Turner added a storm to the Zong atrocity, which really happened in calm seas
J. M. W. Turner's The Slave Ship shows a blood-red sunset, a typhoon rolling in and a vessel sailing away from people it has cast into the sea. It recalls the Zong case of 1781. Turner invented the storm: the real crime took place in calm water, and the weather is his judgement on it.
The Zong was carrying enslaved Africans toward Jamaica when drinking water ran short. Its captain had 132 people thrown overboard, because insurers would pay for cargo lost at sea but not for deaths from natural causes. The court case that followed drew huge public attention. It settled nothing legally, yet it became a turning point for British abolitionists. Britain banned the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833, though the practice continued elsewhere.
Turner, born in London in 1775, entered the Royal Academy schools at fourteen and trained further in watercolour under the physician Thomas Monro. He held liberal views and followed the anti-slavery societies of his day. He probably read about the Zong in the 1839 second edition of Thomas Clarkson's history of the slave trade. The painting, whose original title described slavers casting the dead and dying into the sea as a typhoon approached, went on show at the Royal Academy in 1840, the same year two major anti-slavery conventions met in London, so viewers would likely have read it as a call to act.
Up close, the ship proves to be a fast slaver built to outrun naval patrols. In the foreground a chained leg rises from the water, surrounded by fish and gulls. Yet the canvas is mostly colour: few firm brushstrokes, forms that dissolve into one another, and a sunset red that seeps everywhere. Bodies and storm have no outlines at all, defined only against the pigment around them.
That choice ties the painting to Edmund Burke's idea of the sublime, the terror people feel before overwhelming nature. By making the sea and sky so violent, Turner sets human cruelty against a larger power that seems ready to pass sentence. He paired the work with lines from his own unfinished poem Fallacies of Hope. Measuring 91 by 123 centimetres, oil on canvas, it now hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Source: The Slave Ship
