The slave ship A human history

Marcus Buford Rediker

Book - 2007

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Subjects
Published
New York : Viking c2007.
Language
English
Main Author
Marcus Buford Rediker (-)
Physical Description
434 p., [16] p. of plates : ill., maps ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780670018239
  • Introduction
  • Chap. 1. Life, Death, and Terror in the Slave Trade
  • Chap. 2. The Evolution of the Slave Ship
  • Chap. 3. African Paths to the Middle Passage
  • Chap. 4. Olaudah Equiano: Astonishment and Terror
  • Chap. 5. James Field Stanfield and the Floating Dungeon
  • Chap. 6. John Newton and the Peaceful Kingdom
  • Chap. 7. The Captain's Own Hell
  • Chap. 8. The Sailor's Vast Machine
  • Chap. 9. From Captives to Shipmates
  • Chap. 10. The Long Voyage of the Slave Ship Brooks
  • Epilogue: Endless Passage
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Index
  • Illustration Sources and Credits
Review by Choice Review

Not since the publication of Daniel Mannix's Black Cargoes (1962) has the general reader been presented with such a rousing account of the Atlantic slave trade in all its gory details. Rediker (Univ. of Pittsburgh) is the author of books on pirates and other 18th-century seamen (e.g., Villains of All Nations, CH, Nov'04, 42-1714), and four of these ten chapters are devoted to the captains and crews of the slave ships, not the slaves. Each chapter puts the spotlight on one aspect of the trade by using a human vignette plucked from the archives. There is sound scholarship here and an awareness of the best modern research, but this book was written for the broad public looking for an exciting read, not for academic exposition. While whippings and branding, rape and murder as themes may be less than perfect history, when well written, they are compelling narrative. Specialists will find the last chapter on the abolitionists' use of the story of the slave ship Brooks illuminating. Summing Up: Recommended. General, public, and undergraduate libraries. R. T. Brown formerly, Westfield State College

