The ship he meant was the Liverpool Merchant, Captain Saul Thurso, and he had never seen her, though she carried the seeds of all his dreams in her hold.-- Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth.
This sprawling novel about the British slave trade in the 1700s won the Booker Prize in 1992.
I am reading it as my second Booker winner for the 2011 Battle of the Prizes, British Version. It also counts as one of my Chunkster Challenge books.