Slave Ship

The apparent return of a ferry at the center of a frantic hunt for suspected child slaves raised more questions than answers Tuesday, with puzzled officials unable to say whether the child traffickers were still at large--or if there ever was a slave ship. The 200-foot ferry that arrived here at 1 a.m. Tuesday carried women and children--but not the 180 captives officials had expected.

SAN FRANCISCO -- As novel as the concept sounds, Blueseed was not the first company to take "offshoring" so literally. In 2005, a San Diego company called SeaCode proposed housing foreign software engineers on a cruise ship three miles off the California coast. The controversial plan to bring low-cost, offshore labor so close to California shores came under fire as a "slave ship" and "sweatshop on the sea. " But Roger Green, an entrepreneur, and David Cook, a former tanker captain who had gone into technology, said they were simply trying to help American businesses.

The Closest Possible Union by Joanna Scott (Ticknor & Fields: $17.95; 290 pages Ostensibly, and for awhile, "The Closest Possible Union" is the tale of 14-year-old Pom, who ships out as a privileged cabin boy aboard the Charles Beauchamp, a sailing ship financed by his father, a wealthy New London merchant. Almost at once, it becomes evident that the ship is, in fact, a slaver bound for the Guinea Coast of Africa.

New York City educators have learned the hard way that there are some things that just don't mix -- like using slavery to teach math. The principal of P.S. 59, a well-thought-of elementary school that draws students from Midtown and the area around the United Nations, told the Daily News that she was “appalled” by the assignment and has ordered sensitivity training for all of the staff. Last month, one of the fourth-grade teachers sent pupils home with math problems that were based on slavery.

When film director and writer Joel Marsden first heard about Watts, his reaction was unfortunately typical--fear. "The name 'Watts' has conjured up bad images that have traveled the world over," said Marsden, 27, who now sees the Watts neighborhood in a completely different light.

Abraham Lincoln famously remarked, "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master." In the many years since, something of the Emancipator's moral point has been lost, along with the memory of what benefiting from slavery entailed. No one who reads Marcus Rediker's searingly brilliant "The Slave Ship: A Human History" can have the slightest doubt concerning the real point of Lincoln's aphorism.

The tall ship Pilgrim, which has provided a dramatic backdrop to California's nautical history for thousands of school-age children, will sail before movie cameras in Steven Spielberg's upcoming film "Amistad." The movie, which stars Anthony Hopkins and Morgan Freeman, focuses on a historic revolt involving African slaves who took over the schooner Amistad in 1839.

The Quality of Mercy A Novel Barry Unsworth Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: 336 pp., $26.95 "Sacred Hunger," which won a half-share in the 1992 Man Booker Prize for Barry Unsworth (the co-winner was Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient"), tracks the adventures of the crew of the slave ship the Liverpool Merchant, that mutinies and establishes an egalitarian community in the Florida swamps. The novel is a parable about the capitalist impulse, about man's lust for "profit, which justifies everything, sanctifies any purposes.

Walking through a corridor of the Henrietta Marie's lower deck, Josie Gordon confronted a deep sadness as she viewed statues of slaves huddled in metal chains. "I could hear their voices," she said. "I could see the pain." Raised from the depths of history from the sea near the Florida Keys, the slave ship Henrietta Marie has embarked on one final voyage.

When Teryl Watkins learned that she had a shot at bringing to Los Angeles a major exhibition featuring artifacts from a slaving vessel that sank nearly 300 years ago, she was ecstatic. But when she looked at the exhibit catalog, disappointment set in. What bothered her, she said, was that organizers of the traveling display minimized the horror of the slave trade and favored an interpretation that focused on Europe and Europeans.

“What good is freedom if you can't do nothing with it?” demands the superb Anthony J. Haney as former Underground Railroad conductor Solly Two Kings in an early defining moment of Rubicon Theatre's solid and at times soul-stirring revival of August Wilson's “Gem of the Ocean.” No dramatist has explored the burdens of freedom in greater depth than Wilson, whose epic 10-play “Pittsburgh Cycle” portraying the struggles and unfulfilled dreams...

The Quality of Mercy A Novel Barry Unsworth Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: 336 pp., $26.95 "Sacred Hunger," which won a half-share in the 1992 Man Booker Prize for Barry Unsworth (the co-winner was Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient"), tracks the adventures of the crew of the slave ship the Liverpool Merchant, that mutinies and establishes an egalitarian community in the Florida swamps. The novel is a parable about the capitalist impulse, about man's lust for "profit, which justifies everything, sanctifies any purposes.

History pays a mind-blowing visit in Daniel Beaty's heartfelt and generally winning solo show "Emergency," which opened Wednesday at the Geffen Playhouse. In the waters of New York Harbor, a stone's throw from the ever-fabulous Lady Liberty, a 400-year-old slave ship surfaces to the amazement of a growing throng of African Americans. Though we never actually see the physical vessel onstage, the crowds of sightseers and tourist merchants hawking "slave ship buttons" assure us that this is no floating phantom.

Abraham Lincoln famously remarked, "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master." In the many years since, something of the Emancipator's moral point has been lost, along with the memory of what benefiting from slavery entailed. No one who reads Marcus Rediker's searingly brilliant "The Slave Ship: A Human History" can have the slightest doubt concerning the real point of Lincoln's aphorism.

LAST WEEK, Prime Minister Tony Blair made an apology that was unusual in both subject and form. Writing in the New Nation, a newspaper for his country's black population, he spoke of his "deep sorrow" for Britain's role in the slave trade and slavery. The occasion for this statement -- and for much more official speechmaking to come -- is the approaching bicentennial of the end of the British slave trade.

Olaudah Equiano wrote with vivid detail of life as human cargo -- the foul smells aboard the slave ship that brought him from West Africa to the New World in the 18th century, the anguished cries of women, the despair of those headed to a life of bondage. The bestselling autobiography he later published is now a key text for scholars studying slavery and its roots in Africa, one of the few first-person accounts by a slave of the brutal cross-Atlantic trip known as the Middle Passage.

SAN FRANCISCO -- As novel as the concept sounds, Blueseed was not the first company to take "offshoring" so literally. In 2005, a San Diego company called SeaCode proposed housing foreign software engineers on a cruise ship three miles off the California coast. The controversial plan to bring low-cost, offshore labor so close to California shores came under fire as a "slave ship" and "sweatshop on the sea. " But Roger Green, an entrepreneur, and David Cook, a former tanker captain who had gone into technology, said they were simply trying to help American businesses.

The public reaction was predictable when word first got out of SeaCode Inc.'s proposal to house 600 foreign software engineers on a cruise ship moored three miles off the California coast, thus undercutting U.S. wage rates and circumventing local labor rules. The veteran technology columnist John Dvorak described the vessel as a "slave ship." Other critics preferred the label "sweatshop." The words "exploitative" and "inhumane" caromed around the Web.

The thin neon light spills on the hands in the tubs, the pale halves of the pears that must be dipped in salt water to keep from turning brown, the endless procession of cans that moves past the women now and at midnight and dawn and on and on even in sleep, even in dream. Fingers turn wrinkled, turn pale like the pears, take on a life of their own as they nestle the slippery fruit spoonfashion in the can, barely stopping to push the straggling hair back under the scarf.