Book Review: Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea
Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea. By Marcus Rediker. New York: Viking, 2025. Hardcover, 416 pp., $33.00.
Reviewed by Tim Talbott
The traditional story of how the Underground Railroad received its name comes from an event in which an enslaved Kentuckian named Tice Davids successfully made his way to Ohio and seemingly disappeared, causing his former enslaver to exclaim that Davids must have vanished on an underground railroad. The name “Underground Railroad” itself implies a terra firma-based network of conductors and safe houses. Documented accounts, as well as legends, have focused primarily on land-means of escape. Correcting this one-sided perspective is historian Marcus Rediker’s latest book, Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea.
Readers may recognize Rediker’s name from some of his much-acclaimed earlier works, including, The Slave Ship: A Human History. Rediker combines his interests in maritime and abolitionist history to great effect in giving emphasis to stories involving the often successful, but sometimes thwarted, attempts to use seagoing vessels for one’s own or others’ emancipation. Instead of runaway, Rediker more correctly often uses “sailaway” to describe the water-utilizing freedom seekers he discusses.
Outside of famous attempts like The Pearl incident in 1848, and individuals’ narratives like that of Harriet Jacobs, surprisingly little previous book-length scholarship has appeared on this topic. Thus, Freedom Ship makes a valuable contribution to the historiography and joins previous titles like Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad, edited by Timothy D. Walker (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021) in shedding more light on this important aspect of emancipation.
The means for overland escapes from Deep South and even some Upper South locations were limited due to the required travel distances. The best chance for successful getaways from such challenging locales was using the many coastal and tidewater river ports that were accessible to seafaring vessels. Places like Savannah, Georgia; Charleston, South Carolina; Wilmington, Edenton, and New Bern, North Carolina; and Norfolk, Petersburg, and Richmond, Virginia, held abundant opportunities for enslaved men, women, and children to stowaway or receive assistance from abolitionist-minded Black and white sailors in making an effort to gain their freedom. As Rediker clearly shows, thousands tried, and many were successful.
In addition to a helpful introduction and thought-provoking epilogue, Rediker incorporates eight chapters to outline the situations common with maritime emancipation attempts and to tell the stories of both those who used seacoast vessels for their routes of escape as well as those who tried to help the freedom seekers.
Rediker makes liberal use of many of the antebellum narratives produced by individuals who found their freedom and then bravely told their stories. However, he also uses primary sources like advertisements placed in newspapers attempting to capture the sailaways, and newspaper articles that circulated widely about successful and failed endeavors, as well as obscure records like the quarterly reports of the Virginia Chief Inspector of Vessels, held in the Library of Virginia.
While students of abolitionist history will be rather acquainted with some of Rediker’s focus stories, like that of Frederick Douglass’s and Harriet Jacobs’s escapes, and Jonathan Walker’s Florida assist effort that ended in his capture and “SS” (slave stealer) branded hand, others are less familiar. For example, Rediker shares the fascinating story of William P. Powell as the center of Chapter 6. Powell, the son of an African American father and an American Indian mother, became a sailor and eventually created the benevolent Colored Sailors Home in New York City as an effort to build solidarity and help both Black sailors and escapees from slavery. Even the often told stories like those of Douglass and Jacobs gain new life when the emphasis of their narratives shift toward the maritime aspects of their deliverance from bondage.
Inserted near the middle of the book is a 16-page full-color selection of illustrations and photographs that help readers visualize some of the people, places, documents, situations, and events discussed within the book’s chapters. An impressive 50 pages of notes share the sources that Rediker consulted and quotes from to tell these stories.
Freedom Ship is not only an excellent book for learning about this previously overlooked means of emancipation, it is also a pleasure to read. Readers will find Rediker’s writing style engaging. His ability to accurately contextualize the complex nature of this subject and combine it with proper historical empathy is praiseworthy.
