Freedom Ship
The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A definitive, sweeping account of the Underground Railroad’s long-overlooked maritime origins, from a pre-eminent scholar of Atlantic history and the award-winning author of The Slave Ship
As many as 100,000 enslaved people fled successfully from the horrors of bondage in the antebellum South, finding safe harbor along a network of passageways across North America now known as the Underground Railroad. Yet imagery of fugitives ushered clandestinely from safe house to safe house fails to capture the full breadth of these harrowing journeys: many escapes took place not by land but by sea.
Deeply researched and grippingly told, Freedom Ship offers a groundbreaking new look into the secret world of stowaways and the vessels that carried them to freedom across the North and into Canada. Sprawling through the intricate riverways of the Carolinas to the banks of the Chesapeake Bay to Boston’s harbors, these tales illuminate the little-known stories of freedom seekers who turned their sights to the sea—among them the legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, one of the Underground Railroad’s most famous architects.
Marcus Rediker, one of the leading scholars of maritime history, puts his command of archival research on full display in this luminous portrait of the Atlantic waterfront as a place of conspiracy, mutiny, and liberation. Freedom Ship is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the complete story of one of North America's most significant historical moments.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Rediker (The Slave Ship) zooms in on an all-but-unknown leg of the underground railroad in this revelatory and propulsive account. Slavery peaked, Rediker notes, during "the golden age of American maritime trade," when "every trade route was a potential route for a runaway." Digging through firsthand narratives by escapees and records from abolitionist organizations, he finds that escapes by sea were far more prevalent than previously realized. Several famous figures made maritime escapes, and their stories are narrated here with cinematic flair, among them the writers Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, both of whom dressed up as sailors to pass as seamen on escapee-friendly vessels. However, Rediker digs further, seeking to understand whom these vessels were piloted by. He finds evidence of organized resistance to slavery among the era's sailors, pointing to a range of confluences including how Black radical David Walker's pamphlets (which called for a Haitian-style revolution) were abundantly smuggled into the South by Black and white sailors; the arrest of white sea captain Jonathan Walker for smuggling runaways; and accounts like the one of an escaped 14-year-old girl who, when asked by abolitionists in the North how she escaped, reported simply being asked in passing by a white sailor if she'd like to hop aboard. This is a radical reimagining of the antebellum period that enthrallingly depicts resistance to slavery as widespread, unwavering, and multiracial.
