Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea

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. [Adapted from publishers’ description.]

ISBN: 9780525558347 | Viking

Praise

Marcus Rediker reminds us that the fugitive did not always seek freedom through swamps, thickets, forests, and rivers. The same bloody seas, littered with the bones of their countrymen, was also a pathway to escape. Gripping and illuminating, Freedom Ship gives new meaning to the old nautical phrase ‘cut and run.’ — Robin D. G. Kelley

Marcus Rediker’s career-long engagement with maritime freedom struggles — now including Freedom Ship, his most recent work — has definitively established waterways, docks, and ships as pivotal sites of resistance to slavery. The more we read his work, the more we learn that these stories of escape, requiring extensive collaboration of enslaved Black women and men, sailors, and dockworkers of all racial backgrounds, and self-identified abolitionists, were as quotidian as they were extraordinary. These awe-inspiring escape stories remind us of the power of alliances built across identity and social location and encourage those of us today who still believe in freedom to build on these legacies as we face new terrains of struggle. — Angela Y. Davis

Many people familiar with the history of slavery in the United States associate the terror of the Middle Passage with tall ships traversing the high seas of the Atlantic, while they think of the Underground Railroad as the legendary land-based route that those fleeing bondage traveled to freedom. In this important new work, Freedom Ship, distinguished maritime historian Marcus Rediker turns this binary on its head by showing in dramatic human terms how escape by sea was a primary method used by enslaved Black Americans in the decades leading up to the Civil War. It’s a fascinating work, anchored in a commitment to history from below, that will undoubtedly expand the map of our understanding of how — and by whom — the abolitionist movement gained momentum in the crucial years that redefined our nation. — Henry Louis Gates, Jr.