Samboe; Or, The African Boy

What happens when a man of reasonable conscience enters an unreasonable world? Mary Ann Hedge's 1824 novel drops us into the belly of the slave trade through Charles Irving, a young Englishman whose knowledge of West African customs has made him invaluable to the merchant captains who sail these waters. He is not a monster. He is something worse: a man who sees clearly and still looks away. The novel opens with the merchants' cold instructions to their agents: encourage warfare among the local populations, for war means captives, and captives mean profit. Yet Hedge refuses to let us look away so easily. Through Irving's eyes we witness the gorgeous, fertile coast of West Africa, the same land that produces the wealth that feeds this horror. He befriends an African boy named Samboe, and it is through this friendship that the full moral weight of what Irving participates in becomes undeniable. This is abolitionist fiction in its most direct and troubling form, a novel that asks what remains of a man's humanity when he trades in human lives.