I am pleased to announce the release of my latest book!
The book is entitled Dark Voyage: An American Privateer’s War on Britain’s African Slave Trade (Westholme, 2022). The book is a fascinating microhistory of a Rhode Island privateer during the American Revolutionary War that sails to the coast of Africa and attacks a British slave trading post and British slave ships. At the time, Britain was the world’s leading slave trading country. The book further details for the first time other American privateers capturing numerous British slave ships just before they reached their destinations in the Caribbean, with the consequence of seriously disrupting and virtually halting the British slave trade during the war years. On the other hand, the American privateers, in selling their captured human cargo, in effect became slave traders themselves.
This is a ground-breaking book that tells a story of the Revolutionary War never before told.
This is also very much a Rhode Island story. The main investor and mastermind behind the voyage was Providence merchant John Brown. With his experience in investing in two prior slave voyages, Brown had the boldness, knowledge and expertise to send his new privateer to Africa. The privateer, called the Marlborough, was built in Providence. Most of the officers and crew hailed from North Kingstown, Exeter and other Rhode Island towns. The main source for the story is a ship’s log written by John Linscom Boss of Newport.
Here are some blurbs about the book from prominent historians:
“Historians have not adequately explained the slave trade’s spectacular collapse during the American Revolutionary War. Through his focus on the Marlborough, an American privateer that wreaked havoc on Britain’s slave trade in Africa, Christian McBurney illuminates in precise detail how the war shattered the business. He also reveals the remarkable array of people engaged in slaving across the Atlantic World, and the terrible consequences of their decisions for the enslaved. Dark Voyage thus sheds important new light on the slave trade’s history and the American Revolutionary War’s truly global impact.”
–Nicholas Radburn, Lecturer at Lancaster University, Co-Editor of SlaveVoyages.org and Author of the forthcoming Traders in Men: Merchant Capitalism and Britain’s Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 1701-1807 (Yale University Press, 2023)
“Although focused on the singularly important and remarkable voyage of the Rhode Island privateer Marlborough to Africa, Christian McBurney gives the first systematic account of the impact American privateers had on the British slave trade, providing further evidence of the effectiveness of the privateers as a tool of war against the British. Dark Voyage is an excellent vehicle for exploring both American privateering and the British slave trade.”
— Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, Vice President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and Professor of History, University of Virginia, and author of The Men Who Lost America, British Leadership, the American Revolution, and The Fate of the Empire and An Empire Divided, The American Revolution and the British Caribbean
“Dark Voyage is an important and welcome contribution to the literature. By detailing the significant impact that American privateers during the War for Independence had on Great Britain’s African slave trade, mainly through the extraordinary story of an American privateer’s voyage to Africa, McBurney highlights an overlooked, but critical part of not only the Revolutionary War story, but also the story of slavery writ large.”
— Eric Jay Dolin, author of Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution
Participating Independent Bookstores and Historical Society Gift Shops:
We should all support Rhode Island’s wonderful independent bookstores and historical society gift shops! Currently, their price for Dark Voyage is no higher than amazon.com’s ($35).
These outlets as of July 14 have Dark Voyage in stock:
Wakefield Books, Wakefield Mall (many copies in stock)
Charter Books, Newport, 8 Broadway (just north of the Old State House; it is a wonderful, bright, new bookstore; fiction and children’s books on the first floor, nonfiction below)
Commonwealth Books, Newport, 29 Touro Street
Barrington Books, Barrington, 184 County Road
These outlets have ordered Dark Voyage and should have it in stock by Tuesday, July 19 or so:
Newport Historical Society Gift Shop, Newport, 127 Thames Street (Brick Market building)
Island Books, Middletown, Wyatt Square, 575 E. Main Road
Books on the Square, Providence, 471 Angell Street
Stillwater Books, Pawtucket, 175 Main Street
Island Bound Bookstore, Block Island, Water Street
Block Island Historical Society Museum Shop, 18 Old Town Road
(Most of the above stores also carry my books The Rhode Island Campaign: The First French and American Operation in the Revolutionary War and Spies in Revolutionary Rhode Island.)
To purchase the book online at amazon.com, click here.
You can also purchase from the publisher’s website.
If you do purchase Dark Voyage, it would be greatly appreciated if you could complete a review of it on amazon.com. Such reviews are particularly helpful to authors who do not have big New York or London publishers behind them.
More on the Author
This is Christian McBurney’s sixth book on the American Revolutionary War, four of which have Rhode Island as a focus. Christian is President of The George Washington American Revolution Round Table of the District of Columbia, and is the founder and publisher of Rhode Island’s leading history blog at smallstatebighistory.com. He is an independent historian residing in Kensington, Maryland, with a second home in West Kingston, Rhode Island. He is an attorney in Washington, D.C.
For more on Christian’s books and his upcoming speaking events and book signings, go to www.christianmcburney.com
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