The Zorg is a thorough and well written book about a part of our history that isn't talked about enough. This book was factually accurate and incorporated several primary sources without reading like a dry textbook. Kara does not shy away from the horrors experienced by the slaves as they crossed the Atlantic. This book would be an excellent resource for those wanting to learn more about the Atlantic slave trade.

I knew going into Siddarth Kara’s The Zorg that I was going to be reading about some of the worst things humans can do to each other. But even being prepared for that and the paltry and increasingly creative justifications for it, I still found myself shocked and sickened by the accounts of this book. This is a non-fiction book so I don’t consider it possible to have spoilers, but if you want to read this book without knowing more high level details, you should probably not read the rest of this review.

The journey of the Zorg took place during the Revolutionary War. No part of its journey took place along the shores or in a port of the nascent United States of America. And yet that war played a huge role in how events with the ship played out. The ship began its life as a Dutch ship, and was captured by the English off the coast of Africa because the two countries were at war against each other because of see above.

An experienced slaver assigned the surgeon of his to captaincy of it, despite Luke Collingsworth having no navigating or previous experiences captaining a ship. Collingsworth then packed the ship with twice the number of slaves a ship would normally take on, and brought on as a passenger, Roger Stubbs, who had been expelled from Africa managing the sale of slaves to the slavers (he left his teenage son behind).

After a stopover to load up on supplies before crossing the Atlantic, things started going badly for the white men too. Limited in crew with navigational skills, a storm blew them off course. Lack of attention to supplies led to them running low on citrus and developing scurvy. Collingsworth took ill and put Stubbs in charge instead of the first mate, who was confined to his quarters.

In a non-comedy of errors they realized their potable water was starting to run low, and instead of stopping when they sighted land (because of a lack of navigation and the fact that the islands could be claimed by one of the other countries at war with them) they kept going, trying to reach their intended destination of Jamaica, which turned out to be one of the islands they passed.

Their solution to making sure the white men had enough water while bumbling around the Caribbean was to throw living slaves off the ship, who of course didn’t know how to swim and in the case of the men, were chained to another man when thrown overboard. This is my first “are you absolutely kidding me moment”. These animals tossed living human beings overboard whose only sin was needing food and water, to drown or be eaten by sharks.

The second moment came when after the ship finally docked in Jamaica that the owner of the ship filed an insurance claim to be reimbursed for the loss of “cargo” that was tossed overboard to conserve water that they still had plenty of. Make note that all the women, children and sick men were thrown overboard first, and were going to fetch less of a price at market.

There’s nothing like asking to get reimbursed for murdering people.

The petition for insurance payout back in England caught the eye of a free man and abolitionists, who began the heightened but slow battle to have slavery declared illegal in English lands. Spoiler alert, they eventually won their battle, but full freedom for all slaves happened half a century after the journey of the Zorg, and not that long before things came to a head in America, resulting in the Civil War.

Kara does a fantastic job of making something very difficult to read due to the nature of its content still very readable, and while taking some liberties in presuming day to day details, relies as heavily as possible on the limited resources available to provide the most factual accounting of the ship (including its actual name), the events that occurred on it, and the events that occurred afterwards as a result. You shouldn’t enjoy this book but you should read it to fill in the gaps of the history we’ve been told.

A complimentary copy of this book was provided by the publisher. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

A deep dive into the details of a confluence of poor management, greed, and murder that led to a disaster, which in turn triggered the work toward the abolition of slavery. Heavily researched with interesting detail, this book shares the court drama that turned the largely sleepy and evangelical movement in England into a moral campaign that spread to the US.

Sobering glimpse into the ugly realities of the Atlantic Ocean slave trade. The impressive amount of research Kara conducted provides reassurance of the validity of the tragic chain of events involving the Zorg. The avarice of the slave traders -- European, American, and African -- is laid bare. The suffering as well as fortitude of the enslaved people is on full display. The Zorg is an emotionally challenging look at how and why slave-holding nations became wealthy.

