The Slave Ship Marcus Rediker Sparknotes

The Slave Ship was written by Marcus Rediker and it expresses several accounts of the Atlantic slave trade in addition to the world of the middle passage. The author discusses the nature of the slave ship and the African paths to the middle passage. Rediker also mentions the lives of historical figures (Olaudah Equiano, James Field Stanfield, and John Newton) and the roles that they had during the Atlantic slave trade. For the African captives, the sailors, and captains, the slave ship was seen as a wooden, floating, traveling dungeon and a place of terror, survival, and profit, which are the overall main themes of the book. The author’s thesis and primary purpose was to reconstruct the horrors and tragedy of the Atlantic slave trade along

The need for survival was essential for both the crew of the slave ship and the African captives. When African captives were loaded on board a slave ship, a form of a cold war would reign on the ship until they sold all the captives as slaves at their destination in the New World. The crew aboard the slave ship would become increasingly paranoid since they did not know if a slave uprising would break out or not. All members of a slave ship crew (including cooks, carpenters, and doctors) would become jail keepers. The only way the crew of a slave ship could survive the middle passage is to prevent the outbreak of a slave rebellion. With limited resources, crew members of the ship had to improvise ways to survive long trips. One example is when Rediker mentions the methods that Stanfield used to keep himself alive. The author says “when Stanfield discovered that dew collected atop the ship’s hen coops overnight, he sucked the moisture every morning” (Rediker 141). Members of the crew, including Stanfield himself, had to find new approaches to keep themselves alive if they were going to survive the extensive journey. Survival was also essential for the African captives aboard the slave ship. Female captives, for example, had to submit to the captain’s dominance, which meant that they had to give in to any form of rape or sexual assault. Another example to point out is when Olaudah Equiano begins his journey on the middle

To the merchants and the crew of the slave ship, it was always a condition of “profits over people” (Rediker 142). In addition, this explains why African captives would be tightly crammed in the vessel so that they could be delivered in increasingly large quantities to gain profit, as long as the captives were delivered alive. Towards the end of the book, Rediker explains that “the dramas that played out on the decks of a slave ship were made possible, one might even say structured, by the capital and power of people far from the ship” (352). Merchants were highly influential in the constitution and economics the Atlantic slave trade. They funded and supplied countless voyages to other countries. In some instances, “the captain got his command from a merchant or group of merchants who own the ship and financed the voyage” (Rediker 190). Merchants would instruct captains which slaves to purchase, what goods to exchange, and how to ultimately treat and discipline the African captives and sailors. Additionally, merchants would instruct slave ship captains to “treat the slaves kindly, but not too kindly” (Rediker 197). These slave voyages were performed in order to advance profits. Moreover, it gives an explanation on how the slave ship became a