Voyage to a Thousand Cares: Master's Mate Lawrence with the African Squadron, 1844-1846 (review)

The United States Navy's African Squadron in the mid-nineteenth century had one of the most important yet unglamorous jobs in the American military. In a sad historical irony, the United States, within whose borders flourished a highly profitable slave labor system, charged its Navy with fighting the illegal traffic in Africans. The African Squadron's mission was to enforce the 1819 act outlawing the importation of slaves and to implement the provisions of the 1842 Webster-Ashburton Treaty, which called for cooperation between the United States and Great Britain in stamping out the evil practice. The squadron's mission was difficult, dangerous, boring, and in the sickly tropical climate, debilitating to mind, body, and equipment.

Voyage to a Thousand Cares is a journal detailing one young officer's experience on that lonely but important station. Skillfully compiled and edited by Professor C. Herbert Gilliland of the United States Naval Academy, John C. Lawrence's journal allows the modern reader to glimpse a slice of life at sea off the West Coast of Africa in the 1840s and the horrors of the Middle Passage.

Lawrence was only twenty-two when he joined the wardroom of the sixteen-gun sloop of war USS Yorktown, but he was an able and articulate observer of people, places, and events. One is immediately struck by the mind-numbing monotony of the ship's routine, often broken only by changes in the weather, and sometimes not even that. Lawrence's journal recounts his experiences afloat and ashore; particularly interesting are his descriptions of the complex relationships between officers and men living together in cramped quarters for weeks and months. Boredom and alcohol led to many disputes, one of which degenerated into a duel between officers of a sister ship. Lawrence was not impressed with the African natives he frequently encountered. His descriptions and impressions of these people sound outrageously racist and intolerant to twenty-first-century ears but were commonplace in Lawrence's time. Despite his feelings of moral and racial superiority, Lawrence acknowledged the horrible plight and the basic humanity of those Africans unfortunate enough to be caught up in the slave trade. This notion was driven home to Lawrence when the Yorktown seized a slaver crammed with nine hundred men and women. Unfortunately, Lawrence died of fever as a member of the slave ship's prize crew.

Gilliland, whose previous works include co-authoring a well-regarded biography of Admiral Dan Gallery, has done a masterful job of editing Lawrence's journal. In the editor's capable hands, Lawrence's chronicle becomes much more than a mere day-to-day story of a warship's cruise. Gilliland has supplemented Lawrence's own words with detailed and well-researched sections on the political and diplomatic background behind the squadron's mission, brief biographies of the major players, and vivid descriptions of the warships and the geographic locations the young officer visited, and, of course, the slave trade itself.

This book is a must for anyone interested in nineteenth-century naval life, the slave trade, or racial attitudes in the antebellum period. Gilliland and the Naval Institute Press have performed a valuable service in exposing this wonderful journal to a wide audience.