Extremely well researched book that was a very compelling read. It was filled with so much detail that must've taken forever to research and put together. I thought the first 2/3 of the book was a faster read, but in the end it all came together into a very cohisvie narative. The descriptions of the ports in Africa, the Zorg etc made it really easy to imagine the conditons that they sufferred through. I'm very glad that I was able to read this book about a subject that I haven't really thought or read about in decades.

The Zorg is every bit as terrifying and emotionally exhausting as you might expect. What surprised me most was the book’s unflinching depiction of the wide range of socioeconomic groups conscripted into the slave trade. While their experiences were nowhere near as horrific as those of the enslaved humans treated worse than livestock, the book makes it clear that many others also had little choice or ability to object, caught in a system that offered few avenues for escape or resistance.

The narrative structure, which jumps back and forth in time, is at times confusing and can feel whiplash-inducing. The build-up to “the fateful day” is so heavily foreshadowed and drawn out that, by the time the event is finally described, it feels a bit repetitive and loses some of its impact.

I appreciated the book’s theoretical explorations of daily life and personal experience. The experiences of the routine drudgery and conditions faced by sailors, slave traders, imprisoned slaves, and even the ship captains and their families left on land were interesting to explore. These perspectives add depth and nuance, making the historical realities feel immediate and personal.

The Zorg is a heart-wrenching and visceral but worthwhile read, offering a complex portrait of a brutal system and the people trapped within it.

From Pulitzer finalist and New York Times bestselling author, The Zorg by Siddharth Kara, A notorious slave ship incident that led to the abolition of slavery in the UK and sparked the US abolitionist movement. A piece of history that I had never heard about before and begs to be read.

This book explores the dark history of The Zorg, a slave ship commandeered by the British who chose to throw over 50 people overboard. The press the insurance claim generated from the situation helped lead to the abolition of slavery. As with anything dealing with the history of slavery, this was a heavy, tragic read. The author did a great job of showing what happened and why and the injustice of it all. I'd never heard of The Zorg before reading this, and I'm glad to see someone cared enough to research victims and tell their stories.

This is one of those books that sits heavy in your chest. The Zorg takes a real 18th-century tragedy—a Dutch slave ship commandeered by the British that chose, when rations got low, to throw more than fifty enslaved people overboard—and peels back the layers. Not just what happened, but why, and who benefited, and who disappeared in the retelling.

Siddharth Kara doesn’t write like a detached historian. He writes like someone grieving, someone furious. The care he puts into trying to recover the names and stories of people like Sia and Kojo hit me hard. He’s not trying to make it palatable. He’s not writing for a white comfort zone. The violence isn’t just physical—it’s legal, economic, ideological. And he draws those threads so clearly it’s impossible to look away.

I was struck by how much of this book is about how stories are buried. The crew got to tell their version. The courts debated “lost cargo” like the murdered were boxes of goods. And Kara shows exactly how that logic didn’t just survive—it shaped the foundation of modern capitalism. That’s part of what makes this more than just a historical account. It’s a reckoning.

That said, there were moments where the momentum slowed—mostly when the narrative zoomed way out to track broader legal impacts. I missed the close, intimate focus of the early chapters then. But even in those wider angles, Kara’s voice doesn’t lose urgency. He keeps pulling the reader back to the people at the heart of it all—the ones the system tried to erase.

This isn’t a “both sides” book. It’s a call to remember, and to refuse the lies that history tries to smooth over. It’s about justice, but not the courtroom kind. The kind that starts by naming the dead.

THE ZORG by Siddharth Kara

The author, Siddharth Kara, intentionally decided to leave field research to author a historical book about The Zorg.

The Zorg was a slave ship that was owned by the Dutch and bought by the British to uphold the slave trade in the late 1700’s. The slave ship left the UK and traveled the triangle of Africa to the Caribbean as was the preferred route when The Zorg began its passage [UK -West Africa-Caribbean]. This ocean route was well traversed for many decades.

Slaves from Africa boarded the ship to undergo various methods of abusive captivity to prevent escape; to deny the basic activities of daily life and to inflict contemptuous harm upon their humanity down to the cellular level.

