By Marcus Rediker.  ISBN 978-014-3114253.  Copyright 2007.  Softcover with 434 pages including notes and index, plus 16 pages of black and white maps and illustrations.  

Winner of the 2008 George Washington Book Prize.

In this intimate human history of an inhuman institution, Marcus Rediker shines a light into the darkest corners of the British and American slave ships of the eighteenth century.  Drawing on thirty years of research in maritime archives, including court records, diaries, memoirs, and interviews conducted by abolitionists along the waterfront, the author illuminates the lives of people who were thought to have left without a trace.