profit and loss balan ce sheet. This gives an unusually compreh en sive insight into the entire clipper ship era and the achievem ent of beauty and speed over vas t oceanic expanses. Al though the author repeats himself at m any junctu res, his prose is excellent and the book's o rganization makes searching for specific info rmation quite easy. For students of the clipper ship era, The American Clipper Ship, 1845-1920 is a good starting point fo r more in-depth research . Lours ARTHUR NORTON Wes t Simsbury, Connecticut
The Slave Trade and the Origins ofInternational Human Rights Law by Jenny S. Martinez (Oxford U niversity Press, Oxford, 2012, 254pp, notes, index, ISBN 978-0- 195319162-6; $29.95 h c) Rousseau observed in 1762 that "Man was born free; and everywh ere h e is in chains." The story of the breaking of those chains is the subject of this wo rk; its contribution to o ur und erstanding of the slave trade is revealing the unique role played by the internatio nal m ixed courts that becam e lost in draftin g the accepted narra tive of the evolution of internatio nal human rights law. This is a fasci n ating acco unt of the efforts in the l 9'h century to end slavery, but it is also a tale of the ships that carried slaves or interdicted the slave trade. The sloop H MS Myrmidon is presented in an opening acco unt of rhe challenges faced by captains on du ty in the Africa station . She captures ships of Spain , France and Po rtugal in 1822, and seeks judgm ent in the international court. The outcomes are no r predictable. In 1800 , slavery was legal in European countries. In the first decade of th e l 9'h century, mo re than 600,000 persons were subjected to the M iddl e Passage tha t bro ught them fro m Africa to the New World. But in 1807, British abolitio nists su cceed ed in p ushing thro ugh Parliam ent a bill that prohibited Bri tish subj ects from participation in the slave trade. America fo llowed with a prohibition of the importation of slaves effective January 1808. The number of slaves imported to America spiked at 22,000 in 1807, and fell to zero by 1809. American ships engaged in the slave trade with other nations also declined from abo ut 120 ships in 1807, to less than ten per year. By the 1840s, all the Atlantic maritime nations had signed
SEA HISTORY 149, WINTER 201 4- 15
trea ties curtailing the slave trade. Jenny Martinez, a law professo r at Stanford University, documents the revolution in thought and p ractice of the international law regarding the slave trade. She argues that "the nineteenth century slavery abolition m ovement was the first successful international human rights campaign, and international treaties and courts were its central features." "Crimes against humanity" was an expression used by som e in rhe nineteenth century to describe the actions of rhe slave trader. The language of rhe law and policy makers is gro unded in the tensions between natural law and the law of nations. Slavery was permitted in the law of n atio ns, often defended as a h um an e alternative to putting prisoners of war to death. Slavery was generally held to be contrary to natural law. But armed ships patrolli ng the African coas t delivered with force th e legal pronouncements to those engaged in rhe slave trade. This was tough du ry for captains and crew, often frustrated by fas ter sailing slavers. They were constrained by laws governing search and seizure. It required som e agile legal minds to finally fi nd that slavers were the enemies of all manki nd, and should be treated as pirates. It is argued that this was achieved in America w ith the passage of an amended piracy law in 1820, discussed in a chap ter tided "H osris Humani Generis." While matters at sea remained the focus of public attention , the legal solution to the slave trade was not found in the prize courts, bur in the international courts of m ixed com m ission . These courts are at the heart of this study. The mixed courts were created fo llowing treary agreements with Britain and established in Freetown, Sierra Leone; H avana, C uba; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Param aribo, Suriname. Two judges sat each court, one British and the other Spanish , Po rtuguese, Dutch , o r French backed up by adjudicators. From 1820 to the 1840s, courts of mixed commission determined a large number of cases and freed an estimated 80,000 persons. Martinez uses the data cautiously, but provides quantitative evidence and 68 pages of notes to support her conclusions. Martinez asks: Why have co ntemporary scholars of internation al law largely fo rgotten the antislavery courts? Why do
WrrH SAILS WHITENING EVERY SEA
MARJN ERS AN O
T H E MAK ING OF AN AMERICAN
MARITIME EMPIRE
WITH SAILS WHITENING EVERY SEA Mariners and the Making ofan American Maritime Empire BRIAN R OULEAU
''American sailors roamed the globe by the hundreds of thousands in the decades before the C ivil War, ye t they've been all but excluded fro m our histories of early U .S. fore ign relations. Brian Rouleau's smart, probing, and tough-minded book will permanently change that." -
BRIAN D EL AY,
UC
B ERKELEY
AVAILABLE IN HARDCOVER OR AS AN EBOOK :?lmerica ~ :first University tPreJ'J'
www.cornellpress.cornell.edu 53