The Slave Ship: A Human History

The Slave Ship: A Human History is a 2007 book by Marcus Rediker that describes what happened aboard the ships carrying enslaved people from Africa to the Americas across the Atlantic Ocean. Rediker focuses his history on the slave ship itself as well as those onboard. The book won numerous awards, including the 2008 George Washington Book Prize and the 2008 Merle Curti Award. Critics praise it for shedding light on a little-explored facet of North American history. Rediker, a best-selling nonfiction author and documentary film producer, is a distinguished professor at the University of Pittsburgh and a senior research fellow at the Collège d’études mondiales in Paris. 

This guide refers to the 2008 John Murray edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of graphic violence, sexual violence, child sexual abuse, death, and suicide.

Summary

In The Slave Ship, Rediker discusses the horrific conditions that enslaved people endured while they were transported from Africa to the Americas between 1700 and 1807 aboard slave ships. By examining the vessels themselves, as well as those who sailed upon them, Rediker hopes to provide a greater insight into this brutal period in human history. According to Rediker, slavery was especially profitable in the 18th century, and Great Britain and the US moved millions of Africans to the Americas as part of a broader, deliberate network of enslavement and exploitation.

To write this book, Rediker spent years researching primary resources including maritime archives, court records, firsthand accounts, and diaries. He includes drawings and diagrams in the book to illustrate the points he makes about cramped spaces, suffocating conditions, and the crimes committed aboard these ships. Rediker wrote The Slave Ship to appeal to casual readers and students interested in African American cultural history, while also seeking to demonstrate why discussions of slavery are still relevant today. In particular, Rediker seeks to establish a clear link between the capitalist economic system and the exploitation that took place aboard the slave ships.

Rediker notes that many enslaved people did not survive the journey across the oceans. For the captains who ran these ships with demagogue-like power, this loss of life was a cost of doing business. Disease spread quickly. Enslaved people did not receive proper rations of food and water; the crews, empowered by the captains, punished enslaved people severely for minor altercations. Crews threw the living and dead captives overboard without giving them a second thought, whereupon they were often eaten by the sharks that trailed the ships. Their deaths were recorded in the captains’ journals as business expenses.

In the book, Rediker examines four major types of relationships aboard the slave ships: captain and crew, sailor and captive, captive and captive, and merchants against abolitionists. Rediker asserts that these relationships played a key role in how life played out aboard the slave ships; many of the enslaved people only survived by banding together and finding solace in each other, a process that forged new cultural movements in the direst kind of adversity. Although many enslaved people aboard the ships did not speak the same language, they found other ways to communicate and share messages.

The relationship between captains and crews set the stage for the drama unfolding aboard the ships. Captains paid sailors terribly, fed them next to nothing, and ran their ships with as few sailors as possible. Often, the sailors were kidnapped or extorted into taking part in the voyage and only did so when they were in the most desperate predicaments. Sailors mutinied and frequently deserted, leaving the remaining crew stressed, bitter, and resentful. According to Rediker, the social hierarchy aboard the slave ships mirrored the exploitative social hierarchies in the broader capitalist societies.

The enslaved people suffered a great deal at the hands of the crewmates. Violence was deliberately used as part of a campaign of terror to prepare the captives for sale at the end of the Middle Passage. The sailors despised sharing quarters with the enslaved, hated touching them, and resented every morsel of food they received, often because the captain had ordered their own rations reduced. Enslaved women and children aboard the ships suffered especially badly. Although the women faced fewer confinements than the men, there were many instances in which they were sexually abused without any consequence.

Enslaved people struggled to watch their fellow captives suffer in this way. However, for the most part, there was nothing they could do other than silently endure the journey. Rediker details the means of resistance available to the enslaved people, including hunger strikes and outright insurrections. At the same time, however, the slave ships were constructed with the policing of the enslaved in mind. The barricades on the decks, the arms available to the sailors, and the torture devices used by the captain sought to maintain discipline among the captives and ensure that they were kept alive and as healthy as possible in the name of profits.

Rediker does not shy away from describing the grim realities of the slave ships. The Slave Ship is a stark reminder that, for these enslaved people, suicide was not an escape from misery and toil. Instead, suicide was an act of rebellion against the slave trade. It was one of the few weapons available to the enslaved against the enslavers who decided what happened to their bodies. Rediker reminds the reader that these enslaved people no longer owned themselves—their bodies belonged to the enslavers—and so suicide served as a final act of defiance, especially among those who believed that their spirits would be carried back to their homelands.

Rediker also touches upon the relationships between slave traders and abolitionists. The conflicts between these rival groups culminated in the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807. Although abolitionists triumphed, their victory did not account for the centuries of slavery, cruelty, and misery endured by the captives aboard these slave ships, as many of those who made vast fortunes from the slave trade continued to enjoy their wealth and power. Rediker suggests that no act of parliament or government can make amends for these atrocities.