Reviewed by David Eltis | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.1

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Reviewed by David Eltis | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Tales from the Ships

A Slaving Voyage to Africa and Jamaica: The Log of the "Sandown," 1793–1794. Edited by Bruce L. Mouser. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Pp. xxiv, 156. $27.95.)

The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade. By Robert W. Harms. (New York: Basic Books, 2001. Pp. 448. $30.00 cloth, $ 17.50 paper.)

Reviewed by David Eltis , Emory University

These books showcase two of the many hundreds of extant firsthand accounts of slaving voyages.¹ Assuming each of the 37,000 transatlantic slaving voyages had a logbook and some, in addition, had surgeons' logs, then many thousands of these documents must have been created between 1519 and 1867. In short, these are not rare documents. They range from records kept as part of the business, such as captains' and surgeons' logs, to private diaries and travel accounts kept with publication in mind. A few fragments were written by or at least taken down from Africans themselves. Most accounts derive from officers of slave ships or the European merchants and travelers who accompanied them in an age when almost the only way to reach Africa was on board a slave vessel. Among the latter group was Zachary Macaulay, probably the only white abolitionist luminary to make a transatlantic voyage.²

Such documents divide into two broad groups: those written before and those written after the slave trade came to be viewed as evil. The first contain the most interesting material, providing clues to attitudes about slavery very different from our own. Unless faced with the alternative of death, no one has ever wanted to be a slave. But the key change is the point at which large numbers of people became convinced that no one should ever be a slave. Records of slave voyages appearing after this shift exhibit a self-consciousness that their predecessors lack and tend to be suffused with guilt or outrage, or they focus on the horrors of the Middle Passage in the certain knowledge that there was a new audience for such material.³ At the business end of this second group is a different kind of response. The logbook of the Rhode Island slaver, the Louisa, sailing in 1796–1797, faithfully records the voyage but coyly avoids mention of slaves (under Rhode Island law the voyage was illegal). In the nineteenth century, merchants and captains refer to their captives as "bultos" (packages) rather than slaves, and in the last known example of the logbook genre, that of the Wanderer, a slaver that disembarked in Georgia in 1858, not only is there no mention of slaves, but also, in a nice illustration of attitudes hardening against the trade, there are no further entries whatsoever after the vessel reaches the African coast—in this case the Congo River.

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