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The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea
by Marcus Rediker
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.
"Based on the voluminous first-hand accounts and testimony left by enslaved people and abolitionists, this beautifully written and compassionate account highlights a little-known aspect of antebellum resistance to enslavement. Readers interested in studies of enslavement in the United States and American antebellum and maritime history will enjoy this book." —Library Journal (starred review)
"A much-needed comprehensive contribution to slavery history." —Kirkus Reviews
"Through an array of real-life stories, in which horrifying cruelty is pitched against unimaginable courage, Marcus Rediker shows that alongside the Underground Railroad there existed an equally important Blue Highway that enabled enslaved people to sail to freedom with the help of networks of solidarity that stretched up and down the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. A triumph of storytelling as well as of archival recovery, Freedom Ship is a groundbreaking work by a pioneering maritime historian." —Amitav Ghosh, author of Sea of Poppies
"Freedom Ship is a luminous and transformative work that redefines how we understand resistance to oppression in the United States. Through vibrant storytelling, Marcus Rediker brings to life the courage of enslaved people escaping bondage—capturing their physical struggle, intellectual brilliance, and the defiant spirit that powered their journeys to freedom. In these pages you can hear the waves of the Atlantic, the whispers of resistance below deck, and the sharp, fierce intelligence of a people fighting for liberation. Freedom Ship is a passionate testament to the will of a people working to be free and an extraordinary gift to history, humanity, and hope." —Naomi Wallace, author of One Flea Spare
This information about Freedom Ship was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Marcus Rediker is the Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh and the award-winning author of The Slave Ship and The Amistad Rebellion. He lives in Pittsburgh.
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