The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea

HAUNT ^{SIOBHAN CARROLL}

MAY 31, 1799

INDIAN OCEAN

17˚10′N, BY RECKONING 9˚W OFF CAPE NEGRAIS

Swift did not think about the Zong. The Minerva was a different kind of ship, plagued by different kinds of misery. Her hull, for one. Swift did not like the feel of the boards beneath the waterline. Leaning over the jollyboat’s gunnel, he plunged his arm deeper into the ocean, seeking further damage.

“How’s she fare?”

Swift shook the water off his arm. “A stern leak between wind-and-water,” he said. “’Tis an ill wound for an old ship to bear.” He glanced at the sun, a yellow smear in a haze of gray. A storm was brewing.

“And her hull wants copper-plating,” Decurrs stated. An able seaman, he heard what Swift did not say. “We must move quickly. Pass him the oakum, boy.”

There were three of them in the jollyboat: Decurrs to manage the oars, Swift to patch, and the watch-boy to assist and learn. But, like her mistress, the Minerva’s jollyboat was ill-provided for the sea, and the boy had been bailing since they’d launched her. Swift reached for the oakum himself.

“Mind how the patch goes,” Decurrs said to the boy, as Swift stuffed the sticky fibers between the boards and laid over the tarred canvas. “When the waves surge high, the oakum will swell. The leak will suck the canvas inwards, stopping her mouth.” Decurrs raised the oar to fend off the hull. The jollyboat knocked against the ship anyway, a jolt that shuddered into their bones.

“Aye,” the boy said. He’d left off bailing and was staring intently at the horizon. “Look,” he said suddenly. “To starboard. ‘A something in the sky!’

Swift wiped algae scum onto his trousers. “Hand me the sheet-lead,” he said.

“A haunt!” The boy said. “It follows us!”

“The sheet-lead,” Swift snapped, “and quick about it.”

But it was Decurrs who handed Swift the gray sheet of metal and who helped him nail it to the Minerva’s hull. Like Swift, Decurrs did not scan the horizon for phantoms. He kept his eyes trained on his hands, on the work that could save or kill them.

“The Nightmare Life-in-Death,” the boy breathed. “Just as the ballad said.”

“The Devil take your ghosts.”

Swift ran his hand over the edge of the sheet-lead, making sure the patch lay flush. There was something in the corner of his eye. A flicker of white.

Back aboard ship, Swift was taken aside by Captain Maxwell. “How’s she fare?”

Swift rubbed his chin thoughtfully. His hands were still gummy with the oakum pine-tar that gave sailors their name. It smelled like a distant forest, like a place he’d never see.

“The patch will hold,” Swift said. “But if the seas run high again…”

Maxwell stroked his beard. Swift could see the man considering his charge. The Minerva was a three-masted ship with eleven passengers aboard, forty-eight crew, and a cargo of teak bound for Madras. To turn back to Rangoon would delay the shipment by weeks, and the Company must have its profits.

I should not have shipped on the Minerva, Swift thought. I should have waited for a better berth.

“The coast is a lee shore,” the Captain said, “and her waters are shallow. We will make for Madras.” He coughed, wetly, against his arm. Then he said, awkwardly: “The serang says one of the Lascars saw… something in the swells. Did you happen to spy anything? In the waves?”

Near the windlass, Decurrs was scolding the boy. The boy protested vigorously, pointing toward the horizon.

“No, sir,” Swift said. “We saw nothing. Nothing at all.”

The gale blew into their teeth on the first of June, a choking whirl of greenish mist. “She’s taking on water,” came the cry from below. Swift clung close to the windward rigging of the mainmast as he climbed, flattening his body against the damp ropes. Far below him, the deck heaved with the rising swells.

On the yard he pressed his belly against the hard beam and stepped sideways onto the shivering footrope. It was his stomach, now, that bore his weight as his hands clawed in the heavy canvas of the mainsail. Beside him, two other able seamen did the same, rushing to tie up the ship’s largest sail before the winds rose.

A cry rang down the yard. One of the Chinese sailors had straightened up, pointing at something behind the curtain of rain. Swift hastily turned back to his reef knot, even as the Chinese sailor straightened further, pressing his weight back on the footrope at the very moment the ship rolled. A flurry of motion, and the man fell out of Swift’s vision.

A crash below told Swift the sailor had slammed into the deck. “A kinder death than drowning,” the old salts said. In the rising wind the Chinese sailor’s loose canvas flapped like the wing of an angry bird.

“Belay that sail!”

A Lascar slid sideways on the yard to take his shipmate’s place. The Indian sailor worked quickly, his eyes intent on the task. His own reef knots tied, Swift pulled himself back to the standing rigging and slid back to the frenzy of the deck. The Chinese sailor’s body rested amidships. His fellow seamen stepped around him, their eyes on their assigned lines.

Swift leaned over the man—a young fellow, his eyes wide, staring at the sky. A red stain spread beneath his body, mingling with the wash on the deck.

“He saw a ghost,” said the second belay, eyes on his line. “That’s what he screamed. A sei-gweilo in the waves.”

“Belay that nonsense.” Swift ran his palm over the Chinese sailor’s eyes, doing what he could to close them. When he raised his hand a half-moon of white showed through, as though the man’s spirit studied Swift from the other side. Swift felt a chill that had nothing to do with his sodden clothing, or the rising gale.

“Pumps in full labor,” said a voice. It was Manbacchus, one of the Lascars. “She takes water.”

Swift felt the heaviness in his gut, what the old dogs called the “sinking feeling.” He hoped it would not come to that.

Crouched in the forecastle, the starboard watch discussed the rumors. The sails were close-reefed and the leak patched, but still the Minerva took on water. They said the bilge smelled almost sweet. A bad sign.

“The Lascars say there is a haunt that follows our wake,” Holdfast Muhammad said. Though he hailed from London, Holdfast had the tongue, and often he passed the whisper from the other Mussulmen aboard. “They say it pressed A-kou.”

“There is a haunt,” their mess-boy said proudly. “I saw it, when we were in the jollyboat.”

“You saw a cloud,” Swift said sourly. “For I too was in that jollyboat and I saw no such thing.”

But the tide of conversation was already moving past him.

“I saw a haunt off Ireland once,” said Glosse, the third mate. “I’m no Frenchman to turn tail and run, but I tell you boys, I was damnably scarified.”

“You saw a haunt and lived to speak of it? You’re a lucky man, Glosse,” Decurrs said.

“That I am, boys.” Glosse laughed. “A jack tar with the devil’s own luck.”

