different faces of slavery?

"There is only one law on this earth - the law that gives the strong and wealthy power over the weak and poor."

Mungo St John, son of a Virginian plantation owner is studying in Cambridge when he receives a letter from his slave-sweetheart, Camilla. His father has died and the plantation is bankrupt. On his return, he finds out that his fathers attorney has played dirty and is now the new owner of the plantation. Chester even admits to him that he killed his father himself. All the slaves have been sold instead of being free as the father ordained in his will. A will that was in the hands of his attorney of course and now is destroyed. When Chester tries to kill Mungo, he manages to run away and meets up with the runaways Camilla and her grandfather. Chester murders the grandfather and makes out to kill Camilla as well, Mungo is locked up in jail for slave-stealing by the militia that turned up just in time to stop Chester from shooting him as well. His maternal grandfather Rutherford bails him out and orders him to go aboard of a ship sailing for Africa and make his own fortune. With Camilla dead, he sees no other manner in which he'll ever be able to challenge Chester. The voyage turns out to be disastrous. He soon finds out that they're a slaver ship, even though it is illegal. That makes it even more profitable. On the way back they get into a fight with an English warship and barely escape after killing its captain and the officers that boarded. Later on, the slaves manage to escape due to stupidity of Mungo and they kill the whole crew. Miraculously Mungo and former slave Tippoo escape on a lifeboat
Meanwhile, Chester sells Windemere plantation to a consortium, that includes neighbour Cartwright, the leader of the militia. Apparently the plan was already made before St John's death. Camilla, he takes with him to farm cotton in Louisiana (to remind himself of an old enemy, he says). She is put to work on the fields during day-time and at night in his bed. She discovers to be pregnant from him. A son is born and named Isaac, Chester plans on raising him as if he is a son, even though legally he's still a slave.

Mungo St John is an ambiguous character. He's good-natured and morally knows that slavery is not ethical, but he's also a product of his time and pragmatic enough to understand that the economy of the American south depends on slavery. He's brought up on a plantation and been a slave owner from birth. So although he advocates slavery in a debate in Cambridge, he states that the slaves owned by his father have a fairly good life that's not all that different from the masses of poor labourers that work in the English factories in sometimes worse conditions (so he claims). It must be said that he and his father were atypical slave owners and seen as liberals that put wrong ideas in black heads by their neighbours. Also, not being a hypocrite he convinces himself that if you own slaves, you must also be able to go and get them yourself from Africa, even if that's illegal. And it doesn't take him very long to convince himself that if you own them, you must be able to bring them from Africa and even to capture them yourself.
On the other hand, he frees Tippoo as soon as he can and even before he treated him as an equal, black and a slave or not. He's also in love with Camilla with whom he grew up and contemplated bringing her to England in order to marry her, as it would not be possible in America.

Camilla is born as a slave and had a fairly easy life under St Johns. She's a survivor and once in the claws of Chester, she manages several times to change her bad luck and misery into an opportunity. She's a lot smarter than everybody (Chester included) thinks.

Chester who's the villain of the book is also a product of his time and his evilness in bringing Mungo's father to ruin is (apart from the murder) exactly what our contemporary multinational CEO's do nowadays. Only when you look at things up close and personal can you see the moral devaluation and hypocrisy. He doesn't hate slaves, he's just convinced that they are less than human. How horrible his behaviour toward his slaves looks, it's no different from what the majority did as the norm.

Edwin Fairchild is the 'good' character in this story as he's an advocate for abolitionism and a relentless slavers chaser but even he is a product of the time and can't understand how the blacks that carry the weapons in the attack on his own ship aren't the slaves that he's set out to protect and liberate, but the very men that capture the slaves to sell them to the whites.

As always, Wilbur Smith shows his deep love for Africa, its inhabitants and its nature in the minute and detailed descriptions of the jungles, the marshes, the villages. Apart from the smell, you can close your eyes and imagine that you're there. His eye for details doesn't stop in Africa, as the passages about the oceans, reefs, ships and life at sea, in general, are just as accurate. Life on the plantations and in New Orleans are also painted in, what I believe to be authentic, vivid colours.
This book sketches a very accurate picture of some of the sentiments and moral dilemma's of that period when abolitionists started to rear their heads. They had won a victory several years earlier when the African slave trade was outlawed. But they couldn't foresee that a business of locally bred slaves would create a new market and that the prices of slaves would be higher than ever. On top of that did the American navy do next to nothing to enforce this law. The English navy, on the other hand, did actively persecute the slavers, but despite being able to board American ships, they didn't have the authority to search them even though the stench of the human cargo would be tell-tale.
Another evil of the time was the intensive hunt for ivory, a practice that without a doubt helped to dwindle the number of wild elephants and other species to the state of being endangered or even completely extinct as certain rhinos became last year. But when cruelty to other humans was normal and even institutionalised and animal protection was limited to exhibiting wild animals in too small cages in zoo's, who would lose sleep over animals?
I received a free ARC of this book through Netgalley and this is my honest, unbiased review.