The lesser-known story of 100K courageous runaway slaves who fled the South via the Blue Highway

In 1857, an 18-year-old female slave, Lear Green, who had been repeatedly raped and forced into prostitution by her white owner, one James Noble, was surreptitiously placed in a wooden seaman’s chest wearing a dress, bonnet and cape and delivered as simple freight on a steamship bound to Philadelphia from the port of Baltimore.To avoid suffocation and starvation, her benefactors covered her with a quilt and put a little pillow in the box for a semblance of comfort, along with a few articles of clothing, a small amount of food, and a bottle of water, before sealing the crate, bound with heavy rope.Eighteen hours later, the steamer arrived in the City of Brotherly Love, and the box was delivered to a family friend’s house, where the young stowaway recovered from her arduous journey.Lear Green was one of some 100,000 runaway slaves with unimaginable courage, willing to face horrifying cruelty and vicious flogging, who escaped bondage from the antebellum South on ships at sea.The setting for their flights was what became known as the “Blue Highway,” which ran up and down the Eastern Seaboard and enabled enslaved people to escape as stowaways in below-deck hideaways.They journeyed under wind-filled sails from the Carolinas to the Chesapeake Bay and Boston’s harbors three decades before the Civil War.The ocean carried Africans into slavery, and the ocean was also a pathway that transported them to freedom with the assistance of Black sailors and waterfront workers, and sympathetic working-class whites.“Thousands of people escaped slavery by sea — yet the history books have had little to say about them.

Why have these dramatic tales of dockside conspiracies, below-deck hideaways, billowing sails, and ultimately liberation been so rarely told?” asks preeminent maritime scholar Marcus Rediker in his new book, “Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea” (Viking).The legendary Underground Railway had carried those fleeing bondage in th...