Sowande’ Mustakeem’s focus on the British slave trade in the closing decades of the eighteenth century is based on her examination of diaries and correspondence penned by seamen, ships’ surgeons, captains, and merchants and their brokers, as well as ships’ logs, cargo manifests, newspaper accounts, and testimonies before the House of Commons. It sheds light, moreover, on the organization, provisioning, and infrastructure of slave trading vessels shows in passing the architectural and other modifications to ships necessitated by this most peculiar commerce reveals how the workings of the enterprise were routinely disrupted by the vagaries of shipboard disease, slave insurrection, foul weather, and other factors and graphically describes the barbarous rush of expectant purchasers in port cities of the Americas. Slavery at Sea focuses on the horrendous enterprise through which millions of human beings were captured, sold, transported to the Americas, and resold for their labor, adding usefully to a growing body of work that insists we recognize the ways in which the imprint of slavery’s trauma began well before the enslaved arrived in the New World.
Difficult because of the unrelenting trauma it recounts, doubly difficult because it is so badly written. Sowande’ M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage.
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