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Midway through David Bradley's 1981 novel, "The Chaneysville Incident," historian anti-hero John Washington muses memorably on studies of the Atlantic slave trade. What is a death toll rounded to the nearest million really worth? When figures only figure, and do no more, why not just use them, he concludes, to sabotage the mood at upscale cocktail parties?

One such statistic predicates Marcus Rediker's purposefully subtitled "The Slave Ship: A Human History." Though the slave trade lasted for more than three centuries, two-thirds of all African slaves reached American shores during the 18th century.

But, as promised, this account of life aboard the "vast machines" is not told with charts and tables. The slave ship, as a floating factory, prison and weapon, was recognized by all as a world-altering technology. Rediker's sources include parliamentary hearings, abolitionist pamphlets and the extant writings of captains, sailors and slaves. Chained below decks aboard what some imagined were "houses with wings," Africans were already, according to Rediker, forging new communities.

The slave ship ranged in size and design from 11-ton sloops, capable of carrying 30 slaves, to 566-ton behemoths, capable of carrying 700 to 800 slaves. Such variety belies the slow pace of innovation within the trade. In spite of its centrality to European ventures abroad, the great minds of the Enlightenment added to the slave ship -- over the course of 100 years -- copper-sheathed hulls (to protect against shipworm), ventilation and netting to catch those who tried to jump overboard. Liberté, égalité and fraternité came separately.

Much of Rediker's book also concerns the lives of sailors, the trade's "white slaves." Many were compelled to sea by debt, others by trickery. Half were cut down within months by West Africa's endemic parasites. Those who survived disease had to endure the cruelty of captains driven mad by profit. Some escaped, only to be caught and sold by African traders. Others became pirates. But all were lucky compared with the chronically ill, penniless sailors who, cheated of wages and their passage home, littered 18th-century ports from Kingston to Charleston.

A great fear among newly enslaved Africans was that their white captors were cannibals. They were not, but the markets they served were forcing millions to come just short of consuming themselves. Sailors drank themselves into oblivion with rum distilled from merciless Caribbean cane fields. Slaves often sailed the ships that imprisoned them, and harvested the wood that fueled booming New England shipyards.

Rediker has a thoughtful eye for recognizing the terrible ironies the slave trade inaugurated. The kind that allowed Henry Laurens of South Carolina, whose plantations made him an 18th-century merchant prince, to write of slaves that you should "never put your life in their power a moment."The Slave Ship" is a virtual must read for students of the slave trade. A powerful research achievement itself, it also includes material from a vast array of recent studies, making it a terrific starting point for further reading. Certain of Rediker's sources respond more readily to his historical sifting. Dry parliamentary records benefit, while Olaudah Equiano's already lucid slave narrative suffers. The rime of mariner-turned-abolitionist James Field Stanfield might have felt less "pond'rous," strangely enough, if the full text had been in an appendix. And while it is necessary to escape tables and the "violence of abstraction," Rediker's prose is less than crystal when enumerating wages, conversion factors and profit margins.

Stanfield wrote in 1788 that "One real view -- one MINUTE absolutely spent in the slave rooms on the middle passage, would do more for the cause of humanity than ... the whole collective eloquence of the British senate." Over the years, the accumulated testimony of men like him helped to end the legal side of the "honest trade." Rediker's book offers once again a minute that few accepted two centuries ago and lays bare the wounds that have never fully healed. Without the eyes of humanity, they never can.

Richard Thompson is a graduate in history from the University of California, Berkeley.