Sweet Water and Bitter: The Ships That Stopped the Slave Trade

In admirable, exhaustive, and sometimes deadening detail, Rees (Shadows of Elisa Lynch) sails the high seas in pursuit of the British Preventive Squadron, a tiny fleet of ships that patrolled 3,000 rough miles of African coastline in the early 19th century, in an effort to abolish the slave trade. What to do with freed slaves was but one of the obstacles this squadron faced. The men were dogged by fever "which killed more efficiently than the slavers' guns"; their daunting project often got mired down in the "complexity of politics behind abolition." And compounding the undertaking were slave ships from other countries. "The United States had anti-slave-trade agreements with no one"; American officers could board suspicious ships only if they were flying American or British flags, and few would display their flag in sight of a warship. It's when detailing the dreadful privation of the men and the British casualties (some 17,000 over 60 years) that Rees finds the adventure in her tale; with the aid of numerous historical accounts, she describes, in one episode, a near mutiny on the Actaeon that leads its captain to exclaim, "You have got my monkey up and you won't get him down again in a hurry." Indeed. (Mar.)