"The Floating Dungeon: A History of the Slave Ship"

The Slave Ship: A Human History

The missing link in the chain of American slavery

For more than three centuries slave ships carried millions of people from the coasts of Africa across the Atlantic to the New World. Much is known of the slave trade and the American plantation complex, 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 to the slaver by a neighboring tribe; to the would-be priest who takes a job as a sailor on a slave ship only to be horrified by 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, something that could only be called African-American. Marcus Rediker restores the slave ship to its rightful place alongside the plantation as a formative institution of slavery, as a place where a profound and still haunting history of race, class, and modern capitalism was made.

Watch video of Marcus Rediker, professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, speaking on "The Floating Dungeon: A History of the Slave Ship" at the Vanderbilt Law School March 10, 2009.

Shackles

Author and historian Marcus Rediker recalls his encounter with authentic shackles in an interview: "I was writing about the hardware of bondage, especially the shackles I'd seen in museums. Then one day I got notice of an authentic set of 18th-century slave ship shackles (from a South Carolina plantation) that were up for auction by an early Americana dealer."

"I had a debate with myself. Should I buy a piece of evil? Should I get as close as possible to this gruesome artifact and see what I might learn from it?"

"I bought the shackles and soon found that I had to go back and rewrite everything I'd written on the subject, because now they were more real to me."

"I felt the texture of the metal, how the rod would press against the Achilles tendon, how the loops would rub the flesh raw. In the end, holding those shackles in my hands, even though they made me shudder, enabled me to understand and write about them in a more realistic, even truthful way."

The slave ship was a floating prison in which the captives outnumbered the guards by an order of 10 to one; male prisoners and rebellious females were shackled to limit their capacity to resist. Collection of the Author

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14993517

The Slave Ship

The Slave Ship: A Human History By Marcus Rediker (Penguin, 2007)

I wanted to make our understanding of the slave trade concrete, to see it as a human history—hence the subtitle of my book -- because I believe that the human capacity to live with injustice depends to some extent on making it abstract. The existing scholarship on the slave trade is outstanding, but a lot of it is statistical, which can occlude the horror of what one group of people is doing to another for money. (Marcus Rediker, interview)

Eric Foner's review of The Slave Ship by Marcus Rediker states: Rediker certainly knows his ships: how and where they were built, how a normal trading vessel was transformed into a slave ship by the addition of cannon and the building of a ‘barricado’, a barrier across the main deck behind which armed crewmen could retreat in the event of an uprising. He takes us on a tour from stem to stern, from captain’s quarters to the levels below decks where slaves were incarcerated. He knows the crew and their tasks – the mates, carpenters, gunners and common sailors. And he knows how slaves were captured, transported and terrorised.

The Slave Ship makes it clear that while Europeans financed, directed and profited from the trade, it could not have functioned without the active participation of rulers and traders in Africa. Domestic slavery and the trading of slaves across the Sahara to Arab merchants existed centuries before Europeans arrived in West Africa. But the rise of the transatlantic trade transformed African societies. By the 18th century, militarised states like Asante and Dahomey had come into existence that thrived by warring on and enslaving their neighbours. The trade exacerbated class tensions within African societies, as merchants and rulers profited from selling commoners to the slavers. (continue reading the entire Foner article here.)

The Leonard Lopate Show states: Marcus Rediker revisits the history of the Africa-to-America slave trade in The Slave Ship. He 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 and often deadly journey between Africa and America. Mr. Rediker also gives attention to those who have been largely excluded from the written accounts - enslaved women and the common seaman.

The Leonard Lopate Show / October 15, 2007 / The Slave Ship