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3 Works 82 Members 2 Reviews

About the Author

Jared Ross Hardesty is Associate Professor of History at Western Washington University.

Works by Jared Ross Hardesty

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Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: On the night of June 1, 1743, terror struck the schooner Rising Sun. After completing a routine smuggling voyage where the crew sold enslaved Africans in exchange for chocolate, sugar, and coffee in the Dutch colony of Suriname, the ship traveled eastward along the South American coast.

Believing there was an opportunity to steal the lucrative cargo and make a new life for themselves, three sailors snuck below deck, murdered four people, and seized control of the vessel. Mutiny on the Rising Sun recounts the origins, events, and eventual fate of the Rising Sun's final smuggling voyage in vivid detail.

Starting from that night in June 1743, it narrates a history of smuggling, providing an incredible story of those caught in the webs spun by illicit commerce. The case generated a rich documentary record that illuminates an international chocolate smuggling ring, the lives of the crew and mutineers, and the harrowing experience of the enslaved people trafficked by the Rising Sun.

Smuggling stood at the center of the lives of everyone involved with the business of the schooner. Larger forces, such as imperial trade restrictions, created the conditions for smuggling, but individual actors, often driven by raw ambition and with little regard for the consequences of their actions, designed, refined, and perpetuated this illicit commerce.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review
: The first third of the book is explaining the mutineers, their lives, and their society to us; it is not the swiftest or most action-packed start. This was not a negative for this reader, as I was more than a little appalled and repulsed by the details of the lives chosen by dramatis personae in their access of greed.

The mutiny itself is an event that was documented well enough to give the author a lot of detail that he is not reluctant to share with us. As I am interested in the world these men inhabited, and as their actions and motives are so illuminating of the attitudes and the expectations of the time, I was again kept involved. Adequate citations matter to me in history reads and I was almost pleased with them here...could have had more in-line citations at times, but I was not left with the feeling he was making it up.

The last half was more the opinionating, and that was enough in line with my own strongly held opinions that I felt no dragging of my interest in the story of slaving, smuggling, and the awful human cost of people's love for chocolate (which I don't share). The mutineers were men of their time, they had no moral qualm with what was haening on the ship; they wanted more than they were getting of the proceeds from the captain's flouting of the laws of the Empire whose own greed was in conflict with all the men's personal greeds.

Edified, I was not. The so-called justice meted out on the mutineers appalled and disgusted me. It was, to my mind, a bit overplayed...but it was what factually happened to more men than these, and many better than these greedy fucks, whose moral compasses only saw the money that the moral outrage of slavery could bring.

This is a well-written and thoroughly researched (as far as records can go in this time, which is limited in both its completeness and survival). It is not action-packed, so look elsewhere for derring-do. It is a readable cauionary tale about the consequences to real human beings when their greed is untrammelled.
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richardderus | Jan 13, 2024 |
By the time of the Civil War, the New England states were known to be home to abolitionists and to many free Black intellectuals and activists. Yet, New England history is not unstained by slavery. In fact, Colonial New England was one of the earliest places in British North America where the practice of enslaving Africans and codifying their dependent status occured. This slim but informative volume offers an outline of slavery in New England.

While the number of slaves in New England was small relative to the Southern colonies, there were greater concentrations in larger cities such as Boston, Newport, and Bristol where the Black population approached 10%, and even more rural communities such as Deerfield. As a result of enslaved people being held in more urban areas, they were less likely to work in agriculture but in a great variety of skilled and unskilled labor such as building trades, shipbuilding, distilling, and as sailors. Enslavers could hire out their enslaved people for extra income, and Hardesty even details the practice of self-hiring when enslaved people would take on jobs of their interest (sharing a percentage of their income with their masters). Some Black people earned money to buy their freedom in this way.

Blacks were not the only people held as slaves, as New England colonists captured Native people and traded them to Caribbean colonies. In at least one instant, Carolina Indians were held as slaves in New England. Apart from direct slave ownership, New Englanders were deeply invested in the trade and trafficking of slaves in Africa and the West Indies, particularly in the port cities of Rhode Island. Even the common people profited by this trade by investing into shares of the slave ships.

The most illuminating part of this book is that it tells the personal stories of several enslaved and free Black people in New England. Their is Belinda Sutton who successfully petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for reparations for her captivity by the Royall family of Medford. Venture Smith had three different masters, learned a variety of trades, and eventually saved up to purchase his freedom. Onesimus, held by Cotton Mather, steadfastly refused to convert to Christianity. Briton Hammon wrote a narrative of his life as a sailor. And Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker established the precedent for judicial emancipation in Massachusetts by filing suits under the commonwealth's new constitution of 1780.

This is an excellent and important work of popular history that should be read by anyone studying the history of New England, slavery, and Black Americans.

Favorite Passages:
“Most Africans who ended up in the region came from two places in Africa: the Gold Coast and Senegambia in the northern part of sub-Saharan Africa.” – p. 46

“Unlike our modern world, New England before the American Revolution was not a place of universal freedom. Rather multiple forms of dependence characterized society. Slavery, although an extreme and uniquely violent form of subjugation, existed alongside more traditional forms of bondage such as indentured servitude, apprenticeship, and marriage. Almost everyone living in New England would have been in a state of dependence at some point in their lives, and at no given time was less than 60 percent of the total population legally bound in some way.” – p. 52
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Othemts | Dec 20, 2023 |

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