While Turner enjoyed a good allegory as much as the next artist, he avoided political statements for most of his career with one notable exception: The Slave Ship. The full name of the painting is actually Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon coming on. When it was first displayed at the Royal Academy in 1840, an excerpt from an unfinished poem by Turner entitled Fallacies of Hope accompanied it.
“Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay;
Yon angry setting sun and fierce-edged clouds
Declare the Typhon’s coming.
Before it sweeps your decks, throw overboard
The dead and dying – ne’er heed their chains
Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope!
Where is thy market now?”
The Slave Ship supposedly depicts a real event that was documented in Thomas Clarkson’s A History and Abolition of the Slave Trade. In 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered 133 African slaves to be thrown overboard just as the ship was entering a storm. The slaves were all sick and injured so rather than take them to port where they could not be sold, the captain decided to throw them overboard and claim them as lost in the storm in order to collect insurance payment. Turner never explicitly attributed influence for his painting to this event but it is known that he read Clarkson’s book in which the story of the Zong appears.
Like many of Turner’s paintings, The Slave Ship hides its true meaning in small details masked by impressionistic blur of color and shape. From afar, a ship appears on horizon, rocked by an approaching storm as a fantastic sunset fills the background and waves crash in the foreground. But as you draw closer, the painting reveals human limbs locked in shackles and surrounded by fish and seabirds amongst those crashing waves. The human figures can be traced back to the ship, becoming more obscure as they approach the horizon. On the right edge of the canvas appears a great fish, like a sea monster, coming to claim the poor souls thrashing in the foreground.