The Middle Passage has been a touchstone of storytelling for generations — the television series “Roots” and Charles Johnson’s award-winning “Middle Passage” spring to mind — but no artistic work can truly translate its atrocities.

Hence the necessity of nonfiction: Siddharth Kara’s wrenching, superb “The Zorg” depicts a voyage of the damned as a synecdoche for slavery and its legacy. “There can never be a full accounting of the toll taken on millions of Africans by the period of Atlantic slavery,” the author observes. “There is, however, the Zorg— one wretched ship, one horrid journey, one culminating act of inhumanity to speak for them all.”

By 1781 the British trade had stalled; resources had been redirected to the American rebellion. In 1775, as the war commenced, “Liverpool’s slave ships disembarked 21,212 Africans into slavery. Four years later, the number had dropped to 4,028.” Eager to bump up profits, wealthy traffickers sent forth more vessels. (Kara thus fires a shot across the bow of “The 1619 Project,” which contended that abolition in the United Kingdom sparked the Revolution a decade earlier.)

A young surgeon, Luke Collingwood, signed onto the William, encountering British and Dutch traders at loggerheads along the Gold Coast. Collingwood ingratiated himself with a disgraced official, Robert Stubbs, who joined as the “lone passenger” on a captured Dutch ship, the Zorg, bound for Jamaica. Despite little navigational experience, Collingwood was serving as captain, assisted by a seasoned mate, James Kelsall; a smaller-than-average crew; and a larger-than-average load of Africans.

The Zorg struggled, plagued by poor weather and low provisions. Scurvy spread among the ranks. Collingwood slipped into a febrile delirium while the villainous Stubbs assumed command, banishing Kelsall to his cabin.

Conditions deteriorated, particularly for those imprisoned below deck: “All was dark and foul. Some of the slaves cried, others shouted, others panicked, and others tried to shut out the horror around them. Fights broke out as men tripped on each other trying to make it to the buckets in time. Women took turns pressing their faces into the grating at the top of the hold to catch a few breaths of fresh air.”

Once across the Atlantic, Stubbs’ longitudinal skills failed him. The Zorg wandered amid the Caribbean, hundreds of miles off course. Water supplies dwindled. The crew decided on a dire solution: Cull less valuable enslaved people, starting with women and children. They tossed scores overboard, trailed by shivers of sharks. Kara recreates these scenes with grisly precision.

Yet “The Zorg” shines brightest when it shifts back to Britain and the massacre’s aftermath, the finger-pointing that eventually shattered the shackles of bondage across an empire.

Kara blends Grisham-esque thriller elements with the propulsive quality of David Grann’s “ The Wager” and Sophie Elmhirst’s “ A Marriage at Sea”; as a writer he’s is every bit their equal. There’s a buffet of savory anecdotes; cameos by Benjamin Franklin; Virginia Woolf’s great-grandfather; and the trader-turned-abolitionist composer of “Amazing Grace.”

The author’s technique guides him, sextant-like, into the explosive final chapters of “The Zorg”: a chain of connected episodes — a pair of court hearings, an anonymous letter published in a London newspaper, a Cambridge essay contest, the machinations of a masterful activist — pushed the United Kingdom to ban slavery, the first nation to do so, inspiring Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison.

An epic in miniature, “The Zorg” is one of this year’s superlative nonfiction books.

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The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery

By: Siddharth Kara.

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press, 288 pages.

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