The Slave Ship

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The Slave Ship
Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship: A Human History gives the accounts of human suffering and terror underwent by African captives and seamen as they navigated to the New World on slave ships during the eighteenth century. Rediker incorporates naval records, chronicles, and references to recreate and explicate in detail the account of the British slave ships during the slave trade. Rediker gives a different perspective distinct from most studies on slavery by focusing specifically on the ship as another site of terror and violence. He offers four different encounters or ‘human dramas’ on the ships that include the interactions between the crew and the captain; encounters between slaves and the mariners; the relationships among the slave captives and lastly the encounters between abolitionists and slave trade merchants. The dramas unfold the multifaceted and extremely cruel interactions between the ship captains, the seamen and the captives in all phases of the voyages. In their encounters with the merchants, the abolitionists use the slave ships as emblems to show the ruthless pursuits of capitalism. Rediker manages to reconstruct the unsettling truth and realities of slavery through the experiences of the individuals whose struggles have gone unvalued through history. Rediker asserts the unjustifiable violence and horror on ships during slavery that was obscured have always been central to the cultivation of moder…