Sacred Hunger

In 1752 a Liverpool merchant called William Kemp sinks his money into a slave ship, the Liverpool Merchant, and sends his nephew Matthew Paris aboard as surgeon. Paris has just come out of prison, where he was put for publishing an argument that the earth is older than scripture allows, and he takes the berth because nothing else is left to him. The ship sails for the West African coast to buy its cargo under Captain Saul Thurso, who treats the trade as ordinary work and the people in the hold as stock to be kept breathing at the lowest possible cost. Paris keeps a journal, and what begins in it as unease hardens into a moral emergency and finally into mutiny.

The novel then jumps about a decade. The Liverpool Merchant never reached its market. The ship lies beached in the Florida swamps, where the surviving crew and the Africans they carried have built a settlement together, raising children and talking in a pidgin assembled from the Guinea coast and the forecastle. Erasmus Kemp, William's son, who resented his cousin Paris from boyhood and has since married into money, learns the place exists and goes to destroy it.

This is a long book, over six hundred pages, and it takes its time. Unsworth writes in eighteenth century English rather than modern English in period costume, and the first half stays largely inside the ship, where the cruelty accumulates through ledgers, rations and the vocabulary of ordinary commerce. That is the point: the title names greed, the appetite the traders treat as holy because it excuses whatever it requires. Readers who want speed should know the payoff sits in the second half. It suits anyone who wants researched historical fiction that argues with you and never softens what it shows.