The Sailor's Vast Machine Summary
Rediker’s concern for the individual lived experiences of the participants in the trade is aided immensely by his command of the history of what life at sea is like. While scholars have been using the narrative of Olaudah Equiano to illuminate the experiences of enslavement for decades (Burnside and Robotham 1997), chapter 8 of The Slave Ship titled “The Sailor’s Vast
Machine” contains a learned and astute description of work and suffering at sea. What sticks out is violence, and the shocking degree to which physical and emotional terror was used as a tool for control and psychosexual masochism. Rediker rightly points out that both captives and crew were being exploited by the captain, officers, and sponsors of slave ship voyages, without …show more content…
Anthropologically inclined readers will find much of interest in chapter 9 of Rediker’s book, titled “From Captives to Shipmates.” The argument is of course not new; Mintz and Price raised it in the 1970’s as have others. In this chapter Rediker discusses favored anthropology themes such as resistance, revolt, music, dance, and other dimensions of the ethnogenesis of
African-American culture. On page 305 he observes
Slowly, in ways surviving documents do not allow us to see in detail, the idiom of kinship broadened, from immediate family to messes, to workmates, to friends, to countrymen and –women, to the whole of the lower deck.
And in so observing, Rediker has given underwater archaeologists of the slave trade and the slave ship a research agenda. It’s an agenda with which I happen to agree and that I have discussed in greater detail elsewhere (McGhee 2007).
Rediker ends his book with a discussion of the fight to end the slave trade and with the moving testimony of cast-off and dying sailors being cared for by enslaved people in Caribbean
Machine” contains a learned and astute description of work and suffering at sea. What sticks out is violence, and the shocking degree to which physical and emotional terror was used as a tool for control and psychosexual masochism. Rediker rightly points out that both captives and crew were being exploited by the captain, officers, and sponsors of slave ship voyages, without …show more content…
Anthropologically inclined readers will find much of interest in chapter 9 of Rediker’s book, titled “From Captives to Shipmates.” The argument is of course not new; Mintz and Price raised it in the 1970’s as have others. In this chapter Rediker discusses favored anthropology themes such as resistance, revolt, music, dance, and other dimensions of the ethnogenesis of
African-American culture. On page 305 he observes
Slowly, in ways surviving documents do not allow us to see in detail, the idiom of kinship broadened, from immediate family to messes, to workmates, to friends, to countrymen and –women, to the whole of the lower deck.
And in so observing, Rediker has given underwater archaeologists of the slave trade and the slave ship a research agenda. It’s an agenda with which I happen to agree and that I have discussed in greater detail elsewhere (McGhee 2007).
Rediker ends his book with a discussion of the fight to end the slave trade and with the moving testimony of cast-off and dying sailors being cared for by enslaved people in Caribbean