Paradise before your eyes

The subject of John Hearne's fascinating and gripping 1981 novel about the shipping of enslaved Africans - the so-called "middle passage" - was taken up by a whole series of authors in the 1990s. The year is 1860, and the trade in enslaved Africans has been forbidden to Englishmen and Americans for decades. However, the "Sure Salvation" under its captain Hogarth sets course for the New World with five hundred slaves on board. The novel by the Jamaican John Hearne, published in 1981, depicts with great moral seriousness a theme that was not taken up in Caribbean and Afro-American literature by a whole series of authors until the 1990s. It is a pessimistic work in which the gulf between black and white seems unbridgeable. Betrayal, greed, the decay of values of an entire civilization become a.