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Mar 23, 2020PimaLib_ChristineR rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
Another exciting entry in the Bloody Jack series, In the Belly of the Bloodhound finds Jacky back in Boston at the Lawson Peabody School for Young Girls, hiding out since there's a price on her head for piracy. But when the girls go out for the good ol' "three hour tour" (no, not really but you know what I mean), they aren't coming back any time soon. Unlike most of the other Jacky books I've read, this one is low on adventure, as the girls spend a good portion of the book literally in the "Belly of the Bloodhound" (the Bloodhound is the slaver ship which has taken them). But when the adventure comes, it's pretty amazing! No, this book is more about the girls discovering their own power. An underlying, but equally important theme, deals with slavery. When the girls are kidnapped by slavers, to be sent to the north coast of Africa, they are carried on a ship that had previously brought Africans to North America. The conditions on the ship: the closely spaced neck shackles, the blood stains soaked into the wood, are described in a way that brings the moral darkness of slavery to life. I had to wonder about the girls being sold along the Barbary Coast, and whether it was just a device, but no... our good friend Wikipedia says about White Slavery: "In his 2003 book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500–1800, Ohio State University history professor Robert Davis...estimates that slave traders from Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli alone enslaved 1 million to 1.25 million Europeans in North Africa, from the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th... Roughly 700 Americans were held captive in this region as slaves between 1785 and 1815." And that doesn't include the widespread use of slavery in the Ottoman Empire. So the girls really are about to be sold, and this is all set against the story-line of Ms. Clarissa Worthington Howe, of the Virginia Howes, Jacky's arch-nemesis, who has actually brought her personal slave to school in Boston. Through the story we learn how children became indoctrinated into the ways of slavery. Clarissa gets to find out what it's like when the shackle's on the other foot, so to speak. So, that's a lot about one aspect of the story, but without giving too much away, we learn much more about the strength (or weakness, in some cases) of the girls, and how they learn to become self-reliant with a little help from Jacky. Her sauciness and bravery always win the day. It's still a wonderful story and I'd recommend it highly.