“It could be the Dutchman that follows us,” mused the fresh-faced sailor they called Pretty Pol. “Him that cursed the name of God. He cannot put into port now, but must sail the seas endlessly, eating only red iron and gall. He seeks out all the old sinners of the sea, to press them for his crew.”

“It could be the Mystery,” the boy said. “The slave ship where the Negroes bound the captain to the mast, and forced him to sail ’til the end of time.”

“That’s the Wake,” said Pol. “The Mystery was the slave ship turned into a rock, to stand to this day as a warning. One of its crew was a magician. He killed the Negroes first, and then the sailors, and last he bound the captain to the foremast, and forced him to stand watch ’til the Devil came to claim him.”

The forecastle had grown quieter at the mention of slave ships. Decurrs watched the boards, Holdfast Muhammad, and Glosse. Swift knew then that they’d all worked the Trade.

“Warning of what?” The boy was deaf to the silence swelling around him. “And why would a tar kill all aboard?”

“Perhaps it was a Negro that was meant,” Cobb said, thinking aloud. “For plantation men sometimes call Negroes blacke, on account of their complexion.”

Pol, whose own deep tan had been put down as blacke in the ship’s log, scoffed. “’Twas one of us, a tar, who told me that tale,” he said. “And ’twas one of us, a tar, that sunk that ship. But he was a Yorkshireman.”

“Ah,” Cobb said. Everyone knew it was unlucky to sail with Yorkshiremen.

The boy’s brow remained furrowed. “But why would a tar kill all aboard? On a slave ship? If—”

“You’ve not sailed under many captains,” Glosse said. The crew laughed the way men do when they’re eager to change the subject.

“What do you think, Swift?” said Holdfast Muhammad. “Does your patch still hold?” It was telling, Swift thought, that the man would now rather talk of leaks than haunt-ships.

“She holds,” Swift said. “The Minerva has life in her yet.”

The men settled under the forecastle, listening to the drum of rain above. Swift rubbed his scarred hands together for warmth. He did not think about the Zong.

For three days, they labored constantly at pumping. Even the Gunner, who’d normally be excused from such work, turned his blackened hands to the pump. Sailors like Swift, who could handle carpenters’ tools, did their best to repair the pumps as they choked with the sand-ballast drifting free in the water-logged hold.

“Is there else you can do to stop the water?” Captain Maxwell was regretting his decision to sail without a carpenter, Swift could tell, but it was too late now.

“Not in this sea,” Swift said. “We must get to port, if we’re to save her.”

The captain nodded, and looked over the rain-misted deck to where passengers huddled—a small group of women, merchants, and servants, European, Indian, and Malay, seeking relief from cramped quarters.

“So be it,” he said. “We’ll set what sail we can and make for the coast.” Suddenly the captain’s eyes widened. “What’s that?”

Alarmed, Swift squinted his eyes against the rain. At the rear of the ship a small light wandered erratically up the mizzen mast. For a moment Swift thought it was a man carrying a candle, and he was filled with anger at whatever fool would bring an open flame into the rigging. Then he saw how the flame moved. Lithely. As though it were alive.

“St. Elme’s fire,” one of the tars murmured. “Quick, mark where she lands.”

“Best get below decks now,” Captain Maxwell advised his passengers, his voice betraying a hint of strain. “The wind is picking up.”

The flame flew suddenly to the middle of the ship, and soared to the top of the main mast. It hovered there, about a foot above the spar.

“The Supero Santo. It guides the haunt to us!”

“It predicts how many will drown,” a tar corrected.

“If atop, and only one, it means a storm will soon be over. We should all bid it goodspeed.”

The flame broke into three pieces and sank toward the deck. Sailors recoiled, scrambling to get out of the way of the spirit-fire. The corpusants hovered over the Minerva’s dark boards, still and silent.

“Three a-deck,” the captain muttered, almost under his breath. “That’s no good omen.”

Swift’s mess-boy edged forward, studying the triangle of flames with a cat’s intensity. Decurrs yanked the boy back and cuffed him on the ear.

“Oh look,” one of the European passengers said. “There’s more.”

Horrified, Swift followed the passengers’ gaze over the side of the vessel, to where a hundred or so of the tiny flames reeled and spun. Beneath the corpusants, the ocean burned like witch’s oil, green and blue.

“Allahumma rahmataka arju,” prayed one of the Mussulmen, “fala takilni ila nafsi tarfata ’ain…”

“Wish them goodspeed,” the captain ordered, his voice thick. “And see to your lines.”

“Have you ever seen that?” The boy asked as his messmates hurried to their stations. “Saint Elme’s fire? And so many of them? What does it mean?”

Swift had no answer. Around him, he could feel the wind rising.

“I’ve drowned no cat and killed no albatross,” Glosse said in the mess. Above the starboard watch’s heads the second day of the gale howled and roared. “I have whistled down no wind. Yet death-fires reel about our rigging, and the damned follow our wake, sending good tars to their deaths.”

“It’s not the haunt-ship that made A-kou lose his footing,” said Holdfast. “The Lascars say he had hungry eyes.”

“It was the haunt-ship that killed him,” Glosse said firmly. “And it’ll kill us all until we give it what it wants.”

Swift’s throat was dry. He wanted no part in this.

“And what does it want?” Decurrs said sharply. “Have you hailed that vessel, Glosse? Have you taken a message from the dead?”

“I am no fool, Decurrs, to hail a haunt. No,” Glosse said. “In dreams I heard it so. My lost brother came to me last night, his mouth full of seaweed and his shoes full of sand. In his hands he held a copy of our crew’s list, burning and smoldering. As I looked closer I saw one of those names afire, and knew then it was the Jonah who’d cursed us.”

“Whose name was it?” The boy sounded a bit too eager.

“If I had my letters I could tell you,” Glosse said. “But I’m no reading man. We have a Jonah aboard, and the haunt-ship wants him. That’s all I need to know.”

The rain drummed above their heads. The mess-table, suspended from the ceiling, creaked on its chains.

“And what do you wish us to do, Glosse?” Decurrs’s words jabbed the air. “Hunt down a Lascar to hang? For so they did on your last berth, or so I’m told.” There was a glitter in Decurrs’s eye. He was one of those who thought the captain had made a poor choice in Glosse, that the position of third mate should have gone to a more senior seaman.

The old fear thrilled through Swift. He shook his head warningly at Decurrs. Glosse was a mate now, after all, and had the power of the lash.

