Sacred Hunger

In 1752 the Liverpool merchant William Kemp builds a ship for the African trade, mortgaging everything on it, and his son Erasmus grows up with the certainty that money is a kind of moral proof. The ship is the Liverpool Merchant, and its surgeon is Matthew Paris, Kemp's nephew, released from prison after publishing a book that contradicted Genesis and taking the post because there is nothing else left for him. Unsworth follows the voyage in exhaustive and appalling detail: the trading forts, the haggling over quality, the packing of the hold, the surgeon's daily rounds among cargo he is meant to keep alive at the lowest sustainable cost, and a captain whose brutality is efficient rather than deranged. When the crew and the captives mutiny off Florida, the survivors of both establish a settlement in the swamps where the old distinctions no longer obtain. Twelve years later Erasmus Kemp, now wealthy and driven by a private grievance, comes looking for them. The title says everything the book argues: that greed had to be reasoned into a virtue before this trade could be conducted by respectable men, and that the reasoning outlived the trade.