Helen Kromer

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  Amistad : The Slave Uprising Aboard The Spanish Schooner

  $17.00

  Kromer, a New York-based playwright and writer of television scripts, here considers the 1839 mutiny by 53 Africans aboard a Spanish slave ship, La Amistad (“Friendship”) off the Cuban coast. The mutineers were tricked by the two surviving crew members into sailing to the Long Island coast instead of Africa; they were seized by the U.S. Navy, imprisoned, and charged with murder and piracy. From documents, newspaper articles, and testimonies, Kromer presents a lively account, similar to Howard Jones’s Mutiny on the Amistad (Oxford Univ., 1987), of the intrigues and horrors of the slave trade on the northwestern coast of Africa and the classic Supreme Court trial, with the Africans’ abolitionist legal team joined by former President John Quincy Adams. In March 1841, the U.S. Supreme Court freed the surviving 35 Africans, and ten months later they returned to Sierra Leone. La Amistad is the only slave schooner known to have been successfully commandeered by its captives. Highly recommended for all readers.

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