Holdfast Muhammad looked up from the swinging mess-table, his face grave. “Is that true, Glosse? I’ll pass no whisper for you if it’s so.”

Glosse waved his hand. “That was a different matter,” he said. “A theft.”

“The captain would not look kindly on you if you stir mutiny among the Lascars,” Decurrs said. His eyes met Swift’s, and Swift knew Decurrs expected him to speak up, to draw on his authority as the other old hand in the mess. Swift dropped his gaze.

Glosse forced a smile on his face. “Now, now, fellows,” he said. “What’s this talk of mutiny? I ask only that you keep your ears and eyes open, that’s all. “’Tis no more than good tars should do.”

Tension loomed around them, and then the boy spoke up. “Perhaps the haunt is a mutiny ship,” he said helpfully. “Like the Eagle.”

“Perhaps it’s your arse,” Cobb said. The men laughed. But Glosse gave Decurrs a sidelong glance and Swift knew it was not over between them.

Three days later, the gale winds still blew, and the ship pitched low and heavy. The waves ran mountains high. Swift, his arms numb with fatigue, slipped across the wet deck to his station. They would keep the Minerva before the wind, with bare poles.

At three bells, a sailor rushed up from below to shout in the captain’s ear. Someone else took up the cry, the words straining over the roar of the wind. “Water’s reached the lower deck.”

Captain Maxwell kept his eyes on the yards. “Keep to your stations,” he shouted, but his words were muffled by the gale.

The Minerva veered. Lashed though he was, Swift had to hook his hand around a wooden cleat to steady his footing. Looking toward the main mast, he saw to his horror that the reefed sail had come loose. One of the knots had been poorly tied—perhaps the dead sailor’s, perhaps Swift’s own—and now they might die for it.

The Minerva lurched as the loose sail caught the wind. Captain Maxwell, to his credit, did not hesitate. “Stand by to cut away the main mast!”

The sailor closest to the axe stood stupefied, his gaze transfixed by the terrible swell of the sail. Holdfast Muhammad undid his rope-anchor and slid his way over to the axe. Balancing like a man on a tightrope, he carried it over the tilting deck to the tallest mast on the ship. Some of the landsmen moved to join him, machetes in hand. The sharp crashes of their blows were muted by the deafening wind.

Swift could not help but turn to watch the mainmast shudder. After an age the mast sagged sideways, and with agonizing slowness tilted into the ocean. Such was the wind-sound that he could not hear it fall, but he saw the mast drop, and saw also the terrifying snarl of rope and timbers that moved with it.

“No,” Swift said. They had not cut away the rigging properly. He ducked as the stays tore loose. Wood splintered. Heavy wooden blocks careened across the deck.

The captain shouted orders into the wind, but no one could hear him. Horrified, Swift watched the ocean rise up behind the larboard gunwale. Distracted, the helmsman had let the ship broach to. Now, broadside to the wind, the Minerva’s deck tilted into a wall of water.

The wave smashed across the deck. Swift grabbed hold of a cleat, struggling to keep his footing as warm seawater drenched him. The ship’s bell clanged faintly, desperately. Abandon ship.

A Malay woman staggered out of a hatchway. Swift stretched a hand to her, grabbing her by the wrist.

“Help me,” he shouted to his fellow sailors. He could not hear his own words above the wind-roar, but Decurrs, clinging to the gunwale, nodded. Together they managed to pull the confused woman, her heavy skirts darkening with water, back to the quarterdeck. Swift looked for a stray sheet with which to lash her to the standing rigging, but the water on the deck seemed to be washing ever higher.

Swift pulled the woman to the windward side of the mizzen shrouds and showed her how to grasp the thick black ropes from the sides. “Keep a vertical rope between your legs,” he yelled in her ear, and stepped onto the horizontal ratlines.

Together, he, the woman and Decurrs climbed up, away from the ocean. He could hear faint screams from below. The lower decks were almost fully submerged—one or two of the passengers must be searching for air against the ceiling. It would not last long.

Captain Maxwell clung to the standing rigging above their heads. He nodded upwards, gesturing that the woman should enter the crow’s nest. They passed her silently through the lubber’s hole, then followed themselves. A collection of passengers clung to each other on the firmer footing of the crow’s nest, limbs slipping and flailing as the ship rolled. Swift kept his arm locked around a shroud, as did Decurrs.

After a time, the wind died. Cries and prayers drifted up from the rigging, calls to God and to Allah. The relentless wash of waves surrounded them.

“How many do you think are clinging to this mast?” Decurrs said in his ear. “Look down.” Swift did and saw a muddle of bodies. Thirty, maybe forty souls clung to the mizzen, dangling above the seethe. If the mast collapsed, they would all perish.

Swift followed Decurrs down, climbing recklessly, hand over hand. Pulling out his belt-knife, he sawed at the sling-ropes that bound the mizzen yard to the mast. Beside him Decurrs did the same. The yard arm sagged, then dropped away, releasing its weight with a flurry of sail. Below them, someone screamed.

They rested in the rigging, swaying back and forth in the glowering night. It seemed the Minerva would not sink; this sometimes happened when water had covered the initial leak, and the ship carried a wood cargo. But she could not sail, either. The Minerva was not a ship anymore, and not yet a wreck. Something in-between.

Dawn cracked the sky, but brought no hope with it. The sea ran mountains high, raising and plummeting the remains of the Minerva into the troughs of its waves. Men and women clung to wet rigging, while the spray of wind-driven foam whirled about them. Most held to the mizzen mast rigging; a few sailors near the front of the ship had managed to scramble up the foremast. The stump of the main mast had offered no purchase to anyone. Somehow, through all this, the ship stayed afloat, though its upper deck was going to pieces, a strew of boards and ropes. The Minerva seemed to have found her level. She might float like this for many days, Swift realized.

Swift climbed up to the crow’s nest to check on the passengers. A European woman on the mizzen-top was shivering; she was clad only in a shift and straw petticoat. Swift offered her his jacket.

“Thank you, sir,” she said. “My name is Mrs. Newman. I am much obliged.”

Captain Maxwell, his collar turned up, stared at the waves. Looking down at the swamped ship, Swift racked his brains, searching for something that could save them. The jollyboat was gone, dragged beneath the waves. Perhaps they could fashion a raft? The quarterdeck beneath the mizzen was bare when the waves receded, but the violence of the sea was such that nobody dared climb down to her, for fear of being carried away.

“Someone will find us, surely,” said Mrs. Newman.

