On one day early in September 1781, the _Zong_ sailed from the island of St Thomas, bound for Jamaica, with 440 slaves on board, and she arrived off the coast short of water. But Collingwood made the mistake of thinking he was off Hayti, and seeing that the slaves were sickly, and indeed had suffered much from want of water, he and his mate, James Kelsall, decided that since the slaves were sickly--sickly was probably a mild term to use since sixty of them had already died--it would be well to jettison the cargo, or some of it. For the death rate had been so great the voyage was likely to be unprofitable, and if he could prove that some of the cargo had been thrown overboard to save the rest, the underwriters would pay the value of it, while if these slaves died on board the ship would be at the loss. They selected accordingly 132 of the most sickly of the slaves. Fifty-four of these were there and then thrown overboard to the sharks that swarmed round the ship, and forty-two went the same way the next day, and in the course of the next three days the remaining twenty-six were brought out of the den below to complete the tale of the victims. Poor, wretched, suffering creatures! They looked at the sea, at the sinister fins appearing above the oily swell, and they looked back at their prison and the pitiless white faces that looked down upon them, and then they made their choice. Sixteen, they say, were thrown overboard by the officers, but the rest leaped into the bloody sea where the sharks were already fighting for their meal and shared their fate. The plea that was set up on behalf of this atrocious act of wickedness was that the captain discovered, when he made the proposal, that he had only 200 gallons of water on board, and that he had missed his port. It was proved, however, in answer to this that no one had been put upon short allowance; and that rain fell and continued for three days immediately after the second lot of slaves had been thrown overboard. They might have filled all their barrels and done away with all necessity--if one could call it necessity--for the murder of the third lot. As a matter of fact they only troubled to fill six. But the underwriters refused to pay, and the Solicitor-General actually held that the captain of the ship had an “unquestionable right” to throw the slaves into the sea. But not all men agreed with him. Light was coming, and Lord Mansfield, presiding in the higher court, said that this was a shocking case, and, in spite of the law, decided in favour of the underwriters. Still, nothing apparently was done to the murderers. They went scot-free. But imagine the state of public opinion when such a case could actually be brought before the courts, when the perpetrators of such a crime evidently regarded themselves as agents, doing their very best for those who had entrusted their business to their charge.