Zachary Reid’s Transoceanic Performance of White Gentility in Sea of Poppies

Abstract

B‘Freedom, yes, exactly. Isn’t that what the mastery of the white man means for the lesser races?’^—Benjamin Burnham to Zachary in Sea of Poppies, p. 77 Roughly 90 % of free and enslaved African Americans worked on land in the antebellum USA. But that minority who did sail on whalers and merchant ships has taught scholars about the liberties of seafaring, and about the plantation as just one component of a global system of labor (Bolster 1997). 1 Amitav Ghosh further interrogates the history of these African American slaves and freemen at sea in his postcolonial and postmodern novel Sea of Poppies (2008a, b). I argue that the fictional plot of Sea of Poppies distinguishes itself from the autobiographical maritime narratives of Paul Cuffee, Oludah Equiano, Briton Hammon, and John Jea by imagining an alternate route: The novel features Zachary Reid, a free African American sailor passing as white, and a circulation of Asian migrants between the Black Atlantic and the Indian Ocean during Great Britain and China’s opium trade. Zachary’s voyage as second mate aboard the Ibis initiates our encounter with a multiplicity of subaltern cultures and languages which transform a former slave ship into the vessel for transporting coolies under the mast of Britain’s expansive imperialism of the early nineteenth century. J Afr Am St (2016) 20:120–132 DOI 10.1007/s12111-015-9321-1