“Oh aye,” Captain Maxwell said. “They surely will.” He did not sound convinced. The man kept staring at the ocean, his face set. Swift did not like his look.

“I will go below,” Swift said, “and see if there is anything useful in the wash.” He said it as much to the passengers as to the captain; they should know that things were being done. But as he climbed down the rigging he felt despair roll over him. They were clinging to the remains of two masts above the remains of a ship that could no longer sail. They were at the mercy of wind and current now, in the Bay of Bengal, in monsoon season.

He climbed around the shivering sailors and landsmen until the rigging grew too crowded to pass. Embracing the shrouds, he watched the flotsam that swept to and fro across the quarterdeck, hoping to spy something useful, knowing that even if he did, the waves were too high to fetch it.

Resigned, Swift climbed back to the upper rigging. He rested beside the Gunner, who had taken up position below the crow’s nest.

“Do you think it a sin to eat a man?” the Gunner said.

The question made Swift’s scalp crawl. Swift had had little to do with the officer during the voyage. It was pirates and Indian Ocean slavers the Gunner watched for. And mutiny, of course.

“By God, sir,” Swift said. “It will not come to that.”

“I’ve been wrecked before,” the Gunner replied. “It will come.” He rested his chin on a ratline and closed his eyes.

The wind died. The sun stood overhead, vertical and bloody. Still the Minerva did not sink.

Swift’s throat was beginning to ache with thirst. He fumbled for a still-damp corner of his shirt. Tilting it to his mouth, he succeeded in squeezing free a drop or two.

“This is how it starts,” the Gunner said, watching him. His eyes were sunken and bloodshot, a sure sign of thirst. “When we are driven to drink salt water, that’s when destruction comes.”

“You should not talk so much,” Swift said. He realized as soon as he spoke that he’d left off the obligatory “sir.” But the man did not deserve it, and he could not whip Swift now. “You’ll scare the women.”

The Gunner shrugged to show it did not matter, and lay back against the shrouds.

“We could dip our coats,” said a voice from below. Glancing down, Swift recognized his mess-boy huddled between two Lascars. He was surprised at his own surge of relief: he was glad the boy had lived.

The boy said again, in a small voice: “Captain Inglefield, in his Narrative, said he dipped his coat in the water and lay against it, so the water seeped into his flesh and left the salt on his skin.”

“Is such a thing possible?” A tar, dug into a lower ratline, sounded doubtful.

“Let us try,” Swift said. He did not say, “It will at least keep us busy.” Anything was better than lying endlessly against this swaying grid of ropes, thinking on death. He was a sailor: when Death came calling, he wanted it to catch him doing something useful.

A sailor donated his jacket. They fastened a rope belt to it and passed it down the ladder, so the lowest man could dip it into the ocean before passing it back up. It was a laborious, careful task on a swaying mast—exactly the thing to occupy a man and keep his thoughts from dreadful tales.

The women, however, had no such action to take. When Swift clambered up to the crow’s nest, he saw Mrs. Newman weeping, the other women staring straight ahead. Their skin had begun to blister in the heat. Swift passed the wet coat to the women first, and showed them how to daub their arms with it. Mrs. Newman moved slowly, as if in a dream. “Take your time,” Swift said, as kindly as he could.

“How bad is it?” she asked. “Truly.”

“We’re still afloat,” Swift said. “Perhaps a passing ship will spy us. Indeed,” he lied, “I thought I heard a gun last night. We are not the only ship in this sea.”

“Aye,” muttered a sailor below, “but I’d rather we were alone than with that ghost ship alongside.”

Mrs. Newman’s nostrils flared. She looked for all the world like a small animal trembling inside a Rangoon market cage. “What is he speaking of? What does he mean?”

“It is nothing,” Swift said. “Just tar’s talk.” He could have kicked the man.

“Don’t you worry about her,” the Gunner said as Swift retook his position on the standing rigging. “She’ll outlast us all. Her type always does.”

Night descended on them like a cloud. Though the weather was warm, Swift found himself shivering. Now that the wind had died, the groans and cries of terrified people surrounded him. The Zong, he thought, but he was not there; this was a different ship.

Swift woke with a start. Something—a feather? A wing?—had brushed his cheek. He thrust the bird away before it could peck out his eyes.

“Forgive me, Mr. Swift,” a woman’s voice said. Looking up, he saw the faint outline of Mrs. Newman’s face peering at him. A strip of fabric—the coat?—dangled in front of her. “I only thought—Is that a sail?”

Hope surged through Swift as he adjusted himself on the ropes, trying to get a better look at the ocean behind him. Something stirred in the haze of darkness, something pale and large.

“A sail!” came an exultant voice from the forecastle. “A sail to starboard.”

The shape turned. For one wonderful moment Swift saw it clearly, a square-rigger full to the wind.

“Does anyone have a pistol? A gunshot’s what we need.”

Another sailor hallooed into the wind.

Decurrs started forward in his ropes. “Do not hail that ship!”

“What?” Now Swift was fully awake. He glanced back at the vessel. This time he saw what Decurrs saw: the way the clouds slitted their gaze through the ship’s sails, the way her edges blurred with light.

“Do not hail that ship!” Decurrs shouted. From the foresail he heard a shout in Malay; angry voices rose from below. Others were realizing the danger.

And yet the hallooing man would not stop. Perhaps he was a landsman; perhaps he was desperate enough to not care about the consequences.

“Ahoy!” the man yelled. Bare-chested, he leaned out from the mizzen, his shirt fluttering in his hand as an improvised flag. “We are here!”

The man’s body flew away from the rigging. His arms and legs bewildered themselves in the air as he fell into darkness. The sailor who’d pushed him leaned back in, to the congratulations of his fellows.

“Too late,” Decurrs whispered.

Swift raised his gaze. The ghost ship was turning their way, her cobweb sails filling with impossible wind. Her whiteness was a loathsome thing: the white of a bone pushed through the skin; the white of a shark’s tooth as it eats a man alive.

“What is that?” Mrs. Newman said in wonder. Her words called Swift back to himself.

“Look away, madam,” he said. “Do not gaze upon that ship. Your soul depends on it.” He turned his face to the shrouds. The moaning, heaving noise of the wreck faded into a new kind of silence, in which Swift could hear only the breathing of the wind and the waves.

Light moved over the rigging. He squeezed his eyes shut.

In the distance someone wailed. The rigging trembled, then stilled.

After a long quiet the Malay maid spoke, her voice traveling far in the stillness. “Ship gone,” she said, and added, “It took.”

