John Broich

3.5 stars.

First, the writing was excellent. Details and events were felt natural and part of the whole narrative rather than a break in the writing.

Two, this was a biography of Meara, Heath, Colomb, and Sulivan more than history but not by much.

Three, I wish the author had started the book with a general overview of slavery, the slave trade from Africa, who took part in that trade, and what happened to support and/or stop the slave trade prior to the squadron starting their work. I felt that I had ended up in the middle of a book series and felt a little lost.

Overall, a good book.… (mehr)

I am indebted to Somali Bookaholic who recommended this book to me in conversation about my review of Petals of Blood. It’s a very interesting book about four British naval captains who in the mid 18th century undertook anti-slavery activity off the African coast without always having had official authority to do so.
Britain had abolished slavery, but still, there was significant trade even after the end of the American Civil War. Some of the ships involved were British operating illegally and some were French operating legally, and the persisting trade was done in collusion with African rulers and traders themselves. These local ‘diplomatic’ issues made Britain reluctant to interfere with ongoing slavery as practised in Africa and also in what was then British India, and in the Jamaican plantations. And the French involvement, whose position on slavery vacillated according to its latest revolution, was additionally complicated because interfering with their ships or local ships flown under their flag, meant at times the risk of provoking war with Napoleon.
As I recorded on my travel blog in 2010, according to a timeline at the slavery exhibit in the Musee d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux, the first attempt to end the French slave trade came shortly after the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 but it was brought back under Napoleon, and then abolished again in 1848, 15 years after Britain passed its Abolition Act in 1833. The photo shows a model of a French slave ship and you can just see on the far wall, a diagram of how the slaves were packed in like sardines, sometimes packed in so tightly that they were paralysed from lack of mobility during the voyage. They died in their hundreds at sea.
To read the rest of m review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/07/15/squadron-ending-the-african-slave-trade-by-j...… (mehr)