Freedom Ship

The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea

By: Marcus Rediker

Narrated by: Cornell Womack

A definitive, sweeping account of the Underground Railroad’s long-overlooked maritime origins, from a pre-eminent scholar of Atlantic history and the award-winning author of The Slave Ship

As many as 100,000 enslaved people fled successfully from the horrors of bondage in the antebellum South, finding safe harbor along a network of passageways across North America now known as the Underground Railroad. Yet imagery of fugitives ushered clandestinely from safe house to safe house fails to capture the full breadth of these harrowing journeys: many escapes took place not by land but by sea.

Deeply researched and grippingly told, Freedom Ship offers a groundbreaking new look into the secret world of stowaways and the vessels that carried them to freedom across the North and into Canada. Sprawling through the intricate riverways of the Carolinas to the banks of the Chesapeake Bay to Boston’s harbors, these tales illuminate the little-known stories of freedom seekers who turned their sights to the sea—among them the legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, one of the Underground Railroad’s most famous architects.

Marcus Rediker, one of the leading scholars of maritime history, puts his command of archival research on full display in this luminous portrait of the Atlantic waterfront as a place of conspiracy, mutiny, and liberation. Freedom Ship is essential listening for anyone looking to understand the complete story of one of North America's most significant historical moments.

©2025 Marcus Rediker (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Many people familiar with the history of slavery in the United States associate the terror of the Middle Passage with tall ships traversing the high seas of the Atlantic, while they think of the Underground Railroad as the legendary land-based route that those fleeing bondage traveled to freedom. In this important new work, Freedom Ship, distinguished maritime historian Marcus Rediker turns this binary on its head by showing in dramatic human terms how escape by sea was a primary method used by enslaved Black Americans in the decades leading up to the Civil War. It’s a fascinating work, anchored in a commitment to history from below, that will undoubtedly expand the map of our understanding of how—and by whom—the abolitionist movement gained momentum in the crucial years that redefined our nation.”
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., New York Times bestselling author of Stony the Road

“Who could be better qualified to bring us a little-known slice of history concerning slavery and the political world of the Atlantic Ocean than Marcus Rediker? As someone who has admired his previous work on both subjects, I’m not surprised that he’s done it again. Freedom Ship is a fascinating, evocatively told story—and an inspiring one.”
—Adam Hochschild, author of American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis

“Marcus Rediker has done more than any other historian to chronicle the history of what he calls ‘maritime radicalism’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Freedom Ship he focuses our attention on how the expansion of seaborne capitalism made possible the consolidation of American slavery but also created opportunities for thousands of slaves to escape from bondage by sea. Mining sources including fugitive slave narratives, newspaper advertisements for those seeking freedom, and the records of abolitionist societies, he tells the riveting stories of men and women whose quest for freedom transforms our understanding of the Underground Railroad, as well as of those who aided them in escaping—dockworkers, sailors, sympathetic ship captains, and members of African American communities up and down the East Coast, most of them previously unknown to history.”
—Eric Foner, Pulitzer Prize−winning author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery