book review: The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade.

[Doug Millison]

http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=135271014651241

Robert Harms. The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade.
New York: Basic Books, 2002. xxv + 466 pp. Illustrations, appendices,
notes, index. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-465-02871-3.

[...] For it is the second half that most readers will find extraordinary
for the way it paints conditions on the Slave Coast and the actual conduct
of the trade. What is most remarkable here is the way Harms slips
effortlessly back and forth between the specific course of events on the
voyage, the general nature of the trade as it was conducted by the
Europeans and Africans, and the full range of contingencies faced by
individuals who were involved in it. At no point does the reader have the
sense of being lectured to or manipulated, but the emotional impact of the
details is devastating. The facts of the trade, especially the immense and
constant exertion of force and terror required to get the slaves into the
ships and keep them in submission, speak quite eloquently for themselves.
When Harms finally describes the ordinary slave's state of mind while being
rowed through the surf toward the Diligent, "into those waves, never to
return" (p. 253), even a reader hardened to history's many crimes will feel
the victim's desperation. Since nothing particularly unusual happened on
this voyage, Harms is able to exploit Durand's journal to its best effect,
revealing the usual tediousness of the trade. For the crew it meant an
endless round of maintaining and sailing the ship (or waiting for a wind),
and guarding, feeding, and manhandling captive Africans. For the Africans,
it meant being utterly humiliated, very crowded together, over half the
time with insufficient air to breathe in a hold reeking with their own
filth, waiting for an uncertain fate--some of them for many months. [...]

This book simply presents the unmistakable brutality, human waste, and
everyday capitalist contradictions of the slave trade in its simplest
terms. At the same time, for those with an appetite for the minutia of this
particular enterprise--weights and measures, methods of branding slaves,
sailing lore, contemporary epidemiological wisdom, and the like--this book
is a treasure trove.

The reader who wants more on the African setting of the trade should begin
with the author's River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin
in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 1500-1891 (1981). [...]