In the afternoon, a group of men from the lower rigging tried to swim over to the foremast, seeking a less-crowded position. The waves crashed over them. Four of them struggled through the spray to the mast and clambered up to the foretop. One of them looked like his messmate, Holdfast. A shout drew Swift’s attention to one of the less lucky ones, a man whose head now bobbed far outside the ship, drifting further and further away. Soon Swift lost sight of him altogether.

The tars had no shoes to eat. They’d worked the Minerva barefoot, in the Lascar style. Some tried gnawing the leather on the rigging but soon laid off, declaring it too bitter to be endured. Instead they made do with scraps of canvas and pieces of lead, which they passed up and down the line.

“You should not eat that,” Mrs. Newman croaked as Swift took up a piece of lead the size of a coin. “It’s poisonous.”

Swift put the lead into his mouth. It tasted like nothing; like the air itself. He sucked on it, enjoying the temporary sensation of moisture on his tongue.

“The haunt,” someone said wearily. “It’s here.”

The sun was still in the sky, and yet there the ghost ship was, a miasma against the waves. It approached silently, the way Swift had seen sharks approach a woman struggling in the water. He turned his head away.

But this time he saw.

White tendrils slashed out from the haunt, ropes that were not ropes. Some twisted around limp bodies—dead passengers, Swift thought, or the tars who’d drowned earlier—but one arced past him, right past him, and snatched a man from the mizzentop. Swift’s last glimpse of Captain Maxwell was of the man staring straight in front of him, too terrified to scream.

Below them someone did scream, loud and long. The ropes under Swift’s hands pulled taut. For a dreadful moment he thought the entire rigging might go, ripped free by this man fighting for his life, but then ropes sagged back in place. Behind him, the man’s scream faded into a strange and awful distance.

“That is no ship,” Mrs. Newman said in a small voice.

Swift chewed his piece of lead to powder, and swallowed it down.

“Did you smell it?” Decurrs asked.

Swift was caught off guard. “The haunt?” The old salts said that ghosts had a smell, a stench by which a lore-steeped sailor would know them. “I did not catch it.”

“I did,” Decurrs said. “It smelled like sick and pus swept together on a hot deck. It smelled like a hold full of shit and fear. I know that smell. So do you.”

Swift felt ill. “I smelled nothing,” he said.

“I think I saw her netting, when she came about,” Decurrs said.

Swift pressed his forehead against the ratline. He could feel the rough fibers of the rope cutting into his skin.

“You think she’s a slaver?” The words surprised him; Swift had not thought to speak, not out loud.

“Aren’t most ghost ships slavers? They are in the tales.” Decurrs leaned forward to eye the snoring Gunner, then lowered his voice.

“I knew you’d been in the Trade by the Guinea scars on your legs,” he said. “Aye, and by the scars on your back. You sailed under a hard man?”

“They’re all hard men,” Swift said.

“Aye, but some are harder than the Devil himself.” Decurrs leaned into his shroud, his face in shadow. “Were you articled? I was. Woke up on the tavern floor with a crimp holding a paper in front of me. He said I’d signed, so what could I do?”

There was a sour taste at the back of Swift’s throat. “I was in debtors’ prison,” he said. “I took the Guinea door.”

“A hard choice,” Decurrs said.

“Not for me,” Swift said. “Not then.” He remembered how Bessie’s hands had twisted as the captain described the offer—Swift’s debt paid, if only he’d agree to sail aboard a slaver. And he remembered watching Emily clutching the bent twig she called a doll, thinking how tired he was of watching his child play in a prison cell.

Swift was no fool. He’d expected to die on that voyage, as most slave-ship sailors did—from disease or from the captain’s beatings. But with his debt paid, his family would be free. He had not known then, how his debt would accumulate onboard; that it would be not one voyage, but two, then three, that he would owe. Bessie and Emily were long dead now, but Swift’s debt was still alive, out there somewhere, looking for him.

“Beware, beware, the Bight of Benin,” Decurrs said. “There's one comes out for forty goes in. Well, we’re the ones who came out. Now here we are. And here’s the haunt-ship come to collect.”

The Gunner laughed. The sound jolted them both; they had not realized the man was awake. “You think the haunt comes for you? How fine you are, in all your sins. Me, I have drawn lots to eat men. I have cracked a boy’s leg open and sucked the marrow from it. I have heard this talk before, of curses and Providence, aye, and eaten the flesh of those who talked so.”

Decurrs shifted away from the man. He climbed downwards, not caring that he had to contort himself around the other bodies on the rigging. Swift followed, but he could still hear the Gunner talking after them.

“Here’s your truth,” the Gunner called. “The haunt comes like the wind comes. You fools think it comes for your sins because you want to believe there’s justice in the world. There isn’t any.”

“He is mad,” Decurrs said when they reached the lower rigging. “We will all go mad here.”

They hung on the ropes and watched the deck below. The sea was calmer now. A few sailors had left the rigging and were trying the quarterdeck, staggering about on the wet boards.

We should get the passengers below, to stretch their legs while they can, Swift thought. We should build a raft.

“Glosse was right,” Decurrs said after a time. “We must have a reckoning.”

The sailors had come, finally, to speaking of the Trade.

“The Nancy’s captain stood the other Negroes on deck so they could watch. He had lines tied under the arms of the ringleaders. He ordered them lowered over the side,” said Cobb.

“Go on,” said Glosse.

The remnants of the starboard watch had gathered on the abandoned crow’s nest for their consultation. Far below, passengers and sailors tested out the limits of the quarterdeck. As third mate, Glosse stood as judge on the Minerva. As far as they knew, he was the only officer left on the wreck, save the Gunner, whose strange calm they all suspected.

Cobb looked away, as though scanning the horizon. Swift knew his gaze had gone somewhere else.

“When the water turned red, he gave the order to hoist them up. The sharks had taken No. 3’s legs off at the knees. I thought she was already dead. But when we lowered her again, she started screaming. So I suppose she had only fainted.”

“How long did it take?” Glosse was precise. It was important to focus on the facts, in such matters.

“I think an hour before all three were dead. The captain cut the ropes on the last one; it took too long.”

Glosse nodded, satisfied.

“Did you not protest the order?” the boy exclaimed. How he had maintained his capacity for horror, Swift did not know.

Cobb shrugged, his sunken eyes flat and hard, like sea-washed stones.

“Who else?” said Glosse, ignoring the boy’s question. “Not the usual things. We all know them.” He paused. Swift wondered if the boy could hear everything that lurked in those words, but he stared bewildered; Pretty Pol’s face was closed. This was a current that flowed past them, the sailors who had not worked the Trade.

