Project Description

At the start of the American War of Independence, Great Britain dominated overseas commerce and was the leading slave-trading nation in the world. In 1776, American privateers—privately owned ships granted commissions by the Continental Congress to attack and disrupt enemy trade—began to prey on British merchantmen.  Some privateers captured British slave ships with African captives on board just before they arrived at their Caribbean Island destinations.

The Journal of the Good Ship Marlborough, the story of this remarkable voyage is told here for the first time and will have a major impact on our understanding of the Atlantic slave trade and the American Revolution. The voyage of the Marlborough was the brainchild of John Brown, a prominent Rhode Island merchant—and an investor in two slave trading voyages himself. The motivation was not altruistic. The officers and crew of the Marlborough wanted to advance the cause of independence from Britain through harming Britain’s economy, but they also desired to enrich themselves by selling the plunder they captured—including enslaved Africans.

The work of the Marlborough and other American privateers was so disruptive that it led to an unintended consequence: virtually halting the British slave trade. British slave merchants, alarmed at losing money from their ships being captured, invested in many fewer slave voyages.  As a result tens of thousands of Africans were not forced onto slave ships, transported to the New World, and consigned to a lifetime of slavery or an early death.

Dark Voyage: An American Privateer’s War on Britain’s African Slave Trade, historian Christian McBurney recreates the harrowing voyage of the Marlborough, while placing it in the context of Atlantic World slavery. In Africa, Marlborough’s officers come across an array of African and European slave traders willing to assist them in attacking the British. This book is also the first study to detail the many captures American privateers made of British slave ships during the Revolutionary War.

How to Purchase:

These outlets have Dark Voyage in stock:

Southern Rhode Island:

Wakefield Books, Wakefield Mall (many copies in stock)

Picture This, Wakefield

Island Bound Bookstore, Block Island, Water Street

Block Island Historical Society Museum Shop, 18 Old Town Road

Newport and Aquidneck Island:

Charter Books, Newport, 8 Broadway (its new, just north of the Old State House)

Commonwealth Books, Newport, 29 Touro Street

Island Books, Middletown, Wyatt Square, 575 E. Main Road

Newport Historical Society Gift Shop, Newport, 127 Thames Street (Brick Market building)

Northern Rhode Island:

Barrington Books, Barrington, 184 County Road

Books on the Square, Providence, 471 Angell Street

Stillwater Books, Pawtucket, 175 Main Street

(Most of the above stores also carry my books The Rhode Island Campaign: The First French and American Operation in the Revolutionary War and Spies in Revolutionary Rhode Island.)

To purchase the book from the publisher’s website, click here.

To purchase the book online at amazon.com, click here.

If you do purchase Dark Voyage, it would be greatly appreciated if you could complete a review of it on Amazon. Such reviews are particularly helpful to authors who do not have big publishers behind them.  You can post them on Amazon even if you do not purchase it from there, so long as it is at least a somewhat detailed submission that shows you read the book.  Thank you!

Praise for Dark Voyage from distinguished historians:

“Historians have not adequately explained the slave trade’s spectacular collapse during the American Revolutionary War. Through his focus on the Marlborough, an American privateer that wreaked havoc on Britain’s slave trade in Africa, Christian McBurney illuminates in precise detail how the war shattered the business. He also reveals the remarkable array of people engaged in slaving across the Atlantic World, and the terrible consequences of their decisions for the enslaved. Dark Voyage thus sheds important new light on the slave trade’s history and the American Revolutionary War’s truly global impact.”

–Nicholas Radburn, Lecturer at Lancaster University, Author of Articles on the British Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and Co-Editor of SlaveVoyages.org

“Although focused on the singularly important and remarkable voyage of the Rhode Island privateer Marlborough to Africa, Christian McBurney gives the first systematic account of the impact American privateers had on the British slave trade, providing further evidence of the effectiveness of the privateers as a tool of war against the British.  Dark Voyage is an excellent vehicle for exploring both American privateering and the British slave trade.”

— Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, Vice President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and Professor of History, University of Virginia, and author of The Men Who Lost America, British Leadership, the American Revolution, and The Fate of the Empire and An Empire Divided, The American Revolution and the British Caribbean

“Dark Voyage is an important and welcome contribution to the literature. By detailing the significant impact that American privateers during the War for Independence had on Great Britain’s African slave trade, mainly through the extraordinary story of an American privateer’s voyage to Africa, McBurney highlights an overlooked, but critical part of not only the Revolutionary War story, but also the story of slavery writ large.”

— Eric Jay Dolin, author of Rebels at Sea:  Privateering in the American Revolution

“Beyond John Paul Jones, the naval history of the American Revolutionary War is terra incognita to most Americans. McBurney’s wonderful book should help change that as he masterfully and entertainingly explores a practically-unknown American naval success and its far-reaching consequences.”

— Dennis Conrad, editor of Naval Documents of the American Revolution and Papers of General Nathanael Greene