Micro?

I really enjoyed this book and look forward to using it in my teaching when I teach high school. A large section of the beginning was about the background and set up of the Diligent's voyage. I was excited when the ship arrived in Africa and Durant's journal discussed contact with the cultures. I love geography and new there was math involved somewhere (I hate math) but was fascinated reading about how they calculated longitude and latitude. The portions describing the European forts that lined the west African coast, the various African tribes, etc., was all new history for me. I was hoping for a detail description of the experience of the African "slaves" as told from the perspective of Durant. But the book seemed to veer into the political and economic structures of African and European contact. It was evident how Europeans influenced the slave trade within Africa and created a dependence on European goods for King Agaja and the Dahomey. However, I became disappointed that the book covered a broader sphere than just the Diligent's journey. The Dahomey story explained what was going on and why the Diligent didn't stop there to purchase slaves, but as a microhistory it almost seemed like a side bar. Other stories felt this way as well. Maybe because the back of the book promised "an intimate understanding of a horrifying world." I felt that when it described the underground holding cells, but otherwise it felt more like a history of the triangular trade than a microhistory about one ship's journey through the middle passage.