The Slave Ship (52 page)

An emphasis on terror does not make the question of redress easier to answer. Nor is it the place of a historian to answer the question in any case. The price of exploitation, of unpaid labor, might be computed, and should be, as all people, past and present, deserve the full and just value of their labor. Reparations are, in my view, in order, but justice cannot be reduced to a calculus of money, lest proposed solutions play by the rules of the game that spawned the slave trade in the first place. What in any case would be the price of terror? What the price of mass premature death? These are constituent elements of racism, especially when wedded to class oppression, and they are with us still.
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In the end I conclude that answers to these questions must be decided by a social movement for justice, led by the descendants of those who have suffered most from the legacy of the slave trade, slavery, and the racism they spawned, joined by allies in a broader struggle to end the violence and terror that have always been central to the rise and continuing operation of capitalism. It is for this reason that I chose to end with the sailors’ testimony about enslaved people caring for diseased and dying seamen in Caribbean ports. Theirs was the most generous and inclusive conception of humanity I discovered in the course of my research for this book. These good deeds, taken by people who themselves had little enough food, shelter, health, and space for ritual and burial, seemed to suggest the possibility of a different future. With their inspiration and our hard work, it may still be possible. The long, violent passage of the slave ship might finally come to an end, and the “most magnificent drama” might become magnificent in an entirely new way.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I could never have written this book without family, friends, colleagues, and no small number of helpful strangers. I thank the staffs at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; Bristol Record Office (especially Pat Denney, archivist of the Society of Merchant Venturers); Bristol University Library; Bristol City Museum; Merseyside Maritime Museum (Tony Tibbles and Dawn Littler in particular); Liverpool Record Office; St. John’s College Library and Cambridge University Library; National Archives; House of Lords Record Office; Royal College of Surgeons; Friends House Library; Bristol (RI) Historical Society; Newport (RI) Historical Society; John Carter Brown Library; Providence Public Library; Baker Library, Harvard Business School; New-York Historical Society; Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University; Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center; Charleston County Public Library; Avery Research Center and Special Collections, Addlestone Library, College of Charleston; South Caroliniana Library; South Carolina Historical Society. I am also grateful to the wonderful staff at my home library, Hillman, at the University of Pittsburgh, especially Phil Wilkin, who helped me to get essential research materials.

Thanks to the National Endowment of the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies for fellowship support. My research has also been facilitated in various and generous ways at the University of Pittsburgh, by support from the Center for Latin American Studies, the Center for West European Studies, the University Center for International Studies, the Central Research Development Fund, George Klinzing and Provost’s Office of Research, and Dean N. John Cooper and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

It was my good fortune to speak about this project before many engaged and responsive audiences. Thanks to the facilitators of the events and those who came and spoke their minds: Eric Cheyfitz, Cornell University; Karen Kupperman, Sinclair Thomson, and Michael Gomez, New York University; Madge Dresser, University of the West of England; Peter Way, Bowling Green State University; Andrew Wells and Ben Maddison, University of Wollongong; Cassandra Pybus, Centre for the Study of Colonialism and Its Aftermath, University of Tasmania; Rick Halpern, University of Toronto; Pearl Robinson, Tufts University; William Keach, Brown University; Simon Lewis, College of Charleston; Modhumita Roy, Marxist Literary Group; Phyllis Hunter, University of North Carolina-Greensboro; Kirk Savage, Department of History of Art and Architecture, and Alejandro de la Fuente, Department of History, University of Pittsburgh. I also benefited from the thoughts and suggestions of colleagues who gathered in Fremantle, Australia, in July 2005 at the conference “Middle Passages: The Oceanic Voyage as Social Process,” organized by Cassandra Pybus, Emma Christopher, and Terri-Ann White.

