to order a retrial, while leaving the notion of "general average" intact. He emphasised that the massacre would have been legally justified and the owners' insurance claim would have been valid if the water shortage had not arisen from mistakes made by the captain. A hundred and thirty-two slaves were murdered on the order of the ship's captain after the ship steered off course and supplies were running out, Collingwood jettisoned the sickly slaves who were consuming more water and "threatening" the welfare of their fellows. Compensation for these jettisoned "goods" under the "salvage clause" of the Zong's marine insurance policy resulted in a "conceptualization of justice as exchange" where Collingwood "had produced something of value in each of those moments in which a slave's body hit the surface of the head that each such mini-apocalypse was not only an apocalypse of death but an apocalypse of money." The insurance battle required the ship's owners to establish that the massacre was necessary and that under the operating laws of property, had conferred, each of the slaves' bodies was a measurable and recoverable quantity of value. Capital, death and money were synthesized as equal and thus it was capital that dictated that "justice is done and value produced when one thing is exchanged for another". Krikler comments that Mansfield's conclusions ignored the ruling precedent of his predecessor, Matthew Hale, that the killing of innocents in the name of self-preservation was unlawful. This ruling was to prove important a century later in R v Dudley and Stephens, which also concerned the justifiability of acts of murder at sea. Mansfield also failed to acknowledge another important legal principle—that no insurance claim can be legal if it arose from an illegal act. Effect on the abolitionist movement Granville Sharp campaigned to raise awareness of the massacre, writing letters to newspapers, the Lords Commissioners of Admiralty and the Prime Minister (the Duke of Portland). Neither Portland nor the Admiralty sent him a reply. Only one London newspaper reported the first Zong trial in March 1783 but it provided details of events. The newspaper article in March 1783 was the first public report of the massacre and it was published nearly 18 months after the event. Little else about the massacre appeared in print before 1787. Despite these setbacks, Sharp's efforts did have some success. In April 1783, he sent an account of the massacre to