Mutiny on the Rising Sun

Reviewed by: Mutiny on the Rising Sun: A Tragic Tale of Slavery, Smuggling, and Chocolate by Jared Ross Hardesty Casey Schmitt Mutiny on the Rising Sun: A Tragic Tale of Slavery, Smuggling, and Chocolate. By Jared Ross Hardesty. New York: New York University Press, 2021. 279 pages. Cloth, ebook. From the outset, Jared Ross Hardesty makes it clear that we should not know anything about the mutiny that occurred aboard a schooner called the Rising Sun on June 1, 1743. Smuggling and human trafficking were routine business in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, but because smugglers worked hard to avoid producing documentary evidence of their illicit business, the voyage of the Rising Sun should have gone unrecorded.1 The existence of records that attest to the violent deaths of most of the ship’s crew and the terror experienced by the enslaved captives held belowdecks was, according to Hardesty, contingent on several factors. First, the mutineers failed. Had they succeeded in reaching Orinoco in the colony of Venezuela and offloading their ill-gotten gains, the Rising Sun would have been assumed lost to its New England creditors. Second, when the mutineers ended up in the Dutch colony of Suriname instead of Orinoco, the governor of that colony insisted on punishing them. Had Governor Jan Jacob Mauricius not compiled two inventories of the ship in the process, evidence of the fifteen enslaved people—thirteen children and two young men—who survived the mutiny also would have been lost. A series of contingencies created the documentary record that Hardesty probes in writing this compelling case study of eighteenth-century illicit trade, slavery, and maritime violence. There is one more contingent factor involving the captain of the ship that explains why Hardesty came to write about this particular voyage in Mutiny on the Rising Sun. In 2013, Captain Newark Jackson became the namesake for a new attraction on Boston’s Freedom Trail, a shop called Captain Jackson’s Historic Chocolate Shop that, with funding from the Mars Wrigley Confections Company, set out to inform visitors about the history of chocolate in early America.2 Jackson owned a chocolate shop in eighteenth-century Boston, attended Christ Church (now called Old North Church) next door, and seemed the perfect exemplar of Boston’s role in the trade and production of chocolate. The Old North Foundation invited Hardesty to give a talk in 2016, where he was asked about the shop’s [End Page 177] namesake because Jackson appeared briefly in Hardesty’s first book.3 The question brought Hardesty to further investigate Jackson’s past, and with the help of researchers Ramona Negrón and Karwan Fatah-Black of Leiden University, he uncovered Jackson’s role in a smuggling and human trafficking ring that connected Boston, Barbados, Anomabu, and Dutch Suriname. These findings led the Old North Foundation, whose mission Hardesty describes as “interpreting the history of American liberty” (167), to reckon with using the name of a man who had earned his wealth through “shipping slave-produced commodities, the ownership of enslaved people, and the trafficking of African captives” (12). After meetings and public discussions, they voted to remove Jackson’s name from the chocolate shop and the pew at Old North Church, and to provide information at the historical site about the enslaved people Jackson owned. For his part, Hardesty took the research he had conducted for the Old North Foundation and produced Mutiny on the Rising Sun. The book opens with a portrait of the ship captain that, as Hardesty writes, “paints a human face on a smuggler and slave trader” (11). Driven by a desire for competency in a competitive commercial world, Jackson’s career began with legal trade before he was entrusted with riskier and more logistically complicated smuggling voyages by Boston merchants. The first chapter provides a swift sketch of Boston’s merchant community and the options available to men such as Jackson, while the second traces a group of merchants at the center of the smuggling ring that Hardesty calls “the cartel” (41). For these men, smuggling was routine and socially acceptable, reflecting the particular moral economy of eighteenth-century Boston. Building on the work of scholars such

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