Survivors:
The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the Atlantic Slave Trade
Hannah Durkin
William Collins
This is an immersive and revelatory history of the survivors of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on American soil, whose lives diverged and intersected in profound ways.
The Clotilda docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama, in July 1860 – more than 50 years after a federal law was passed banning the importation of captive Africans, and nine months before the beginning of the Civil War. The last of its survivors lived well into the twentieth century. They were the last witnesses to the final act of a terrible period in world history.
In this epic work, Dr. Hannah Durkin tells the stories of the Clotilda’s 110 captives, drawing on her intensive archival, historical and sociological research. Survivors follows their lives from their kidnappings in what is modern-day Nigeria through a terrifying 45-day journey across the Middle Passage; from the subsequent sale of the ship’s 103 surviving children and young people into slavery across Alabama to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement in Selma.
An astonishing, deeply compelling tapestry of history, biography and social commentary, Survivors is a tour de force that deepens our knowledge and understanding of the Atlantic slave trade and its influence on the world today.
About the author
Dr. Hannah Durkin is a historian specialising in transatlantic slavery and African diasporic art and culture. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Nottingham and a Postgraduate Diploma in Journalism from Leeds Trinity University. She is a former Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow and has taught at Nottingham and Newcastle universities. Her work has been shortlisted for a Historical Writers’ Association Non-Fiction Crown Award, and she is an advisor to the History Museum of Mobile, which is working to memorialise the Clotilda survivors, and the Clotilda Descendants Association, which traces survivors’ descendants.
Read an extract from Survivors: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the Atlantic Slave Trade.
- A superb reconstruction of the lives of the survivors of the slave ship, Clotilda. This searing book conveys the survivors’ sufferings and remarkable resilience, bringing to life their personal stories in a compelling way.
Wolfson History Prize judges
