The Christian Science Monitor has a review of Marcus Rediker’s latest work The Slave Ship: A Human History:
The story is largely told through a tapestry of firsthand accounts from slave merchants, ship captains, sailors, abolitionists, and the enslaved themselves, who are tracked from their initial capture in interior African villages (typically by rival tribes) to their ultimate sale in the Americas. The result is akin to a good documentary film in which greater truths unfold from a sequence of personal stories.
This method also allows readers to slowly absorb and process the full range of horrors, which a more conventional approach might have allowed them to become numb to: people chained in hot, densely packed, poorly ventilated quarters covered in the bile, blood, and excrement of the sick and dying; the routine rape of enslaved women and girls; the ghastly reprisals against those unwilling or unable to follow the officer’s commands; the packs of hungry sharks that followed slave ships, waiting to consume the bodies of the dead, dying, or suicidal.