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review

MOST spasms of cruelty in history we know about largely through the testimony of victims. It is thanks to acts of witness by survivors like Primo Levi and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for instance, that we can begin to picture what life was like in Auschwitz and the gulag. There is no great trove of memoirs by retired concentration camp guards. By contrast, a much more prolonged bout of suffering, the notorious Middle Passage across the Atlantic, on which more than 12 million Africans were embarked for the Americas over more than three centuries, we know about almost entirely from the perpetrators. There are few accounts of this voyage by slaves, and historians are now not 100 percent sure of the authenticity of the most famous of them, the 18th-century autobiography of Olaudah Equiano. But an astonishingly large body of evidence remains from those who trafficked in human beings: letters, diaries, memoirs, captain's logbooks, shipping company records, testimony before British Parliamentary investigations, even poetry and at least one play by former slave-ship officers. It is this rich array of material that Marcus Rediker plumbs, more thoroughly than anyone else to date, for his masterly new book, "The Slave Ship: A Human History." His focus is on the period after 1700, when this traffic was increasingly dominated by Britain - a country where, as anyone who has worked in its libraries and archives knows, they seldom seem to throw a piece of paper away. The documents mounted up because the transport of chained and shackled Africans was once so central a part of world commerce. Rediker looks not at that bigger picture but at the slave ship itself, as a microeconomy where the captain was chief executive, jailer, accountant, paymaster and disciplinarian, exercising these roles by maintaining, from his spacious captain's cabin in a very unspacious ship, the mystique of what later military leaders would call command isolation. Slave ships are, after all, a far larger part of our history than we like to think. Our normal picture of an 18th-century sailing vessel is of one filled with hopeful immigrants. But before 1807, ships carried well over three times as many enslaved Africans across the ocean to British colonies as they did Europeans. Not only was the business a booming one, it was, until pesky abolitionists started making a fuss in the 1780s, considered highly respectable, as central to the Atlantic economy as is something like oil today. "What a glorious and advantageous trade this is," wrote James Houston, who worked for a firm of 18th-century slave merchants. "It is the hinge on which all the trade of this globe moves." John Newton, who later wrote the hymn "Amazing Grace," spent part of his youth as a slave-ship captain and believed that because of the long periods of time at sea, there was no calling that afforded "greater advantages to an awakened mind, for promoting the life of God in the soul." Respectability is not the only resemblance to international trade today. Rediker points out many others. One is the highly globalized nature of the business, and even of the ships' construction: he traces how one major British slave-ship owner ordered his vessels built in New England, which had the best timber, but sent the builder nails, rope and anchors from Liverpool, where their price was lower. Like executives today, British slave merchants pressed their government for deregulation, and finally it obliged, canceling the Royal African Company's guaranteed monopoly. Just as corporate officers now get stock options, slave-ship officers received the extra compensation of a few "privilege" slaves they were permitted to buy, transport and sell for their own profit. Sometimes there were executive bonuses tied directly to performance, based on the number of slaves delivered. And finally, those who succeeded in the business could seamlessly make the transition to politics, the way tycoons still do: former slave-ship captains sat in both the British House of Commons and the United States Senate (James D'Wolf of Rhode Island). This complex tissue of normality makes one wonder what aspects of our own everyday business-as-usual people will, a century or two from now, be considered as horrendous as we think the slave trade was. Economically, the slave ship was a means of transporting some of the ocean's most valuable cargo. Socially, with its whips and chains, it was a floating prison, which acclimated its passengers to the harsh world they would encounter on American and Caribbean plantations. Politically, the slave ship was a continual furnace of rebellion, packed with desperate people willing to fight to the death for their freedom, and who often did so: there were nearly 500 documented revolts on Atlantic slave ships and probably many more considered so routine they never made it into the written record. Humanly, the slave ship was the locus of unbelievable cruelty. To punish rebels, captains resorted to thumbscrews, red-hot pokers, strangling, the severing of limbs and more. Like the post of concentration-camp commandant, the job bred violence. Rediker has made magnificent use of archival data; his probing, compassionate eye turns up numerous finds that other people who've written on this subject, myself included, have missed. He (like many scholars before him) makes only one minor oversight: the vivid description he quotes of a slave-ship voyage published by John Riland in 1827 was in fact partly plagiarized from a little-known account by Zachary Macaulay, written many years earlier. Macaulay's was a remarkable feat of investigative reporting, the only time a prominent abolitionist crossed the Atlantic on a slave ship, taking notes. As a practitioner of "history from below" who has written several other books about the maritime world of this era, Rediker is sensitive to the ruthless manner in which captains treated common sailors, and to the way that any totalitarian system en-lists a lower layer to control those at the very bottom. (Both the Nazi and the Soviet camps established such hierarchies among prisoners.) "Violence cascaded downward," he writes, "from captain and officers to sailors to the enslaved." The slaves got the worst of it, of course, but sailors - who staged many mutinies - were subject to murderous floggings and to a shipboard company-store arrangement that often left naïve deckhands owing money to the captain. Furthermore, it was to the captain's interest to brutalize his sailors enough that some would jump ship in the West Indies or the American South. With the slave cargo unloaded, fewer hands were needed to sail the ship back to England; if some of the sailors debarked, fewer would have to be paid. In a haunting discovery, Rediker finds several witnesses who testified that when these injured and penniless sailors lived as vagrants on the streets of Caribbean and North American ports, the local people who took pity and found them food and shelter sometimes included slaves. It is a rare, touching moment of human solidarity in an otherwise inhuman story. 'Violence cascaded downward from captain and officers to sailors to the enslaved.' Adam Hochschild is the author of six books, including "Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves," a history of the British abolition movement.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review