“And what have you done, Glosse?” Decurrs’s voice sliced knife-sharp. Glosse scratched his chin. Like the rest of them, his blistered skin had begun to tear, hanging off in dead strips.

“I’ve lashed and pickled,” Glosse said. “Aye, I’ve done the usual things. But not to the children. Not like some.” Decurrs blinked and looked away.

“Did you not pass the whisper?” The boy was still incensed at Cobb’s story. “Mr. Clarkson and his ’bolitionists are forever combing the docks, asking tars to testify. You could have passed the whisper at least.”

“Aye,” Cobb said sourly. “And didn’t some Bristol boys club Mr. Clarkson and try to feed him to the sea? When the owners pay good coin to kill Cambridge gentlemen, what do you think the chances are for a common tar like me?”

“That Negro seaman, Equiano, him what wrote the narrative,” the boy said stubbornly. “He passes whispers for tars. He passed the whisper on the Zong, even—”

Swift’s blood drummed in his ears.

“—and they haven’t killed him yet.”

“I had a shipmate who passed the whisper once,” Decurrs said. His voice had gone low and strange. “Listen,” he said, fixing them with his gaze. “There was a ship. She sailed under a hard man. A Negro caused trouble in the hold. No. 37. So this Captain Bremmer—” Decurrs’s face contorted for a moment, as though he would like to spit, but thought better of it. “This Bremmer, he ordered the man whipped and pickled with salt water. You know,” he said to Glosse, “the usual things. But this captain, he went further.

“He hung the man up on deck, and tortured him with thirst. He would give the Negro no water, he said—though that number was strong and would have fetched a good price in Antigua—he’d give him no water but urine, and no food but shit to eat. The captain’s own shit.”

Decurrs gave a strangled laugh. “The captain sent his cabin boy to fetch it, but when he made the boy go—a boy younger than you, mind,” he said to their mess-boy, “eleven years old he was, and new to the Trade. He didn’t know how it is,” he added to Swift.

Swift nodded, hoping Decurrs would fall silent, knowing he wouldn’t. There was a kind of madness that came upon slave-ship sailors sometimes, a fever in their blood. Some blamed the disease on the African air, but it was more than that, and Decurrs, blasted raw by sun and wind, had it now. It was this fever and not courage that sent tars into the courts to testify, knowing they’d be killed in the alley afterwards, knowing their wife and mother would be brutalized on the streets. It was this rage, Swift knew, that sent a tar to point his hand in court, which made him into a monstrous revenant that was not a man at all, but some dead-alive thing returned from the sea. A witness.

“He didn’t know,” Decurrs repeated. “And he refused the order.” He wiped his face with his skinny hand, considering. “The captain had him flogged and brined, of course. Sixty lashes, but it wasn’t enough. He dragged the boy up the deck and put a plank over him. He ordered us to walk on it,” he said dispassionately. “He stamped on his breast so we could hear his bones splinter. The boy’s shit came out of him, and the captain forced it down his throat. Then he hung the boy up on the mainmast. He gave him and the Negro the urine to drink, and forbade us all to bring water or food to them.

“For three days they hung there, while we worked. I don’t think anyone dared try to give them water. I know I didn’t. The captain gave the boy eighteen lashes each day, even as he died. When I sewed him into his sail, his flesh felt like jelly to the touch. His body was purple and swollen huge. You could not tell it was a child anymore. The sharks took them both.”

Decurrs glared at them. “I did not pass the whisper, but my shipmate did. Fourteen years old, he was. They found his body floating by the docks. I said nothing. I said nothing for all my days sailing the Triangle. I said nothing after. Only the cabin boy spoke up. And my shipmate. Children. Only them.” Decurrs rubbed his chin again. “I think you know what must be done,” he said to Glosse.

Glosse shifted uncomfortably. Decurrs’s story seemed to have taken the wind out of his sails. “Is there anyone else?”

There was a ship, Swift thought. He could feel the words in his mouth. She was called the Zong.

“There’s no one else,” Ducurrs said, cutting off anything Swift might say. He stood up abruptly, wobbling on his weakened legs. Swift reached out to steady him.

“No,” Decurrs said, and patted Swift’s hand. Swift released his grip.

“Shipmates,” Decurrs said sternly. “I leave you in a sorry state. But if I’ve accursed you I do remove it now. If any of you live, carry word to my sister. Do not tell her about the ship.”

Then, before anyone could intervene, Decurrs tipped himself backwards. Sky bloomed through the space where he had been. Swift leaned forward, searching the ocean with his eyes, but Decurrs had already vanished under the waves. He did not come up again.

After a while, Glosse shifted his weight. He did not look at them.

“We must get off this wreck,” he said. “We must get off today.”

The sea was hot and smooth, like a silver plate left in the sun.

“This is our chance,” Glosse said. He’d been signaling the men on the foremast with a handkerchief. They, in turn, had employed themselves in making a raft from the fore yard and sprit sail yard, lashed together with ropes and spars rescued from the flotsam.

In the afternoon they launched her, paddling with pieces of plank they had whittled with their belt knives. The survivors from the mizzen mast waited to greet them.

“Avast,” said a sailor on the raft, baring the blade on his belt knife. “The raft cannot support you all.”

“Only the strongest can come,” said another. “All hands must paddle if we’re to make the shore.”

“None of the women,” the knife man said in a kindly tone. He gestured with the point of his blade to the Malay maid. She guessed the meaning of his words and stepped back a few paces, dropping to her knees on the few planks that remained of the quarterdeck.

Cobb stepped forward. “I’ve got life in me yet,” he said. “I’ll sail with you.”

“And I,” said one of Lascars.

Glosse stepped forward. “You’ll need my help to find the land,” he said. “I can reckon the stars.” They motioned him forward. As Glosse stepped forward, the mess-boy caught at his shirt sleeve. “This is wrong,” he said. “You cannot leave the passengers here to die.”

Glosse snatched his shirt away. “Where and when they die is up to God, not me.” He stepped forward onto the bobbing raft, sinking his weight low to keep his footing.

“What about you, Swift?” Holdfast Muhammad looked up from his corner of the raft. “You’ve got a good hand with the carpentry. We could use you.”

“Aye,” Swift said reluctantly. He looked at their raft, a shaky net of spars and canvas, lashed together with rope. “But I’ll stay here.” He did not know what decision he’d make until the words were out of his mouth, but there they were.

