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Black Cattle: A Gruesome Story
by John MeilinkPublish: Jan 27, 2025Series: Sons of JaphethHistorical Fiction African American InterestBook Overview
In the tradition of Wilbur Smith and Patrick O’Brian—a sweeping tale of men driven by empire and undone by conscience.A powerful novel of greed, loyalty, and survival in the brutal world of the seventeenth-century Dutch slave trade.
West Africa, 1687. On the lawless edge of the Dutch colonial empire, the West India Company tightens its grip on the coast, its ships filled with gunpowder, muskets—and ambition. Skipper Aldemar Burghoutsz, a battle-hardened seaman haunted by his own past, sails a slave-trading pinnace into a world where profit is measured in human lives. At his side stands Gillis Graauw, a younger sailor torn between loyalty and conscience. Together they enter a deadly arena where European merchants, African kings, and Moorish middlemen fight for dominance along the Gold Coast.
From the stifling barracoons to the decks of the slave ships, from the gold-laden rivers to the fever-ridden shores, Black Cattle lays bare the human machinery of empire—its greed, its faith, and its cruelty. No one emerges unscathed: not the conquerors, not the conquered, and not those who stand between them.
Rooted in true events yet told through living, breathing characters, Black Cattle is a sweeping work of historical fiction—part maritime adventure, part moral reckoning. It is not history retold—it is history lived.
For readers of Wilbur Smith, Patrick O’Brian, and Ken Follett, Black Cattle delivers seventeenth-century storytelling at its most visceral, cinematic, and deeply human.
Black Cattle (original Dutch title: Kroesvee) was published in the Netherlands in 2019 and has since been reprinted three times. The novel is included in the literature list of the official historical Canon of the Netherlands (June 2020). It is the first of four standalone historical novels in the Sons of Japheth series about the Dutch and the slave trade in the seventeenth century.