With all the scholarship that has been devoted to the slave trade between Africa, Europe, and America, the dynamics aboard the ships at the heart of the trade has been the least studied, according to historian Rediker. Drawing on 30 years of research in maritime archives, Rediker offers an intimate look at the social and cultural dynamics of the slave ships that carried three million Africans in the largest movement of people in human history. Because of its crucial role in European and American commerce, the slave ship was a strange and potent combination of war machine, mobile prison, and factory. Rediker devotes separate sections to the relationship between the slave-ship captain and the crew, between the crew and the enslaved, among the enslaved people of different cultures and languages, and between the slave ship and civil society as Europeans and Americans struggled to balance commerce with ideals of ethics, religion, and governance in democratic nations.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2007 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this groundbreaking work, historian and scholar Rediker considers the relationships between the slave ship captain and his crew, between the sailors and the slaves, and among the captives themselves as they endured the violent, terror-filled and often deadly journey between the coasts of Africa and America. While he makes fresh use of those who left their mark in written records (Olaudah Equiano, James Field Stanfield, John Newton), Rediker is remarkably attentive to the experiences of the enslaved women, from whom we have no written accounts, and of the common seaman, who he says was "a victim of the slave trade... and a victimizer." Regarding these vessels as a "strange and potent combination of war machine, mobile prison, and factory," Rediker expands the scholarship on how the ships "not only delivered millions of people to slavery, [but] prepared them for it." He engages readers in maritime detail (how ships were made, how crews were fed) and renders the archival (letters, logs and legal hearings) accessible. Painful as this powerful book often is, Rediker does not lose sight of the humanity of even the most egregious participants, from African traders to English merchants. (Oct. 8) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

In a tour de force displaying his mastery of Atlantic maritime matters, historian Rediker (Univ. of Pittsburgh; Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age) details step by step the terrors, toil, technologies, commercial linkages, and business plans that made the slave ship the human triumph and tragedy it was. The magnificent and monstrous machine that formed the modern Atlantic world functioned as nursery, prison, war engine, and graveyard. For nearly 400 years from the late 1400s through the 1800s, tall ships-from the bantam ten-ton Hesketh with its 30 captives to the behemoth, ill-fated 566-ton Parr-operated as terrible instruments of capitalist profit and human wastage. They made cargo of ten to 15 million Africans in the hellish voyage called Middle Passage. Rediker brings to life sea captains, sailors, and slaves consumed in "the abominable traffick." Imaginatively conceived, expertly researched, humanely informed, and movingly written, this virtuoso work is essential for collections treating the history of Europe, the Americas, or Africa since 1500.-Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

"Making the slave ship real, "historian Rediker (History/Univ. of Pittsburgh) revivifies the horror of this world-changing machine. By 1807, more than nine-million Africans in shackles, manacles, neck rings, locks and chains had been carried to New World plantations, a crime impossible without ships, the most complex machines of the age, turned for this evil purpose into floating dungeons. Rediker's multilayered narrative--marred only by an occasional eruption of academic lingo and a clunky economic analysis--examines first the captains, whose absolute authority and mastery of many duties--warden, straw boss, international merchant, technician--made them indispensable. Their violent tyranny animated the "Savage Spirit of the Trade," cascading downward to the victimized crews, the dregs of the waterfront, who in turn became victimizers, liberally employing the cat-o'-nine tails on their captives. Boarding the ships, the slaves, themselves prisoners of African wars, criminals in their own societies or kidnap victims, transitioned to European control and found their world completely changed. Here Rediker (Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, 2004, etc.) excels, detailing their strategies of resistance--refusing to eat, jumping overboard, rising up against their captors--their shipboard punishments, deaths and deprivations and the new kinship that arose among the survivors of the harsh Middle Passage, a bonding that helped sustain the resistance movement for centuries. Finally, the author includes stories by and about abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson, who gathered the horror stories of the seamen; William Wilberforce, Parliament's most persistent anti-slave trade voice; James Stanfield, an old jack tar who wrote from the common sailor's perspective; Captain John Newton, whose religious transformation turned him into an opponent; and Olaudah Equiano, a slave who wrote movingly about the Atlantic crossing. Rediker's dramatic presentation powerfully impresses. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.