Das Sklavenschiff

Turner showed this at the Royal Academy in 1840, the same season as one of the great international conventions against the slave trade. He had been reading Thomas Clarkson's history of abolition, and in it the story of the Zong, a British slave ship whose captain, back in 1781, had thrown sick and dying captives into the sea so he could claim them on the insurance as cargo lost at sea. That is what the storm and the burning light are wrapping around. Look toward the lower right and you can pick out chained limbs in the water among the fish. Turner hung it with a few lines of his own unfinished poem, ending on the instruction to throw the dead and dying overboard and never mind their chains. When it later belonged to the critic John Ruskin, he wrote that if Turner's whole reputation had to rest on one canvas, this would be the one he chose.