A slaver on the West African coast, a quadroon woman sold with the cargo, and a Yankee captain who has to decide what he is. Ballou founded Ballou's Pictorial and, with a partner, the first American story paper, turning out cheap romances by the yard. Read it as evidence: this is how the American mass market of the 1850s told itself about slavery, and the telling is worth examining. Fifty-five plates of sea and shore by Turner, Aivazovsky and others run from 1771 to 1910, matching the novel's watery reach from the African coast to the open Atlantic.
