Race at sea: revisiting Alexander Falconbridge’s Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (1788) Falconbridge’s book, Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa, was published in 1788 after Falconbridge met with Thomas Clarkson and left the slave trade. The account became influential in the abolitionist milieux in England. Falconbridge and his wife, Anna-Marie, were sent by the Anti-Slavery Society to the failed settlement for freed slaves established by the Sierra Leone Company, “Freetown”. I would like to revisit this first account and examine the reasons for its popularity, focusing more particularly on Falconbridge’s medical gaze, and his approach to the conditions of enslaved people as a sea surgeon. Not only were medical men in charge of caring for the confined crew, they were also closer to the enslaved people’s bodies, as agents of control, perpetrators of violence and sometimes care providers. They were also owners of private libraries on board, and considered as natural historians and men of science on board. Falconbridge’s profession as sea surgeon, and his medical background will be presented in this paper as a specific – and ambivalent – insight into racial violence in his account, as well as a specific awareness to the larger communities and environmental constraints that determined slave voyages.