“You know how it’ll go if you stay,” Holdfast Muhammad said in a low voice. Swift appreciated that he did not speak of dying in front of the passengers.

“I know,” Swift said. “I’ll stay.”

Glosse looked at the boy. “You should come with us,” he said.

“No,” the boy said, trembling with self-righteousness. Had Swift ever been that young? “I’ll stay here.”

Glosse shrugged and took the paddle handed to him.

The raft took on three more sailors and two of the merchants. Then they set off, paddling determinedly away from the Minerva.

Swift sank to his haunches and watched them go. They were trying, he knew, to be well clear of the Minerva before the haunt returned.

“Do you think they’ll make it?” the boy asked. His voice had lost its ring of certainty now that the raft grew smaller in the distance, now that the moaning from the rigging was rising around them again.

“I do not know,” Swift said. He put his hands to the shrouds and climbed back up the rigging.

Mrs. Newman had resumed her place in the crow’s nest. “Those men on the raft,” she said through cracked lips. “Have they gone to seek help?”

“They have,” Swift said.

The Gunner was slumped in the ropes. Ugly red ulcers dotted his skin, and it was only by his breathing that Swift knew he was alive. Swift took up his old position by the man’s side. Staring straight ahead, he could almost believe that Decurrs was still beside him, perhaps a step or two down on the ratlines.

He waited for the haunt to return.

On the third night they heard screaming over the water. Not a lot of screaming—two, maybe three voices. One went on for some time.

“That was the raft,” the Gunner said. “I cannot abide a raft anymore. Not after what I’ve seen.”

Swift opened his eyes. The Gunner had died two days ago, and his corpse slowly rotted in the flotsam below. On a slave ship, the sharks would have found his body already, but this was the Minerva, and the dead man studied Swift with desiccated eyes.

“You will drink the salt,” the dead man said. “It will help for a while, and then it will drive you mad.”

Then it was not the Gunner beside him on the ropes, but the governor, large as life. He had his pistol on his hand, same as he’d had on the Zong. Swift felt like laughing at the man, just as he had all those years ago. You did not threaten a slave-ship sailor with a quick death. They’d lost all fear of such things. It was the slow death and the slow pain they feared. The thirst, the pickling, the sharks.

“Water,” someone croaked above him. It was the Malay maid. She dangled the coat to him. Swift took it from her and wrapped it around his shoulders, for his hands were losing their grip. He descended the ratlines slowly, step by step, stepping carefully around the living and the dead.

The sea was calm. The boy lay stretched out on the quarterdeck. Swift shook him, and he stirred.

“You should climb,” Swift said. “The waves will wash you away in the next gale.”

“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Swift,” the boy said. “I do not think I have the strength for it.”

Swift looked up at the rigging. The numbness in his muscles told him he did not have the strength to pull the boy up. But he grabbed the boy under his arms, and, leaning his weight back, managed to pull him to the rail. The stars overhead made fantastic patchworks of light. They reminded Swift of the Saint Elme’s fire that had danced on board, warning the sailors of their deaths. Such a beautiful thing, he thought in wonder. So beautiful.

He eased out his rope belt and lashed the boy to the quarterdeck rail. Then he lowered the coat into the sea. He dribbled some drops of salt water into the boy’s mouth. Lowering his own head to the deck, Swift lapped at the waves like an animal. The wetness in his mouth shocked him with a relief that surged through his body.

Then he saw the haunt.

It lay two points abaft the port beam, an eerie shine on the ocean. Its tendrils were out again, touching the water so delicately it resembled one of those strange underwater flowers that bloom and curl in foreign tide pools. It was feeding off the men on the raft, he supposed. Or was that something the Gunner had told him?

Swift soaked the coat in salt water and placed it on his back. The precious water cut icy pathways across his shoulders as he climbed, finding every groove in his shrinking body and pinching him with cold. Still he climbed, and at the crow’s nest he handed the three women who’d taken refuge there the sodden coat. They sucked at it eagerly.

“Will we die soon, do you think?” Mrs. Newman’s eyes had sunken so far it was almost a peeling skull Swift looked into, and not a face.

“Don’t worry,” he told them. “It will all be over soon.”

But it wasn’t.

The living and the dead lay side by side on the ropes. The thick, sweet smell of death lay over everything.

Swift climbed up and down the rigging, wetting the coat and passing it to those too weak to move. The boy was still alive. He could tell by the way his limbs quivered when the waves washed over them, though Swift could no longer detect the sound of breath when he dribbled water into the corner of the boy’s mouth.

In the evening, when the air began to cool, Swift went in search of survivors. He grabbed the bodies he passed on the shrouds. He patted their bloated arms, their naked, festering legs. No one moved. They were as still as if painted, upon a painted ship, upon a painted ocean.

Mrs. Newman’s swollen body sat upright, looking expectantly ahead. From time to time Swift followed her gaze, trying to make out what she saw.

“Well,” the governor said. “What will it be, men? To die of thirst’s a cruel death.” He gestured again with that foolish pistol of his. The Zong’s crew stared back at him. They’d been working on less than a quart of water since entering the Torrid Zone. The rainwater casks that loomed so lovely behind the governor’s pistol were never for the likes of them, and they knew it.

“A vote,” the first mate said. “A vote on this.” The first mate despised them all, Swift could tell.

“What’s the captain say?”

“Captain Collingwood’s sick abed,” the governor said. “And Kelsall’s been taken out of the chain of command. The situation is clear. The cargo must be jettisoned. Not all—only the sick and the dying. Collingwood has given me his list.”

“For your insurance monies, you want the cargo jettisoned. That’s murder, sir,” said the first mate. “I’ll have no part in it.”

“A vote,” the boatswain said. “We must have a vote.”

Silence on the Zong. A parched boat on a parched ocean.

“Who votes yea?” the governor asked. He raised his own hand and looked meaningfully around. A few of the officers hesitantly raised their arms in the air.

“If you vote yea,” the governor said, “I’ll see to it that every tar here gets a cup of water in his ration.”

Swift raised his hand.

Listen: there was a ship. She was called the Zong. She was low on water, or so they said. Part of her cargo needed to be jettisoned, or so they said. Her cargo was a collection of humans in chains.

They pushed the women and children out one by one, through the cabin portholes. The first ones went quietly enough, but the others struggled. The slaves could hear the screaming as it drifted through the hold. They understood they were going to die. You have no idea how much even a sick child can fight you when she knows you are dragging her to her death.

