schools. we have them also read thomas paine, jefferson, martin luther king, abraham lincoln. not that i believe everything in the liberal arts has to be at the base but i do believe the multiculturalism viewpoints and ideas are important things that are crucial. >> thank you everybody for being here.. there are so many amazing panels and a lot of them conflict with one another so i appreciate that folks chose to be here. as someone who's read all the books on this panel, i can tell you that the quality lives up to both the architecture and everything else in the room so you're not going to be disappointed. this panel is called history on the open sea. it features the works of eric j immediately to my left, revels appc, privateering and the american revolution while also discussing "the last slave ship the true story of how flotilla was found, her descendents and extraordinary reckoning. the third author whose speech on the panel, tom unfortunately can't be here today but i do hope that everybodydy will spend some time with his book to the uttermost ends ofc the earth te south's most feared ship and greatest battle of the civil war. in my experiences i've never spent time i am an author that wished they had less time to talk so we will let these gentlemen have that much extra time not to mention more opportunity for questions from the audience and i imagine there will be many so taken together all these books take seemingly familiar moments of u.s. history and force us as readers to sort of reinterpret some of those moments by orienting towards the water and the open seas. what i want to do is i will start by having each of the authors take a few minutes to describe their book in whatever they way they want. i have some questions and then we will open it up to the floor. thank you again everybody for being here. >> i guess that's me. the mic on? okay. thank you very much for coming and thanks to the mississippi book festival for inviting me. this is the second time i've been here. glad to be back. came in 2018 and talked about black flags and blue waters in pirated book but first let me start with the definition so everybody's on the same page. privateers are armed vessels owned by private individuals that are given government permission to attack enemy ships during times of war. that permission is in the form of ae, letter of mark which is a legal government document that gives the right to take belligerent vessels, bring them into port, have them out adjudicated and if it is deemed a debt valid prize or spoil of war,e then the owners and investors in the privateer get 50% of the profit or proceeds of selling the ship and its cargo and the men who fought on board of the privateer get the other 50%. now i want to tell you a story about b something i start off te book with.ee he was a privateer out of salem and his privateer was named the pickering and during the americand revolution he capturd numerous british o prizes, brout hundreds of cannons as many british prisoners, bu' there is one battle in particular that he is very well known for at the time, he is not well known for it now and we will getet to thaa little bit later. i had to do with a vessel called the achilles. he was off the port in spain in june of 1780 and the achilles stood in his way. the pickering was a small ship that only had 48 men on board. sixteen cannons. of the achilles was much larger and had 123 men on board and 43 cannons most of which were much larger than the pickering 6-pound cannons, so the british pairs and are on board turned to the jonathan nanda said you better get out of here this isn't going to be a fair fight and it wasn't going to be, but jonathan said to this man i shan't run from her and he didn't and the next morning when they actuallypl battled, a thousand people from the port had wandered to the beach to watch thee spectacle offshore this british and american ship fighting each other. the battle lasted for about two hours and then jonathan decided to have his men loaded the cannons bar shot which is basically two cannonballs connected by an iron bar and when it exits the canon it starts spinning wildly and can/sales if it hits directly so he chased it but it was a little too fast and got away. he spun around and recaptured the british privateert that he had captured earlier and all told on board, one man had been killed, his head had been sheared off by a cannonball and he had been seriously injured. now, his battle and his career was commemorated in 1909 by the sons of the american revolution. they put a plaque, large bronze plaque in salem massachusetts right o next door to my hometown of marblehead massachusetts just north of boston.th while i was working on the book i read about this plaque that has an image of the achilles into the pickering fighting so i hopped on my bike. this is during covid, went over to salem and i looked in the square where the book said the plaque was supposedly located. i found a lot of other historical plaqueses but not ths one so i went back home and called the local historian h ani said what's up with the plaque, where did it go and she starts laughing. i said what's going on.er she said you're not going to like where itve is. it's moved many years ago and nobody knows when and it's inside of a korean barbecue restaurant about two blocks away. so i got back on my bike and went to the korean barbecue restaurant, walked in and the woman wass so excited to see me because it's the height of covid and she had no customers and she thought i was there to buy some food. unfortunately, i probably should have bought some food but i didn't. i said i'm here to see what's behind your head and there was this plaque which was almost 3 feet wide and 4 feet tall and i think that is emblematic of how privateering is treated in american history. people either don't know anything about it or its shunted aside and privateers had a huge impact on the war. there were nearly 2,000 bsh.pa n privateers. nearly 40,000 men served on those ships. they captured almost 2,000 british ships. they made the british believed they played a role in bringing fans into the war and on the side of theca americans. they caused insurance rates to precipitously rise on the oceans of the british freight. they bought valuable goods and money intoto american ports. they forced the british navy to convoy its merchant ships and to go out and seek and destroy american privateers. they also added it to the weariness on the part of british merchants in particular for continuing this protracted war, and perhaps most importantly but hardest to measure, they gave