The Zorg was underwritten by insurers of the Shipping industry in the UK. The insurance was enacted once a ship had its “cargo” aboard for the duration. The insured could not collect until they returned to the UK as there were percentages kept in reference to number of slaves that arrived in the Caribbean; any returning items and the new itinerary that was brought back for sale and distribution by the UK. The Zorg staff decided to include 400+ slaves for their journey, far exceeding other ships. This number is indicative of the inexperienced and somewhat greedy staff.

The author chose The Zorg because it is not as well known as other slave ships. It became a better-known ship when the crew defied "due process" and murdered slaves “attributable” to a supposedly short water supply and its inability to arrival at the port of destination several times.

The crew believed that their story of low water supply and lost direction would be enough to disavow them of their unscrupulous deeds. Upon return to the UK, the insurers would not provide the funds. There was a trial with little to no rebuke of the ship’s staff and no monetary compensation.

Kara follows The Zorg and her journey from the beginning to prosecution. He is faithful to his vision to gain recognition for the slaves and penalize the ship’s staff. A second trial would provide substantive judicial evidence to bring the anti-slavery organizations and slavery by ship to its end. This trial was not included in the docket.

Kara exposes the vicissitudes of The Zorg. The original trial coincides with the rise of Abolitionism. A letter is written and published anonymously that accounts for the actions of the staff of the Zorg.

This letter in the accompaniment of the rise of the Abolitionist Movement reinforces the idea that “revolution from below’ is a productive way to challenge the existing testimony and hegemony. Kara shows that these two events helped to undermine slavery and lead to its withdrawal and the withdrawal of insured funds provided by the shopping industry to underwrite the slave trade.

Kara connects events that are singular to The Zorg to generate a model of unethical conduct and murder and the societal movement to challenge slavery and the dominance of the shipping industry in the slave trade.

The author follows this journey through painstaking narrative repeatedly. This is a characteristic of Kara’s writing in his works where the subject matter is a crime against humanity. This repetition is one that is unnecessary. It can deter a reader from the text and/or numb a reader to the text.

Creepy history? Im here for it!

I love a good history story that doesn't put me to sleep. This was a great one!

As a lover of history, the information in this book was conveyed in an enjoyable way that didn't seem tedious to get its point across. I learned quite a lot about the triangle trade, but especially about the Zorg. I had never heard of this ship and its importance in doing away with slavery in Britain. It was fascinating to read excerpts from primary and secondary sources recounting the Zorg's fateful trip. I would love to read another book by this author as the writing was engaging and informative.

Really fascinating and well-researched account of a slave ship that, at the very least, started to change the conversation around slavery in England. The author did a good job of describing some of the conditions that the slaves were subject to without being gratuitous. There was sufficient attention given to some of the players that (particularly as someone raised in the US) that pushed for accountability and against the scourge of slavery in its entirety using The Zorg as a starting point. Highly recommended.

The Zorg is a highly readable, clearly well-researched but not overly dry or pedantic tale of that ship and the infamous voyage that led to its place in history. The Zorg is famous primarily for an insurance claim, where its owners sought financial compensation for the jettison of living people—the ship’s enslaved ‘cargo.’ The audacity of the case caught the attention of the British press and public and, Kara convincingly argues, contributed to the later abolition of slavery in the British empire.

Kara examines all sides of the Zorg’s famous voyage, from the various likely origins of its enslaved cargo, the curious economic position the American Revolutionary war had put its owners into, the history and strange appointment of its temporary captain and a passenger-turned-commander, and the various abolitionists who were inspired by the tragedy aboard the Zorg to improve the condition of Africans in the British empire.

I was particularly struck by how Kara took two unnamed enslaved persons, who figure extremely briefly in the first lieutenant’s account of the massacre, and used careful historical research to make conjectures about their probably lives and feelings, humanizing these victims of the slave trade’s violence and giving an imagined voice to those silenced by the archive. He names them Sia and Kojo. This project is clearly informed by the critical fabulation of Saidiya Hartman, and it shows.

I would recommend <i> The Zorg </i> to anyone with even a passing interest in British, American, and/or colonial history as it intersects with the slave trade, anyone at all interested in insurance law, and anyone interested in activist messaging and how to advocate for a moral cause in the press and the public imagination.

