Turner's The Slave Ship, exhibited in London in 1840, shows a slave ship sailing away while its crew throws the dead and dying overboard, with a typhoon closing in. It reads as a protest against the slave trade and the market behind it. Since 1959 almost every historian has tied it to the Zong massacre of 1781, when a crew threw about 130 enslaved Africans into the sea to claim insurance, but that reading is now disputed.
From a distance the picture is a blazing sunset over rough water. The horror sits low in the frame, in the waves.
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The Zong killings did not happen in a typhoon. The captives died in calm water, with the ship stuck in a part of the Atlantic where the wind had nearly stopped. Turner painted a storm anyway, and he never named the ship, not in the title and not in the verse he printed beside it.
The title, the poem and the convention of 1840
The picture hung at the Royal Academy in London. No source says Turner chose the timing, but 1840 was a year of anti-slavery meetings. On June 12, 1840, the General Anti-Slavery Convention opened at the Freemasons' Tavern in London, with the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson in the chair.
Clarkson's history of the slave trade had come out in a second edition in 1839, and it is the book that may have moved Turner to paint.
In the Academy catalogue the picture carried a long title: Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On. Beneath it, Turner printed lines from his own unfinished poem, Fallacies of Hope, which he had begun around 1812.
The lines are an order from a ship's officer: "Before it sweeps your decks, throw overboard" the dead and dying. The extract ends on a question to Hope itself: "Where is thy market now?" That last line is the point of the picture. The crew is weighing cargo while people drown.
The painter who wrote it knew something about that market. In 1805 he had put money into a property in Jamaica.
What You'll Discover
Why historians now doubt the Zong link.
The chained leg in the foreground.
Where Turner's own money went.
Why Ruskin sold his gift.