As I worked in maritime archives over the last thirty years, it took a long time to see that it might be possible to write a history of the slave ship and longer still to accept its challenge. The idea first came to me in the late 1990s as I visited prisoners on death row in Pennsylvania and worked to abolish capital punishment, a modern system of terror. Thanks to the many people I have met through this long and continuing struggle: our common work is reflected in countless ways, subtle and deep, in these pages. A critical moment in deciding to write the book was a meeting in 2003 with a host of talented scholars in the Sawyer Seminar on “Redress in Social Thought, Law, and Literature,” at the University of California-Irvine. Especially valuable then and since have been communications with Saidiya Hartman, author of the powerful new book
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route.

Many of my colleagues and students at the University of Pittsburgh have helped me in countless ways. Joseph Adjaye has long been a vital source of knowledge and wisdom about African history. Stefan Wheelock encouraged me to think about the technology of enslavement, while Jerome Branche helped me to understand the concept “shipmate.” Seymour Drescher and Rebecca Shumway read chapters and gave me the benefit of their expertise. Patrick Manning has been a paragon of scholarly and comradely generosity, encouraging me at the beginning of the project, guiding me through the middle, and helping me in numerous and practical ways at the end. Rob Ruck has shared the ups and downs of this book and much else, not least many a Pitt basketball season. These people and others—Alejandro de la Fuente, Lara Putnam, Bill Chase, Reid Andrews, and the members of the Working-Class History Seminar—have helped to make the history department and the University of Pittsburgh my happy home for many years.

I have had excellent research assistance along the way. Three of my former undergraduate students, Heather Looney, Ian Hartman, and Matt Maeder, did truly outstanding work, not only gathering primary sources but asking sharp, probing questions about what they found. My graduate students past and present have been a continual source of enthusiasm, assistance, and inspiration: thanks to Isaac Cur-tis, John Donoghue, Niklas Frykman, Gabriele Gottlieb, Forrest Hylton, Maurice Jackson, Eric Kimball, Christopher Magra, Michael McCoy, Craig Marin, Scott Smith, Karsten Voss, and Cornell Womack. Special thanks to Niklas, Gabriele, Chris, and Forrest, who helped me with research, as did my son, Zeke Rediker, who lent a hand in his own area of interest, African history.

I owe a special debt to Peter Linebaugh, whose friendship and collaboration over many years were central to the formulation of this project. Michael West, a distinguished scholar-activist of Africa and the Black Atlantic, has given warm encouragement to the project from beginning to end. The splendid maritime artist and writer William Gilkerson lent a sailor’s hand with chapter two. George Burgess, coordinator of Museum Operations, and director, Florida Program for Shark Research, Florida Museum of Natural History, and Department of Ichthyology, University of Florida, helped me to understand the history and behavior of sharks, while Pieter van der Merwe of the National Maritime Museum gave generous assistance on James Field Stanfield (chapter five). David Eltis kindly provided recent figures from the updated
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM
. Roderick Ebanks shared his knowledge of historical archaeology in Jamaica. My gratitude to all.

Five superb historians read the entire manuscript and applied their enormous learning. Especially warm thanks to Cassandra Pybus, a gifted writer and historian who helped me to see new possibilities; Emma Christopher, whose pathbreaking study of slave-trade sailors helped to make my own book possible; and Robin Blackburn, whose synthetic, comparative, and comprehensive studies of Atlantic slavery have been exemplary. Ira Berlin, who has brilliantly reconceptualized the slave experience in the New World, made characteristically tough-minded suggestions. Kenneth Morgan, whose own forthcoming study of the British slave trade will reset the scholarly standard, helped me in many ways, sharing his extraordinary knowledge of sources and many careful, detailed comments. I thank all for what they suggested, including the comments I was too hard-headed to accept.

My agent, Sandy Dijkstra, helped me to think my way into the project and to find the right publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. Maureen Sugden provided expert copyediting. Thanks to Eleanor Birne at John Murray, and to my excellent editors at Viking Penguin USA, Wendy Wolf and Ellen Garrison, who accompanied, challenged, and helped me along the way, especially as things got difficult at the end.

Final thanks are reserved for my family. My wife, Wendy Gold-man, has read, discussed, argued, and helped endlessly, more than anyone else. The book is dedicated to her and to my children, Zeke and Eva Rediker.

NOTES

ABBREVIATIONS