The transatlantic slave trade holds a visceral and haunting legacy of the drowned. Here, that legacy is anchored in an analysis of archival materials, including from the Company of Royal Adventurers of England and a 1783 legal case about the jettison, in 1781, of enslaved people from a ship, the Zong, in what was a grim play for insurance. My aim is to reveal how practices of dehumanization, commodification, and systemic violence are entangled in the elemental geographies of water and the constitution of the drowned as disposable cargo; together, they produce a profound dissonance between the calculable and the unspeakable. The waters of the Atlantic emerge as material and metaphorical spaces of abjection. There, bodies rendered disposable have become a spectral presence and stark reminder of racialized capitalism, the spatial dynamics of empire, and its brutalizing consequences. I continue to explore what obligations are owed to the drowned. Later in the chapter, I juxtapose colonial practices of oppression with contemporary efforts to memorialize and acknowledge such injustices in terms of recognition respect and posthumous dignity. I also wrestle with ideas about forgiveness that feel deeply counterfactual.