemployed sailors hired from the settlements along the African coast.
When Zong sails from Accra with four hundred and forty-two slaves on August 18, 1781, it has taken on more than twice the number of people that it can safely transport.
In the 1780s, British-built ships typically carry 1.75 slaves per ton of the ship's capacity; on the Zong, the ratio is 4.0 per ton.
A British slave ship of the period carries around one hundred and ninety-three slaves and it is extremely unusual for a ship of Zong's relatively small size to carry so many.
On November 18 or 19, the ship nears Tobago in the Caribbean but fails to stop there to replenish its water supplies.
It is unclear who, if anyone, is in charge of the ship at this point, as Luke Collingwood had been gravely ill for some time.
The man who would normally have replaced him, first mate James Kelsall, had been previously suspended from duty following an argument on November 14.
Robert Stubbs had captained a slave ship several decades earlier and he temporarily commanded Zong during Collingwood's incapacitation, but he is not a registered member of the vessel's crew.
Zong continues on its westward course, leaving Jamaica behind.
This mistake is recognized only after the ship is three hundred miles (four hundred and eighty kilometers) leeward of the island.
Overcrowding, malnutrition, accidents, and disease have already killed several mariners and approximately sixty-two Africans.
James Kelsall will later claim that there was only four days' water remaining on the ship, when the navigational error was discovered and Jamaica was still ten to thirteen sailing days away.
If the slaves die onshore, the Liverpool ship-owners will have had no redress from their insurers.
Similarly, if the slaves die a "natural death" (as the contemporary term puts it) at sea, then insurance cannot be claimed.
If some slaves are jettisoned in order to save the rest of the "cargo" or the ship, then a claim can be made under "general average". ( This principle holds that a captain who jettisons part of his cargo in order to save the rest can claim for the loss from his insurers.)
The ship's insurance covers the loss of slaves at £30 a head.
James Kelsall will later claim that he had disagreed with the plan at first but it is soon unanimously agreed, whereupon the crew throws fifty-four women and children through cabin windows into the sea.
Another ten, in a display of defiance at the inhumanity of the slavers, jump into the sea.
Having heard the shrieks of the victims as they were thrown into the water, one slave requests that the remaining Africans be denied all food and drink rather than be thrown into the sea.
The crew ignores his request.
The account of the King's Bench trial will report that one slave managed to climb back onto the ship.
The crew will claim that the slaves had been jettisoned because the ship did not have enough water to keep all the slaves alive for the rest of the voyage.
This claim will later be disputed, as the ship had 420 imperial gallons (1,900 liters) of water left when it arrived in Jamaica on December 22.
An affidavit later made by Kelsall, stated that on December 1, when forty-two slaves were killed, it rained heavily for more than a day, allowing six casks of water (sufficient for eleven days) to be collected.
Zong arrives at Black River, Jamaica, on December 22, 1781 with two hundred and eight slaves on board, less than half the number taken from Africa.
These sell for an average price of £36 each.
The Jamaican Vice-Admiralty court upholds the legality of the British capture of Zong from the Dutch, and the syndicate renames the ship Richard of Jamaica.
Luke Collingwood dies three days after Zong reaches Jamaica, two years before the 1783 court proceedings about the case.
The insurers had refused to honor the claim and the owners have taken them to court.
Zong's logbook had gone missing after the ship reached Jamaica, two years before the hearings start.
The legal proceedings provide almost all the documentary evidence about the massacre but there is no formal record of the first trial other than what is referred to in the appeals hearing.
The ship's insurers claim that the log had been deliberately destroyed, which the Gregson syndicate denies.
Almost all the surviving source material is of questionable reliability.
The two witnesses who give evidence, Robert Stubbs and James Kelsall, are strongly motivated to exonerate themselves from blame.
It is possible that the figures concerning the number of slaves killed, the amount of water that remained on the ship, and the distance beyond Jamaica that Zong had mistakenly sailed are inaccurate.
The dispute is initially tried at the Guildhall in London on March 6, 1783, with the Lord Chief Justice, the Earl of Mansfield, overseeing the trial before a jury.
Mansfield, previously the judge in Somersett's Case in 1772, which concerned the legality of keeping slaves in Britain, had ruled that slavery has never been established by statute in Britain and is not supported by common law.
Robert Stubbs is the only witness in the first Zong trial and the jury finds in favor of the owners, under an established protocol in maritime insurance that considers slaves as cargo.
Sharp seeks legal advice the next day, about the possibility of prosecuting the crew for murder.
A hearing is held at the Court of King's Bench in Westminster Hall from May 21 to 22, 1783, before Mansfield and two other King's Bench judges, Mr Justice Buller and Mr Justice Willes.
The Solicitor General, John Lee, appears on behalf of the Zong's owners, as he had done previously in the Guildhall trial.
Granville Sharp is also in attendance, together with a secretary he had hired to take a written record of the proceedings.
Summing up the verdict reached in the first trial, Mansfield says that the jury,
had no doubt (though it shocks one very much) that the Case of Slaves was the same as if Horses had been thrown over board ... The Question was, whether there was not an Absolute Necessity for throwing them over board to save the rest, [and] the Jury were of opinion there was ... (Walvin, James (2011). The Zong: A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.)
Collingwood had died in 1781 and the only witness of the massacre to appear at Westminster Hall is passenger Robert Stubbs, although a written affidavit by first mate James Kelsall is made available to the lawyers.
Stubbs claimed that there was "an absolute Necessity for throwing over the Negroes", because the crew feared all the slaves would die if they did not throw some into the sea.
The insurers argue that Collingwood had made "a Blunder and Mistake" in sailing beyond Jamaica and that the slaves had been killed so their owners could claim compensation.
They allege that Collingwood did this because he did not want his first voyage as a slave ship captain to be unprofitable.
John Lee respondsby saying that the slaves "perished just as a Cargo of Goods perished" and were jettisoned for the greater good of the ship.[
The insurers' legal team replies that Lee's argument can never justify the killing of innocent people; each of the three addresses issues of humanity in the treatment of the slaves and says that the actions of Zong's crew are nothing less than murder.
At the hearing, new evidence is heard, that heavy rain had fallen on the ship on the second day of the killings, but a third batch of slaves was killed after that.
This leads Mansfield to order another trial, because the rainfall meant that the killing of those slaves, after the water shortage had been eased, could not be justified in terms of the greater necessity of saving the ship and the rest of its human cargo.[
One of the justices in attendance also said that this evidence invalidated the findings of the jury in the first trial, as the jury had heard testimony that the water shortage resulted from the poor condition of the ship, brought on by unforeseen maritime conditions, rather than from errors committed by its captain.
Mansfield concludes that the insurers are not liable for losses resulting from errors committed by Zong's crew.
There is no evidence that another trial was held on this issue.
Despite Granville Sharp's efforts, no member of the crew is prosecuted for murder of the slaves, yet the Zong case will eventually gain both national and international attention.
A summary of the appeal on the Zong case will eventually be published in the nominate reports prepared from the contemporaneous manuscript notes of Sylvester Douglas, Baron Glenbervie, and others, in 1831 as Gregson v Gilbert (1783) 3 Doug. KB 232.