MARCUS REDIKER “SLAVE SHIP”

Marcus Rediker “Slave Ship”

Marcus Rediker “Slave Ship”

Introduction

The paper looks at Marcus Rediker's The Slave Ship and describes Rediker's graphic depiction of the treatment of slaves, the terror used to subjugate them and the cruel and untimely deaths of millions of Africans. The paper highlights Rediker's belief that the slave trade was born out of the desire for capitalistic gain throughout the world. The paper also offers a personal, emotive response to the novel.

Analysis

In The Slave Ship, Marcus Rediker, a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, recreates the wooden world inhabited by kidnapped Africans, sea captains, and their rough- hewn crews. An antidote to the moral numbing of numbers, the book uses maritime records and diaries to reconstruct the lives—and deaths—of heretofore invisible individuals. With passion and power, Rediker presents four slave ship dramas: the relationship between captain and crew; interactions between sailors and slaves; conflict and cooperation among the captives themselves; and the struggle between slave-trading merchants and abolitionists. Straight from the heart of darkness, he explores the legacies of race, class, and slavery through ghost ships sailing on the edges of modern consciousness.

Directing the dramas were merchants in pursuit of profit. They set the woeful wages, and working conditions for sailors. To save space for the human cargo, they put crews on a short allowance of food and water. When ships reached the West Indies and the slaves were sold, captains often drove suddenly superfluous crew members even more mercilessly, hoping they would desert, forfeiting the wages awaiting them at home port. Inadequate diet, back-breaking labor, accidents, harsh discipline, and epidemics (of diseases from which sailors had no Immiunity), Rediker reveals, meant that the mortality rate for the crew aboard slave ships exceeded that of the slaves.

The interaction between the ...