americanshu confidence because f the hundreds and perhaps thousands of articles written on privateering the 30 newspapers that were being published in the colonies at this time, positive articles about privateers acapturing british privates. they gave americans some confidence especially in the early most disastrous years of the war that we might actually win sosy it had a psychological impact. the last story i want to tell is about my daughterd and again i mentioned i wrote this book during covid and i wrote the book faster than any other book i've written because i had nothing to do other than write this book and i also had some new office mates. my wife started working from home in the kitchen. my son came home from college to do his schooling in the house and my daughter who is a literary agent in new york came back home for a year and a half. none of my kids have ever read any of my books with the exception of my daughter reading my pirate book. so, when i found a picture of a guy named elias davis, he was incredibly good-looking. if you've seen pictures of nathaniel hawthorne when he was young, he was better looking than nathaniel hawthorne which is saying a lot. so i saw this picture and had an idea. ir called my daughter who was single at the time and still is single to this day if anybody watching is listening in new york -- [laughter] i shouldn't haved said that. anyway. [laughter] but anyway, i called her into take a look and my heart went aflutter when i saw him. he's a good-looking guy. i said take a look at this guy, he's a privateer. she took a good hard look and said i could really get into privateering. so she hasn't read the book tot this day but i still have some hope. >> thank you. >> the last slave ship is sort of two stories, the story of how i found the flotilla which was the last ship to bring slaves into the african country and with people on it. so that's kind of what i want to set up a little bit. the reason i wrote about it and the reason people are still talking k about it is what we kw about the entire affair including the people who were on the ship. the ship came in in 1860 on the eve of the civil war. at that point in the united states itng had been illegal to bring africans into the country rsince 1808. most people don't realize it. slavery was still legal but you could no longer import africans. so because of that, when it arrived almost all the enslaved people there were very few people left who knew what life in africafr was like, who had experienced an african slave trade who'd t experienced the middle passage so these were alien things by the time this happens. so the peoplena get kidnapped ad then they come to america. they are brought here. the ship is burned of the night it arrives or three nights later to hide theme evidence of this crime because the federal agents were already in pursuit of the people behind by the time they'd returned from africa mainly yabecause the flamboyant steam boat captain who paid for sending the ship to africa bragged constantly about what he was doing which was a hanging crime at the time. as with these people are enslaved for five years into than a free at the end of the war. they wanted to get back to africa. there were 110 of them but they couldn't afford passage. they saved up their money and bought land from their former enslavers about five different plantations and build a new town in america still there in alabama today and because this was the last slave ship became sort of a celebrity in the country and was interviewed dozens of times before he died he became so famous that when he did die, "the new york times" about it anduary this is a lot for the steamboat captain from mobile alabama to end up in "the new york times." when all the reporters were coming here and there were publications around today like harbors or whatever they would interview timothy about what t he'd done and then they would go to africa town and sometimes try and interview the africans. they usually just wrote a post card off with the village looked like in their houses and things like that. but in those interviews we have this treasure trove of the story of what happened to people from their own mouths. perhaps thert most important happened at about 1914 a mobile woman whose father was a civil war hero, a confederate civil war hero and owned a funeral home. she had grown up knowing some of the africans because they were gravediggersrs for her father after they were freed. so she interviews ten of them while they are still alive in 1914. her book allowed him to come to mobile in 1927 and interview coupr joe lewis who was the lat survivor at that point and the book was published a few years ago and is incredible so from the stories, we have all those things i mentioned. we know what their lives were likeer and they were quite wonderful. kudrow talks about how he and his siblings would run through the forest hunting for food and things., we know how brutal the raid was where he was captured. we know that the nation that captured coup joe and the other people was one of the most brutal regimesum in history. kudrow was captured by the empire which was responsible according to most historical accounts of capturing about one third of the 12 million people who were enslaved. so we have the story of the raid, and we know this incredible detail from his own mouths and from the mouths of the others who were interviewed when they attacked. if you are not between about 12 and 30, they killed you so they killed everybody in the villages they attack and left no one behind alive. when weio talk about the 12 million people who were enslaved, we also need to think about the tens of millions who were probably killed back in africa to begin to understand. so the book is it deals with all those things and when i started it i was just looking for the ship as an investigative reporter to solve a mystery but i came to understand it was this ghost that has been haunting these groups since the night it burned. the family that paid for it still live in mobile where they are among the largest wealthiest landowners in the area and they've never interacted with the people despite repeated requests to have some sort of reconciliation. they are so ashamed of what happened theypu want to speak publicly so they are being hauntedie by the ship. i interview people in africa town who'd grown up who were descendents of the people and had no idea until they were much older, 60, 70-years-old because their parents lied to them about it because they were ashamed of being associated with the last slaveen ship. then i went to