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A Human History
Viking Adult
October 2007
On Sale: October 4, 2007
448 pages
ISBN: 0670018236
EAN: 9780670018239
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
For three centuries slave ships carted millions of people
from the coasts of Africa across the Atlantic to the
Americas. Much is known of the slave trade and the American
plantation system, but little of the ships that made it all
possible. In The Slave Ship, award-winning historian Marcus
Rediker draws on thirty years of research in maritime
archives to create an unprecedented history of these vessels
and the human drama acted out on their rolling decks. He
reconstructs in chilling detail the lives, deaths, and
terrors of captains, sailors, and the enslaved aboard a
“floating dungeon” trailed by sharks. From the young African
kidnapped from his village and sold into slavery by a
neighboring tribe to the would-be priest who takes a job as
a sailor on a slave ship only to be horrified at the evil he
sees to the captain who relishes having “a hell of my own,”
Rediker illuminates the lives of people who were thought to
have left no trace.
This is a tale of tragedy and terror, but also an epic of
resilience, survival, and the creation of something entirely
new. Marcus Rediker restores the slave ship to its rightful
place alongside the plantation as a formative institution of
slavery, a place where a profound and still haunting history
of race, class, and modern economy was made.
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