| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. By Stephanie E. Smallwood. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. 273 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-674-02349-9.)
The transatlantic slave trade is simultaneously one of the best documented phenomena in history and one of the most elusive. The forthcoming edition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database includes references to nearly thirty thousand specific slaving voyages over a period of more than three centuries. Yet the experience of the human beings trafficked in those voyages remains curiously opaque. To be sure, the middle passage has generated a rich array of visual imaginings, from the iconic etching of the slave ship Brooks, with its human cargo packed like cordwood, to the harrowing beginning of Steven Spielberg's Amistad (1997), but extant written accounts by Africans who survived the passage can literally be counted on two hands. And even that number may soon be reduced, given mounting doubts about the veracity of Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789).	1
What are historians to do? Must we cede the middle passage to imaginative artists? Or can the vast archive generated by the trade—account books, customs papers, ships' logs, letters of instruction, inventories, bills of lading, auction records—be made to yield something of the passage's meaning and significance to those who endured it? This is the challenge taken up by Stephanie E. Smallwood in her imaginative new book, Saltwater Slavery.	. . .

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