died; and several were ill and likely to die, when the captain proposed to James Kelsall, the mate, and others, to throw several of them overboard, stating “that if they died a natural death, the loss would fall upon the owners of the ship, but that, if they were thrown into the sea, it would fall upon the underwriters.”  He selected accordingly one hundred and thirty-two of the most sickly of the slaves.  Fifty-four of these were immediately thrown overboard, and forty-two were made to be partakers of their fate on the succeeding day.  In the course of three days afterwards the remaining twenty-six were brought upon deck to complete the number of victims.  The first sixteen submitted to be thrown into the sea; but the rest with a noble resolution would not suffer the officers to touch them, but leaped after their companions and shared their fate.

The plea, which was set up in behalf of this atrocious and unparalleled act of wickedness, was, that the captain discovered, when he made the proposal, that he had only two hundred 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, as if Providence had determined to afford an unequivocal proof of the guilt, a shower of rain fell and continued for three days immediately after the second lot of slaves had been destroyed, by means of which they might have filled many of their vessels[A] with water, and thus have prevented all necessity for the destruction of the third.

[Footnote A:  It appeared that they filled six.]

Mr. Sharp was present at this trial, and procured the attendance of a short-hand-writer to take down the facts, which should come out in the course of it.  These he gave to the public afterwards.  He communicated them also, with a copy of the trial, to the Lords of the Admiralty, as the guardians of justice upon the seas, and to the Duke of Portland, as principal minister of state.  No notice however was taken by any of these, of the information which had been thus sent them.

But though nothing was done by the persons then in power, in consequence of the murder of so many innocent individuals, yet the publication of an account of it by Mr. Sharp in the newspapers, made such an impression upon others, that new coadjutors rose up.  For, soon after this, we find Thomas Day entering the lists again as the champion of the injured Africans.  He had lived to see his poem of The Dying Negro, which had been published in 1773, make a considerable impression.  In 1776, he had written a letter to a friend in America, who was the possessor of slaves, to dissuade him by a number of arguments from holding such property.  And now, when the knowledge of the case of the ship Zong was spreading, he published that letter under the title of Fragment of an Original Letter on the Slavery of the Negroes.