The slave ship that changed history

Welcome back to the History Extra podcast. In 1781, the crew of a slave ship called the Zorg deliberately threw more than 130 enslaved Africans into the Atlantic. The atrocity and the extraordinary legal battle that followed would have far-reaching consequences for the history of slavery and abolition. In today's episode, you'll hear from Sid Athkara, whose book The Zorg investigates the ship's disastrous voyage and reveals how the case helped expose the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade to the British public. He was speaking to Eleanor Evans.

And just before we start, please note this episode includes descriptions of themes and events that some listeners may find upsetting. I wonder if we can start with the name the Zorg, because it's a tale that some people might have come across before under a slightly different name. Can we start there? Yeah, that's the right place to start, because one of the most important aspects of this book for me was to try and set the historical record straight. There's a lot of misunderstanding about the ship, what happened on the ship.

and why it happened and who was responsible. But the starting point is the name of the ship itself, which for roughly 240 years has been known incorrectly as the Zong. And this is a word that has no meaning in any language. Most slave ships were named after the owner or given some other quaint name like Providence. But for reasons that come down to mistaking an R for an N in 18th century cursive handwriting, the name Zong got set down in the historical record, when in fact the name of the ship is Zorg.

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