Spirits of the Passage - Hardcover

Burnside, Madeline; West, Cornel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684818191 ISBN 13: 9780684818191

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1997

Synopsis

An account of the slave trade during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries centers around the wreck of the slave ship Henrietta Marie, a vessel that has been excavated from the waters off the coast of Florida. 22,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

This handsome book is the result of the discovery, in 1972 of the wreckage of a slave ship some 30 miles off the coast of Florida. The Henrietta Marie sank during a storm in 1700 after delivering a cargo of slaves to Jamaica. It is the oldest slave ship ever found, and the only slave ship ever recovered in the Americas. Author Madeline Burnside uses the story of the Henrietta Marie to tell the agonizing story of slavery in the Americas, from the 1500s to the 19th century and the end of what U.S. Southerners called "the peculiar institution."

From Booklist:

The horrendous transatlantic slave trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--"the night side of the Age of Enlightenment" --is chronicled for general readers in an attractive format and engaging text. Particular attention is paid to information that historians have gleaned from the wreck of the Henrietta Marie, a slave ship that sank off the Florida Keys 300 years ago; in fact, this book accompanies an exhibition of the ship's artifacts that will be touring the country. The nonacademic approach eases this important subject away from its usual habitat--the hands of scholars--and places it before a much wider audience. In arresting prose, the author discusses the social and economic factors that lay behind the three-sided slave-trade network: the "imperatives" of European commerce forming the first leg of the business triangle and, following that, the plundering of the African coast for slave labor and the captives' sale into bondage once in America. A book deserving a place in all U.S. history collections. Brad Hooper

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0684818191
• ISBN 13: 9780684818191
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192