The moon the brightest and clearest they would ever have seen

This reworking of Melville’s (chilling) Benito Cereno (or is it a liner-notes cum commentary) certainly measures up.

I have known about the West African kingdoms and the Bony Island trade already from The Voyage of Slave Ship Hare; and a little about the working of the privateering business from Dark Places of the Earth; and a little about early sailing around south Chile from In the Heart of the Sea; but I knew nothing of the slave trade in in the Southern Cone — Uruguay, Argentina, Chile; or of the history of rebellions on slave ships; and certainly nothing of the sealing business. (Yuck).

And Grandin knows how to tell a story to give one a shudder: in his description of the slave train crossing the Andes, at the feet of Aconcagua, on Laylat al-Qadr, the holiest night of the Ramadan; with the moon the brightest and clearest the slaves would ever have seen; he first carefully prepares the reader by telling us about the white petrified trees spotted there by Darwin some years prior (“during his trek over the Andes at an altitude of about 7,000 feet, [he came] across a grove of calcified trees standing white and straight “like Lot’s wife.” He [looked] back behind him toward the pampas and [realized] he is  standing in what had once been the bottom of the sea”. (“Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his  shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic;  and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.”).

Now, that’s damn good writing.

Greg Grandin , The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World