The slave ship

About the book

David Scott recalls the consequences of fighting for the Jacobite cause: imprisonment in Edinburgh, a failed escape, and transportation into forced service in Virginia. There he encounters people whose enslavement extends far beyond his own particular defeat. His subsequent passage aboard the Janet brings him into direct contact with the African slave trade and with men skilled at explaining away their participation in it. Johnston makes the narrator's temptation to accept comfort, opportunity, and professional excuses central to the story. Memory supplies a perspective from which earlier evasions can be recognized without making those evasions harmless. The historical adventure therefore asks how someone who has suffered the loss of liberty can still become entangled in a system that denies liberty to others.

• Bondage and complicity
• Self-interest and conscience
• Retrospective moral judgment

Why read it

Scott's changing position within the Atlantic world makes the difference between suffering injustice and recognizing one's participation in it unusually concrete.

Little, Brown, and Company edition, published November 1924