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W HAT O LD R EN did not say, because he did not know this part of the story:
What happened, as the abolitionist-backed court case of 1783 would make clear to all of England, is this: on the 29th of November, 1781, Captain Collingwood of the Zong slave ship—or passenger Mr. Stubbs, or First Mate James Kelsall, acting in place of the increasingly sick and sometimes delirious captain—ordered approximately fifty-four slaves who were exhibiting signs of illness to be thrown overboard, in the middle of the Atlantic. Two days later, the crew threw another group of approximately forty-two slaves, and shortly thereafter yet another group of slaves (including ten who jumped to join their brethren): about 133 souls in all. (Witnesses disagreed on the exact number.) The slaves’ deaths allowed the ship’s owners to collect from their English insurance company, because slave property, though not underwritten against natural demise, was worth some cash if it suffered expiration from falling—or jumping or being thrown—overboard.
In other words: if the slaves were murdered, the insurance would pay.
Why? Because if they were killed—if they were thrown overboard, for example—it would surely be to stop a rebellion, to save the ship and crew and the rest of the cargo. So, yes, insurance paid up for murdered slaves. The logic was illogical only if you insisted on thinking of slaves as people.
Among the Zong captives flung overboard and drowned, though never mentioned by name in any of the court documents, was the girl who’d first come down with the illness—and presumably brought it on board with her. The used-to-be-pretty one with the too-old uncle and the intractable brother. The one called Venus. That one.