Episode 397: Mutiny on the Black Prince

In April 1769 a small British vessel sailing along the southern coast of Hispaniola discovered a shipwreck near the current border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. An investigation found no survivors aboard. But they also found a log which identified that ship as the Black Prince. And there the mystery might have ended. But over the next eight years, “ship’s crew members surfaced in unexpected places and recounted its demise.” That demise is part of the story in James H. Sweet’s Mutiny on the Black Prince: Slavery, Piracy, and the Limits of Liberty in the Revolutionary Atlantic World. But so too is how the Black Prince came to be wrecked on the Hispaniolan reef; how its crew escaped; and how the owners of the ship, and the interest they represented, took their own revenge. Above all it is a story of how Atlantic slavery was linked not only to commerce, but nearly every other corner of the 18th century world. James H. Sweet is the Vilas-Jartz Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a past president of the American Historical Association. He has previously been the prize-winning author of Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 and Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World.