Emma Christopher

The Murderer and His Victim: Tracing a Lost Convict of the Botany Bay Decision

William Murray, alias Kenneth McKenzie, and his murderer, the real Kenneth McKenzie, occupy crucial roles in the so-called Botany Bay Decision, that is, Britains resolution to settle a penal colony in Australia in the 1780s. Their intriguing, tangled story is part of the initial post-American Revolution scheme, which saw male convicts released into two independent companies to go and fight on the west coast of Africa. William Murray had already been transported to the American colonies and had illicitly returned to London. Then sent to Africa, he was one of the many convict-soldiers who ran amok, causing problems with the slave traders. His murderers life is equally complex: a story of bravery, hope and ambition going very wrong. This article traces their stories.

Colloquy with Marcus Rediker on The Slave Ship: A Human History

On the last afternoon of the Society of Early Americanists’ most recent biennial conference, sixty-plus colleagues gathered to hear an interdisciplinary panel of scholars focusing on historian Marcus Rediker’s book The Slave Ship: A Human History. In accepting my invitation, Rediker had agreed to be one voice among several, rather than serving simply as the respondent. Four of the participants in this follow-up roundtable were each very much a part of that session: Emma Christopher, Sean Goudie, Marcus Rediker and Karen Salt had each agreed to make a brief opening statement describing issues and questions that the book raises, which they hoped the audience and panelists would then discuss. The two other participants here, Ned Blackhawk and William Boelhower, were not at the table, but each has agreed to participate in this continuation of that afternoon’s conversation. Indeed, once the discussion began, Professor Blackhawk raised the stakes by bringing up the Barry Unsworth novel Sacred Hunger and, along with it, issues of genocide that involve Native Americans who were living, and dying by the hundreds of thousands, during the period that The Slave Ship historicizes. The other panelist here had originally been on the panel (as had Vincent Carretta) but was not able to be at the conference. Upon returning from Bermuda, I contacted him and described how substantive, and at moments moving the discussion had been; when I asked if there might be space in the pages of Atlantic Studies for a follow-up article along the lines that the roundtable had laid out, he agreed. He also agreed to contribute the commentary, here, with which he would have participated in that afternoon’s opening comments. The following comments serve, then, as a richly fleshed-out version of what one would have heard in early March 2009 at that session in a hotel in Bermuda, in the middle of the metaphorical space that Paul Gilroy and Joseph Roach have taught us to see as the Black Atlantic and the circum-Atlantic. Each of these participants has continued reflecting on the book The Slave Ship and on ways it helps us place the eighteenth century’s Atlantic slave trade in a perspective that has meaning in our time. A significant difference here is the addition of the comments by Professors Boelhower and Blackhawk, comments that frame those by panelists Goudie, Salt and Christopher (which appear, here, in the sequence in which each one spoke at the colloquy). Another difference is that, this time around, Marcus Rediker has agreed to contribute a coda, drawing on the others’ observations and expanded comments.

From the ‘Ballad-Singing Monkey’ to the ‘Cunning Savages’: The Voyage to Found a British Colony on the Orange River, 1785–1786

ABSTRACT After the loss of their American colonies and prior to the settlement of the land which became known as Australia, the British Government intended to found a penal settlement in South West Africa at the mouth of the Orange River. The main proposer of this scheme, Edward Thompson, died before the plan was put into action. This article asks the counterfactual question of what might have happened, had Thompson lived to give a very different story of the voyage to ‘Das Voltas’.

Another head of the hydra?: Slave trade sailors and militancy on the African coast

This paper looks at the activities of the sailors on board British and North American slave ships on the coast of West Africa. It argues that the West African coast was a central part of the Atlantic arena, where seamen deserted from their ships, resisted the authority of their captain, and occasionally took the more extreme action of taking their ships and turning pirate. They did this not in isolation from local African workers, but rather in connection with them.