Word: slaving
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SINS OF THE FATHERS: A STUDY OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADERS, 1441-1807 by James Pope-Hennessy. 286 pages. Knopf...
...Benito Cereno, Herman Melville's parable about slavery, the moody, vaguely ailing captain of a Spanish slave ship is asked: "What has cast such a shadow upon you?" He replies simply: "The Negro." In the long aftershadow of centuries, that answer, says James Pope-Hennessy, still holds true...
Pope-Hennessy, authorized biographer of Queen Mary, grandson and biographer (Verandah) of a British colonial governor, is not a formal historian; his book is a stark, sometimes emotional act of moral scrutiny. From brutal start to finish, he documents the slave traders' operation as a "vast complex of international crime." Captains' letters, half-literate journals, freed slaves' memoirs-all the available primary sources are meticulously assayed, not so much to show how the slave trade operated as to try to explain...
...Speech of Money. Why did the slave-ship captains of Newport-so scrupulous that they took oaths not to gamble, drink or swear-have no scruples at all about their terrible profession? How could the almost offensively respectable Englishman. John Newton, who eventually switched from slave captain to clergyman, pack chained human beings into a suffocating hold as tightly as "books upon a shelf," and then retire to his well-appointed cabin to read the Bible and pray...
...motive: profit. Shipbuilders in Liverpool, French sugar planters in the West Indies, rum manufacturers in Massachusetts (there were 63 distilleries there in 1750), coffee growers in Brazil, to say nothing of owners of cotton, rice and tobacco plantations in the South-all were dependent, directly or indirectly, upon the slave trade. All their quoted comments, says the disapproving author, ring with "the eternal voice of the middleman, the levelheaded, grating speech of money...