by Greg Grandin
First published 2014
In 1805, Captain Amasa Delano encounters a Spanish vessel in distress near a remote South Pacific island. The New England seal hunter boards the ship and observes what appears to be a standard slave transport, with West Africans serving their Spanish masters. Delano, who opposes slavery on principle, sympathizes with the apparent captives while admiring their seeming devotion to their owners. But the Africans have already killed most of the crew and taken control of the vessel. They perform an intricate deception, pretending to remain in bondage while actually holding their former captors prisoner. When Delano discovers the truth about who really commands the ship, his idealistic beliefs collide with brutal reality. Greg Grandin reconstructs this extraordinary rebellion using records from four continents, revealing how the encounter exposes the contradictions between American ideals of freedom and the economic realities of New World slavery. The same incident that inspired Herman Melville's Benito Cereno becomes a window into the violent collision of cultures, faiths, and economic systems that shaped the early nineteenth century Americas.
Genres: historical-fiction, american, 19th-century, american-history
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: clash-of-cultures, ideals-vs-reality
Setting: South Pacific, New World
Period: 1805
384 pages · Hardcover · Metropolitan Books
Content warnings: slavery, violence