modern day and found people there are still totally haunted by this story. when i mention all the people killed in africa, the scars are still there very present. the tribe is what they are called now as the largest ethnic group. everybody from a variety of different tribes were all. captured and you can tell what tribes the people are from by facialay clarifications and things.an so you can walk down the street and say that guy is from the tribe that captured my people or those are somee people who were captured and so they are very worried in that country today about a tribal resentment just like what happened in rwanda starting the civil war in the country so they still try to wrestle with thiss history toda. so that's what my book is about. >> thank you both. the first question i have both of you came at that from different ways so take what you will with this. i wonder how the taking the maritime aspect of your respective stories to do that work of forcing the interpretation of certain aspects of history that we felt pretty certain we knew about before reading them. >> one of the things that excited me about this book is i didn't learn anything about it high school or i was going to say college but i only went to one history course in college. i wish i had taken more. i was a biologist back then. but the fact that this story is so poorly known and not taught about is something that attracted me to it and now i totally spaced on the question. that's horrible. [laughter] >> essentially changing how we think about it.t. >> when people think about the american revolution, they think a lot about land-based battles and famous founders and like george washington, the great battle on land and not so much therg sea. george washington the first time he said our victory in the american revolution was a miracle and the reason it was a standing miracle is that there were very many elements that had to go just right if troops had shown up in a few days earlier or later it might have been a different outcome. my argument in the book is privateering played ae significant role. it's one of those things that had to go just right to have the revolution and the way that it did so by focusing on the maritime aspect of the war as well as the land-based aspects of the war you get a full picture and it's very easily argued that the revolution is a seminal event in american history right up there with the civil war and something we should have a better grasp on how it started and how it's fought and how we one because one of the tenuous battles up until the very end, the privateers who had been forgotten in history deserved to be heralded along with all the others, a difficult pantheon of people that we focused on in the american revolution and i think we will get into this a little bit later but part of the reason people had forgotten about privateers as people sort of assumed privateering was legalized privacy and something that isn't very about it. while in the earlier centuries many privateers like francis street and a lot of the privateers i talk about in my book actually were nothing but pirates. a great example of that in the late 1600s there were many, england was at war with france during king william's war and england sent out a lot of privateers to battle france in the american colonies the colonial governors gave out letters to ships to go out and battle with france. they charged people 300 pounds of pop to get the letters marked which isn't legal but the reason is because it was a racket. those privateers did not go out and battle the french. instead they went around the cape of good hope into the indian ocean. they attacked ships that were transiting between the indian subcontinent and the red seaports and thenn they brought back the treasure to the american colonies and to boot, the pirates, quote unquote privateers had to pay 100 pounds or pieces per person to the governor as a kickback to get permission to reenter the ports without being molested because piracy was a capital offense. so privateers were very often pirates but during the american revolution, they most definitely were not. i think that if we should look back on them more favorably and not relegate them to a slideshow in history, they were part of the main event. one other thing i point out in the book is the continental navy although it has the bright spot during the war, the american revolution was the navy's first hour. it wasn't its finest hour and while we may have preferred to have a powerful navy go toe to toe with the british navy, that wasn't going to be the case in a country that was barely functioning, couldn't levy taxes and had difficult enough times forwarding the army so into the void on the maritime side of the privateers.e they were our militia of the sea. they were our cost free navy. and i just loved writing about them and i learned a lot about the topic obviously. i feel the monuments to them should not be relegated to barbecue restaurants. [laughter] >> before you answer, just to givepl you another kind of exame from the book about the power of this type of analysis is that if you are talking about privateering you have to look at the economic aspects and how the sailors and ship captains are being paid and i think one of the powerful moments in the book is when eric is talking about this economic aspect of it and then he pushes pause and says we never even talk that much about all the other soldiers and all their economic motivations, so when you start asking questions about pirate tears it solved and leave raises these other areas that obviously i guess you have more books to write. so which again comes back to this notion that we are not just adding water or if we are it's transformative of the larger narrative. go ahead. >> tsince we are talking a lot about pirates, the folks that sailed to africa were pirates the moment they left the dock. they were on an illegal -- intod the captain referred to it that way and the crew would meet four times during the trip. the first time when they figured out they unwittingly had become pirates. but in a larger sense, this story is about one of the most important maritime events in the history of the world which was the enslavement of 12 million people who were then transported from their homeland to other countries across the ocean. it is hard to escape the maritime aspect of the story of enslavement when you see those images of ships that were designed to carry people where you see them all spread around laying down on the deck santa things. this there were about 20,000 involved in the global slave trade over the