Tells the troubled history of abolition and slave violence by examining representations of shipboard mutiny and insurrection in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Anglo-American and American literature. Fire on the Water centers on five black sailors, whose experiences either inspired or found resonance within fiction.

Lenora Warren is an assistant professor of English at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Illustrations
Introduction
1                Witness to the Atrocities: Olaudah Equiano, Thomas Clarkson, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade
2                Denmark Vesey, John Howison, and Revolutionary Possibility
3                Joseph Cinqué, The Amistad Mutiny and Revolutionary Whitewashing
4                The Black and White Sailor:  Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor and the Case of Washington Goode
Coda
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
About the Author