Life in the Hold
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

In 1788 the Plymouth Committee of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade published a scale drawing of the slave ship Brooks. The rendering showed 482 individual African men, women, and children arrayed as cargo in impossibly small dimensions to maximize profit. The drawing of the Brooks quickly became the visual indictment of the slave trade, a strategic tool for abolitionists to make the slave trade” concrete, material and human in order to build a movement.”
Marcus Rediker’s “The Slave Ship: A Human History” (Viking, 448 pages, $27.95) serves the same purpose. His exquisite and grotesque narrative marks the evil visited on each person — captain, sailor, and enslaved African — who was swept up in the trade of human bodies. Abolitionists needed the Brooks in the 18th century, but why does 21st-century America need an examination of the slave trade? What can we learn from revisiting the anguish and loss of the Middle Passage? The answer is as clear for Mr. Rediker as it was for anyone who first viewed the Brooks. The text is not only a historical marker; he means to remind us that, in the contemporary world, the rapacious behavior of nations continues to produce unconscionable human suffering.
Mr. Rediker’s narrative is marked by clear-eyed empiricism that avoids exaggeration, overstatement, and polemics, because it does not need them. Telling the meticulously recovered stories is enough. Based on suspicion that he assisted rebellious slaves, Captain William Watkins chains his black cook to the main mast of the ship for more than a month, allowing him to slowly starve and descend into insanity before finally throwing his lifeless body to the sharks. In order to avert a widespread hunger strike, Captain Thomas Marshall flogs a 9-month-old African child to death for refusing to nurse. James Stanfield watches as a captain rapes an 8-year-old girl in an act so “atrocious and bloody” he cannot bring himself to give a full account. Working sailors are tricked into service and bound by unpardoned debts. Like the enslaved whom they terrorize, the sailors are traded, starved, beaten, and abandoned at the whim of the captain and the dictate of the profit margin. The mortality of the common sailor nearly matches that of captive Africans. The horrors recounted by sailors give weight to the abolitionist cause and provide much of the extant evidence that Mr. Rediker uses. In this system of totalizing human commoditization, the enslaved and the employed share linked fates.
Each paragraph, page, and chapter adds another seemingly unspeakable story. Each is told carefully and reverently. The book’s soundtrack is a slow, steady staccato of bodies plunging into the unforgiving, shark-infested Atlantic. One body is tossed overboard after prolonged torture; another body hits the water after succumbing to disease; another voluntarily goes into the sea rather than be a slave; another is thrown in to terrorize the rest; then another, then another, another, another, another. In Mr. Rediker’s text these bodies are each fully human. Like the careful depictions of the torsos, members, and faces of those who are packed in the hull of the Brooks, each man, woman, and child in this text is an individual ripped from his or her social and familial fabric and woven into a new tapestry of slavery.
The most shocking aspect of the story is the utter mendacity of its perpetrators. The terrorism aboard the slave ship was performed by the fiendish, cruel men who sailed the Atlantic; but it was made possible by a massive, global endeavor that was mostly bureaucratic and indifferent. It was financed by wealthy speculators seeking fortunes in overseas markets. It was approved by legislatures protecting their entrenched political interests. It was allowed by millions of European and American citizens who profited from the lifestyles slavery produced. It was undergirded by African leaders who participated in the rape, murder, and sale of their market competitors and political rivals. Two hundred years after the abolition of the slave trade, these forces are still troublingly present in the global pursuit of wealth.
Few of us imagine ourselves capable of committing the worst atrocities that occurred on slave ships, but Mr. Rediker reminds us that silence, comfort, and profit born from the sale of human beings is complicity. It is a reminder of our complicity in Sudan, Thailand, Congo, and elsewhere. We are like the sailors who refuse to help the captain as he lowers the bound, gagged, living African woman to the sharks, but who nonetheless fail to intervene on her behalf.
Against the hard-driving rhythm of suffering and death is a muted but persistent melody of resistance. Captive Africans rebel and resist. Though they speak dozens of languages, proximity and song render them intelligible to one another. Women pilfer objects from the deck of the ship. Children pass them through the grates to the men below. Men use them as weapons against the crew when they are brought up for daily “dancing.” Through hunger strikes, suicide, and direct insurrection, the enslaved assert their humanity against an unspeakable system of agony that insists on reducing them to numbers.
Ms. Harris-Lacewell is an associate professor of politics and African American studies at Princeton University. She is the author of “Barbershops, Bibles and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought.”