Markus Rediker, Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea – Verso, March 2026

Conspiracy, mutiny, and liberation across the Atlantic from the award-winning author of The Slave Ship

Freedom Ship is a gripping history of the enslaved African Americans who stowed away on vessels that carried them to liberty. Up to 100,000 fugitives successfully fled the horrors of bondage in the American South. Many moved northwards through a network of secret routes and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. Thousands of others, most of them completely unknown, escaped by sea. Their dramatic accounts of whispered conspiracy and billowing sails make Freedom Ship essential and en­thralling reading.

From the docks of Savannah and Charleston to Boston Harbor and beyond, Freedom Ship traces the seekers who turned their sights to the sea. Stowaways regularly arrived in Britain aboard cotton ships bound for Liverpool. Moses Roper, one of the most determined runaways in American history, travelled 350 miles through slave coun­try before boarding the Napoleon and sailing for England. He became the first self-emancipated bondsman to lecture in the cause of abolition in Britain. Legendary abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman both saw the shipping lanes as paths to freedom.

Marcus Rediker displays a prodigious command of ar­chival research to embark on a thrilling journey along the Atlantic seaboard, following those who risked everything in a maritime pursuit of freedom.