Slave ships get a second look

INTERVIEW. Women were raped and their skin flayed off of their bodies by bullwhips on their decks. Men were tortured and beheaded for planning uprisings in their holding areas. Ultimately, all the dead bodies were thrown into the water behind them, where schools of sharks followed them across the Atlantic.

Such is the story of the slave ship, which  transported millions of Africans in their floating dungeons from the 15th century through the 19th century — with millions more lost along the way. University of Pittsburgh history professor Marcus Rediker has combed through archives around the globe to tell the ships’ stories through the eyes of their crews and slave “cargo” in his new book, “The Slave Ship: A Human History.” Rediker tells of sadistic captains who enjoy running “a hell of my own,” crew members who stand frozen while slaves are beaten to within an inch of their lives and a priest who takes the unlikely role of slave-ship sailor before recoiling at the horrors before him.

“Slave Ship” speaks not only to the horrors of the Middle Passage from Africa to the New World, but of the continued repercussions of the slave trade on an American society seemingly unwilling to discuss them.

How did you decide to take on the subject of the slave ship?
It’s somewhat of a hobby of mine. I’ve been studying tall ships and people at sea for 30 years and have written about sailors, pirates and the important kinds of history that were made on the oceans. Slowly, it began to dawn on me that it might be possible to write the history of the slave ship. It took several years of me gathering the materials from the archives to see that it was possible. After I had begun to see that it was possible, it took some time to take on the subject because I knew that it would be a difficult and painful one to study — and, lo and behold, it was. It really emerged out of a commitment to talk about a great historic injustice.

Was the density of the research material the greatest obstacle to writing this book?
The research of the slave ship is a complicated business, and this, I think, is why there have been so few studies of it. The materials are so widely dispersed — both geographically and in other sorts of archives — and it took this long period of my studying other subjects to accumulate materials. But it’s not just the technical possibility of research; it’s the moral difficulty of the subject. If you decide to write a book on the slave ship, you’re really going to live with horror for several years.

Did it become overwhelming at times?
There were a couple of instances when I was in the archive where I just broke down: Once was in England in the National Maritime Museum, and the other was in Newport, R.I. In both cases, it had to do with particular horrors that were going on and the way enslaved Africans on both ships were being treated, but it was also the recognition on the part of a member of the crew that they wished they could do something to help but couldn’t. The sheer brutality of the situation and the way these ships operated became very difficult to take.

What stories that you discovered in your research were the most memorable?
If I had to pick out one single story that stands out in my mind, it would be the one in the first chapter of the enslaved man who used his fingernails to rip open the veins of his neck and commit suicide. That, to me, is a very clear indication of just how horrible these places were.

There were many people who took their own lives just to escape them.

Do you think slavery is adequately discussed in the context of American history?
With the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade coming up, there might be some kind of discussion of the slave trade. In the last generation, some progress has been made in recognizing this as a part of our national experience and writing a new type of history, rather than the elite, top-down, president-by-president history that we had for so long. You could say that slavery is one of the most sophisticated and advanced areas of modern historical research, which is why what we know about slavery has vastly expanded over the last 30 years. Of course, this doesn’t always translate into national dialogue about its legacy, but it’s in our consciousness. When people were looking for words to express the horror in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, a great many people reached for the term “Middle Passage” — the horrors of the Middle Passage — and this was quite revealing.