Another gripping seafaring history, but this one concerns the English slave trade and focuses on a truly vile incident in which 132 Africans were murdered in cold blood aboard a ship bound for the sugar plantations of Jamaica. The subject matter is upsetting and not for the faint of heart, but I was impressed with the way it was handled, not shying away from the brutality and inhumanity but also not dwelling on them in salacious detail. I ripped through the first half which sets the scene of the logistics of the slave trade and then lays out the circumstances of the Zorg's eventful journey, flagged a little during the courtroom scenes in which the ship's owner tried to claim insurance remunerations for the "lost property" and launched an inquiry which eventually (slowly, painfully, maddeningly) led to the abolition of the slave trade in England some fifty years later. But overall it's a great read and painstakingly researched. You WILL want to invent a time machine just so you can go back and murder Robert Stubbs over and over again in new and inventive ways.

A well thought out book that examines how Europeans began to wake up from their greed to see their heinous crimes. A side effect of the research also explores how easily the records of the events can change and shift drastically by small means. There were so many eye opening parts to the story I was not aware of. I found the book to be both informative and engaging. I plan to fold it into my lesson plan.

As good a telling as anticipated.
So much to absorb in the narration and history. Potent in its directness and in connecting the lost and missing dots of some devastating history. Great balance in direct telling and in working through tragic realities. Kara pulls, and cites, a ton of references and then does not hold back.

Definitely one to add to your shelves.
And spend a leisurely, immersive time taking in. Not a light one-- and should not be taken as so. A must-read for us all.

Really glad to have had the opportunity to have read this ARC from St. Martin's Press and Siddharth Kara. Thank you for the opportunity and, more importantly, the effort to pull this together for us all to take in.

This book really hit me. Part way through, I wished I had not chosen to read it, and then, I was so glad I did read it. This story needed telling. Through history class in school, we studied some of this content, but not to the point that this piece of history reveals, I recommend this book to ----everyone should read it!. I like this author's writing style, and method of connecting events. I do plan on reading more of his books.

“The slave trade was a nest of serpents, which would never have endured so long, but for the darkness in which they lay hid”

This book is an account of the slave ship, Zorg, and the role it had on exposing that darkness and depravity of the slave trade. The book works in two parts (1) the account of the Zorg, from it’s capture by the British, its repurposing to transport slaves from Africa to Jamaica, and the mass murder that occurred on that voyage, to (2) the legal aftermath and role it played in contributing to the abolition of the slave trade and slavery in England after those horrors were brought to the public.
The author presents a well researched account of the Zoey’s voyage and the murder of 132 slaves that occurred on board, while then documenting how this event served to expose the atrocities of the slave trade to the public at large. The book highlights the tireless work of abolitionists, including a former slave, who each deserve to be remembered for their contributions to justice. As you will learn from reading this book, it would take another 36 years of continued and tireless lobbying against slavery, after the Zorg reached the public conscience to the time that Britian finally outlawed slavery. However, the events that occurred on the Zorg were no doubt important to moving along the cause for freedom, because they were such a shocking exposure of the brutality of the slave trade.
I very much appreciate authors like this who can provide easy to read and engaging historical accounts of lesser celebrated figures and events. Those abolitionists highlighted in this book deserve to be remembered, and these are stories that we should not forget. Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for providing this book, I highly recommend it to all.

I thought when I began the Zorg I was going to read a book about sailing. I had no idea that it was really about man’s inhumanity towards man. This is a difficult read. Africans capturing Africans who in turn sell these prisoners to Europeans who funneled them into the slave trade is depressing and all too real in this extremely hard to read book. To think that Stubs, the passenger captain, was responsible for jettisoning 132 humans alive into the ocean is hard to fathom. It reminds me of the horror of the Doors song, Horse Latitudes. The author’s investigation into the legal ramifications of this story is brilliant! He did an amazing job bringing this to light. It’s still hard to believe that after the trial was over, the slave trade flourished and produced a huge amount of income for the British empire…!