The governor kept pointing. This one, he said. That one. They took the healthy along with the sick. The governor couldn’t read, Kelsall said, so what was the point of a list?

Some of the tars joined in. This one. A woman scratched Swift’s arm as he reached for her chain-mate, so he grabbed her by the hair. This one.

It is no great thing to drown a slave or two, when they are sick, when they have caused trouble. It is a usual thing.

They jettisoned fifty-four the first day. The governor said the number should be noted down, for the insurance claim. 54.

The next day they marched the men up to the quarterdeck, this time with the chains and shackles still on. They’d fight less that way, the governor said. And the chains would drag them down quicker. 42.

They had to stop for a time, to see to the sails. One of the Negroes had some English; he said all in the hold were begging to live, promising to survive on no meat and no water until port. 38. Ten women committed suicide, leaping from the deck to join those in the waves below. 48. One man managed to climb back aboard. They kicked him from the netting, into the screaming ocean. 144 in all. Or maybe more? Despite the governor’s efforts, they’d lost count halfway through.

A usual thing. The descent into the stinking hold, the lash with the cat, the feel of a man’s arm resisting as you haul him forward, the shouts, the crying, the pleas. Usual things. Save that first day, when Swift rushed above, because the stench of the hold was getting to him, that was all, and he rested his burning arms on the gunwale, and saw. A pregnant woman, giving birth in the waves.

“I did not pass the whisper,” Swift told the boy. “Someone else did. I don’t know who. Before the second trial, one of the Gregson men found me on a dock, told me, ‘we know you’re a fine man, we know you’ll remember what’s good for you.’ But they never called me to testify. Not one of the seventeen crew were called. I never did get to find out what kind of man I was.” He raised his hand to scratch one of the scabs beneath his eyes, and noticed, idly, that his fingernail had fallen off. He did not remember losing it.

The boy’s corpse was swollen. Its swollen limbs still floated every time a wave washed in. In and out.

“There was a ship,” Swift said to himself, trying out the words.

The sun stared down.

Swift waited patiently as the haunt approached. On inspection, he agreed with Mrs. Newman that it might not be a ship at all. The haunt had the general look of a ship—the hull, the masts, the sails—but its cobweb gauziness confused his gaze. He could not figure how such a thing could sail. He supposed he’d soon learn.

The haunt was selective in the corpses it chose. It paused over one body, then took the one beside it, lifting it into the air in a slow arc. One of the corpses it pulled from the rigging fell to pieces, a torn limb splashing into the darkness. The haunt continued its delicate search, serene.

When one of its glowing tendrils passed near him Swift stiffened—some part of him still wanted to live—but then he forced himself to relax. He no longer had the strength to fight it, if he ever had.

The tendril brushed over his shoulder, a prickle of heat and light. It had a dry, horrid smell, like burning bone. The tendril drifted over to the boy, wrapped itself around his torso, lifted him up. Swift’s knots held—he was proud of that—but another tendril arced out of the sky, ripping the rope away. The boy was carried aloft.

The haunt’s light faded, its too-white glare dimming to the muted color of the moon. Its graceful tendrils curled back to the ship like the closing petals of a flower. Slowly, relentlessly, it turned away from the Minerva.

“No,” Swift said. This last outrage was too much. “You don’t get to leave me here. I’m the last one living, aren’t I? The Jonah?” He expected the ship would turn back at the sound of his voice, but the haunt sailed on. It retreated with surprising speed into the darkness.

Cold flooded Swift’s body. They could not leave him here.

“Come back!” The words were hard to force through his parched mouth. He threw himself on his belly, scrabbled forward to the water’s edge, palmed in water to wet his tongue.

“Come back!” His voice was louder now. They’d surely hear him.

Darkness wrapped itself around him. He could not see the haunt at all.

Swift lay alone on the rotting deck, alone in the silent sea. He sometimes thought he heard the dead conversing above him, but he could not make out their words.

He expected them to return, the dead. Surely they’d come back. Decurrs and Glosse, the boy, the women, Bessie, Emily, his little girl as he’d seen her last with the blood cough dribbling down her dress. Or the slaves. No. 23, at least. Or the woman from the waves. Surely they had something to say to him. Some last accusation to make.

But they did not come.

The sun pressed down. The clouds hid the moon.

There passed a weary time.

Something edged into the corner of his vision. A triangle of white. A sail?

Swift lifted his head. A wave of relief filled him. It was the haunt, come to put things right.

But the sail was too solid. He could not see through it. It was, he realized wearily, a living ship.

He watched it pass. There was no reason now to summon it. No one to save.

But the silence pressed down on him, heavy and terrible. An agony of silence.

Swift tried to speak, but his tongue had withered with thirst. No noise came out. It was too far now, to reach the waves that washed the quarterdeck. So he raised his arm to his lips. Bit down. The warm taste of blood freed his tongue. He croaked. Shouted. Wordlessly. A cry from the deep.

The angle of the ship’s sails changed. They’d heard something.

Swift let his head sink down again. He floated on the deck, suspended between life and death, between one possibility and the other.

But he did not think he could die, not yet, not yet. There was a name on his cracked lips. A word like the blood in his mouth. A thing he had to tell.

Author’s Note:

“Years ago, while working at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, I came across a sailor’s account of his visit aboard a slave ship. I was struck by the effort he’d made to mobilize his fellow sailors against the slave trade. A few months later I read Marcus Rediker’s magisterial The Slave Ship, which helped put this document into context. In writing “Haunt,” I relied heavily on Rediker’s searing description of the daily operations of slave ships. Readers interested in learning more about sailors’ relationship to the abolition movement should consult this book.

The murders I describe in “Haunt” are all based on real incidents. Of these, the most notorious is the Zong massacre. As James Walvin points out, the mass murder that took place in 1781 became notorious not because the drowning of sick slaves was unusual (it wasn’t), but because British abolitionists made it their first cause célèbre. As with so many slave trade atrocities, we will never know the names of the Africans murdered on the Zong. Given the owners’ destruction of the ship’s logs, we will also never know the names of the ordinary sailors who executed the murders or (according to the first mate’s testimony) of the few who protested the massacre. Nor is it likely we will learn the name of the person who first passed the Zong’s story on to Olaudah Equiano, the black ‘able seaman’ and anti-slavery activist responsible for turning the massacre into a historical milestone. The victims of the Zong never received justice in a court of law. However, thanks to the efforts of Equiano and other abolitionists, their deaths helped galvanize the popular movement that, decades later, would abolish the transatlantic slave trade. This is not the same as justice. But it has its own meaning.”