former captain of slave ships. In early 1780 he was appointed by the African Committee of the Royal African Company as the governor of Anomabu, a British fortification near Cape Coast Castle in Ghana. This position made him also vice-president of the RAC Council of the Castle. Due to his ineptitude and enmity incurred with John Roberts, governor of the Castle, Stubbs was forced out of the governorship of Anomabu by the RAC Council after nine months. Witness statements gathered by the African Committee of the RAC accused him of being a semi-literate drunkard who mismanaged the slave-trading activities of the fort. Stubbs was aboard to return to Britain; Collingwood may have thought his earlier experience on slave ships would be useful. Zong had a 17-man crew when it left Africa, which was far too small to maintain adequate sanitary conditions on the ship. Mariners willing to risk disease and rebellions on slave ships were difficult to recruit within Britain and were harder to find for a vessel captured from the Dutch off the coast of Africa. Zong was manned with remnants of the previous Dutch crew, the crew of William and with unemployed sailors hired from settlements along the African coast. The Middle Passage When Zong sailed from Accra with 442 enslaved people on 18 August 1781, it had taken on more than twice the number of people that it could safely transport. In the 1780s, British-built ships typically carried 1.75 slaves per ton of the ship's capacity; on the Zong, the ratio was 4.0 per ton. A British slave ship of the period would carry around 193 enslaved people and it was extremely unusual for a ship of Zong relatively small size to carry so many. After taking on drinking water at São Tomé, Zong began its voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to Jamaica on 6 September 1781. On 18 or 19 November, the ship neared Tobago in the Caribbean but failed to stop there to replenish its water supplies. It is unclear who, if anyone, was in charge of the ship at this point, as Luke Collingwood had been gravely ill for some time. The man who would normally have replaced him, first mate James Kelsall, had been suspended from duty following an argument on 14 November. Robert Stubbs had captained a slave ship several decades earlier and he temporarily commanded Zong during Collingwood's incapacitation but he