ABSTRACT
Representations of ships, sailors and even pirates have provided subject matter for many transatlantic studies. This chapter examines three texts from the period between 1836 and 1854: Mr. Midshipman Easy and Percival Keene by Frederick Marryat, and Emmanuel Appadocca by Maxwell Philip. Although the enslavement of whites by Barbary pirates is certainly a topic related to racial discourse in sea adventure novels of the period, it is a subject too large to be discussed in the chapter. It argues that the abolition of slavery in 1834 caused an upswing of anxiety in Britain over the role that ethnicity should play in the emerging definitions of British national identity. Philip's intentional placement of Appadocca in a rational law-bound realm outside of the nation-state echoes a state of being that Paul Gilroy, in his book Against Race, describes as being between camps: Deliberately adopting a position between camps of this sort is not a sign of indecision or equivocation.
