Jared Ross Hardesty's well-written and thoroughly researched study of the bloody 1743 mutiny on the Rising Sun, as the ship smuggled its cargo of enslaved African children and cacao, is both engaging narrative and excellent history. Hardesty's analysis of the interplay of slavery, race, smuggling, consumption, and empire takes the reader from colonial Boston where the entrepreneurial Captain Newark Jackson maintained a pioneering shop selling chocolate at Old North Church, to British Barbados where the Rising Sun boarded its illicit human cargo, and then to the Dutch colony of Surinam. There, the captain and cartel routinely flouted imperial laws governing the trading of cacao—only to be ruthlessly murdered en route to French Cayenne by mutinous sailors caught in a net of oppressive labor, social, and racial relationships. Swimming easily through various histories, this book is a fine example of the power of Atlantic history to explore important issues outside of national contexts.

Hardesty's book is organized thematically. He begins with a discussion of the Boston captain Newark Jackson and the events in his life that brought him to his death at the hands of mutineers. Hardesty also deftly develops Boston's significant role in slavery and smuggling. The second chapter focuses on the British cartel that organized the smuggling of cacao and human beings around the West Indies to subvert mercantilist law. Here we learn about navigation laws, the intricacies of smuggling through several imperial systems, and something of the sort of entrepreneurs who wagered their lives in places like Surinam and Barbados, profiting from both the misery of the enslaved and the gastronomic delight of British subjects.

The following chapters develop in turn the “Cargo,” the “Crew,” and the mutiny and trial (“Endings”). The enslaved children smuggled alongside cacao were African but had been boarded in Barbados and were en route to Dutch Surinam and possibly French Cayenne, in violation of the Navigation Acts. Here and throughout the book Hardesty emphasizes the centrality of racial slavery to the entire imperial economic and social system—an especially poignant point since the ship smuggled both enslaved children and the products of slave agriculture. Race is also a critical part of the discussion of the crew. Two of the three mutineers were mixed-race Portuguese sailors, lifelong victims in their own way of a savage imperial mercantile order. Their bloody mutiny took place off the coast of Dutch Surinam, and the trial was held in the capital, Paramaribo, after local Amerindians helped Dutch authorities capture the mutineers. Several appendixes compellingly discuss the vagaries of the source base for this history—the Dutch trial records, newspaper accounts, probate records, and more that Hardesty uses to imaginatively reconstruct the arc of this multifaceted tragedy.

Hardesty's only misstep for this reader is the occasional but repeated indulgence in a moral theater of sorts, perhaps a side-effect of the book's origins in the public debates surrounding museum exhibits and slavery (the name of Newark Jackson's chocolate shop, part of Boston's Old North Church & Historic Site, has been changed). For example, Hardesty warns us on several occasions that the eighteenth century was a violent age in which slavery was completely morally acceptable. But still, he cannot help but wonder if the captain of the boat regretted his role in slavery as he fell murdered to his watery grave. But why would he?

As Hardesty makes clear, the Atlantic imperial economy was driven by an unquestioned and brutal system of racial slavery. Anachronistically imagining Jackson as able to question his own historical context comes off as fantastic. Hardesty's graphic discussion of the punishments Surinam authorities meted out might also have benefitted from a comparative perspective. Bostonians also sadistically executed their slave patricides, and two years before the mutiny New Yorkers burned 13 men alive on the fears of a baseless conspiracy. All the Atlantic world was a ‘land of death,’ not just Surinam. Nevertheless, Hardesty's book is a lively, thoroughly researched, and engaging read that will inform and entertain historians, students, and broader reading audiences.