Imagine standing on the edge of a tropical island with soft golden sand between your toes and a bright blue sky overhead. But all you can feel is a deep sense of dread. You were almost shaved, your clothes were torn, and you were examined by a stranger. The man next to you was a Maghreb slave before being sold to a new merchant, and the woman behind you was from a village kidnapped and taken prisoner by local warlords, but no one speaks English so you doesn’t know that. . your language. When you were playing outside with your sister, three people kidnapped you, tied you up, and gagged you by jumping over a fence in the dark woods near your town. You haven’t seen your family since.
Suddenly you are taken off the boarding ramp and onto the deck of a huge ship. The gigantic weapon anchored to the deck catches the eye, like something out of a pirate’s story, but as you drive deeper below the deck, its charm quickly becomes more than anything you’ve ever encountered. It is overwhelmed by the most terrifying stench. You are examined by the crew, who seem unsure of which hold to send you to, but they eventually conclude that you are a child and send you off with the women. The men were handcuffed with iron chains.
The deck below is dark and grotesque, with seemingly impossible numbers of people crammed in and space getting tighter and tighter. As the doors closed, hundreds of people huddled shoulder to shoulder and had to cross their legs to sit in the already stifling heat. The air is stuffy. Through eerie dialogue, we can finally hear familiar words and move enough to speak. You asked her what was going on and she said she was going to work somewhere across the ocean.
The next day, you are back on deck and your crew will provide you with food. You are too worried to be eaten, but because you refused, two crew members tie your legs and whip you. This time, when she was taken below deck, she was taken to a man’s house in even worse conditions. You are tied up with two other people, crammed into a compartment, forced to lie on top of each other, unable to move.
The days between lean meals of rice and beans and compulsory exercise in the dark, damp and cramped space on deck and below go on like this. It doesn’t take long for the men around her to get sick. People start dying in the weeks that follow, though it’s unclear whether it’s the water or the near-constant choking hazard. It would be too kind to say it fell like a fly, because that would entail days or weeks of pain. Even in incredible heat, they develop a fever, quickly start vomiting, and lose bowel control. Refusal of food to relieve the sickness is followed by holding the mouth open with a speculum and forcing food down the throat.
Occasionally, a chained man dies and then it takes some time before the crew is released on deck to separate the deceased from you. All the bodies of the dead are dumped into the deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean without ritual or tradition. The death toll increases as the week goes on, and upon arrival at an unfamiliar shore in an unfamiliar land, 2 out of 10 people they meet on board die from red heat, malnutrition, or violence.
Congratulations. You have survived the perils of the Middle Passage and, in spite of all the hardships, have earned the prize of being a slave for life. There are few direct accounts of what it was like to be a slave on a slave ship, but given the difficulty of living long enough to be able to read and write Western languages, we can say that trade routes has an autobiography of Olauda Equiano, who survived the From Africa to the Caribbean and finally to the colonies, until he bought his own freedom in 1766. His story, though gruesome, necessarily omits the horrors suffered by many women and children, as sexual abuse was commonplace on many slaver ships.
The true horror of the Middle Passage was made known to the world by the British Dzong Trial of 1783. In this case, a slave trader fought an insurance company over the deaths of many African slaves who participated in the trade. Unable to navigate the Atlantic efficiently, the ship spent dangerously long periods in the open sea, and the crew soon ran out of food for souls trapped below decks. Their solution? Kill the people who didn’t get eaten. His insurance did not cover starvation or disease, but it did cover drowning, and an estimated 122 people were thrown into the sea and died.
Thanks to the evaluation of Zon and Equiano’s writings, the public became aware of the dire conditions of the slave ships. Bolitionist groups began to form in England, but it was not until 1807 in England that the inhumane transatlantic slave trade, which claimed the lives of more than two million innocent Africans, was finally outlawed. It was 1808 in America. England formally outlawed slavery in her 1833, and America eventually followed after the Union victory over the Confederacy in the 1865 Civil War. Lincoln’s famous Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 emancipated only the slaves of the “rebel states,” not him. It recognizes its leaders in itself and does not apply it to enslaved peoples in areas dominated by the North or West.