Zong massacre - Wikipedia
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zong_massacre
The Zong massacre was the mass killing of 133 African slaves by the crew of the slave ship Zong in the days following 29 November 1781. The Gregson slave-trading syndicate, based in Liverpool, owned the ship and sailed her in the Atlantic slave trade. As was common business practice, they had taken out insurance on the lives of the slaves as cargo. When the ship ran low on potable water following navigational mistakes, the crew threw slaves overboard into the sea to drown, partly in order to ensure the survival of the rest of the ship’s passengers, and in part to cash in on the insurance on the slaves, thus not losing money on the slaves who would have died from the lack of drinking water.
... ship’s surgeons were typically involved in selecting slaves for purchase in Africa, so their medical expertise supported the determination of “commodity value” for a captive. If the surgeon rejected a captive, that individual suffered “commercial death”, being of no value, and was liable to be killed by African handlers. Sometimes these killings happened in the presence of the surgeon. It is likely that Collingwood had already witnessed the mass-killing of slaves. As the historian Jeremy Krikler commented, this may have prepared him psychologically to condone the massacre that took place on the Zong.
