Middle Passage Summary

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Jean Schatz The Middle Passage Summary Remembering history is one thing; learning from it however is another. Daniel P. Mannix speaks out in his article about The Middle Passage in American Heritage magazine. Our world has undergone numerous tragedies and inhumane events. The Middle Passage, an infamous slave trade route, is incredulous in how horrific it was, how detailed, and somewhat how organized it was. There were many aspects of the slave trade and the Middle Passage that are studied to this day. Africans were brutally uprooted from their home lands to the New World on the basis that they were not human, but rather beasts, who were only put on this Earth to provide free labor for those superior to them. We, as the present generation, must learn from the horrors of our ancestors. The time frame of the Middle Passage spanned for about 3 centuries, there were Africans in Santo Domingo even up to the year 1503. There are records of the number of slaves aboard the slavers, but we will only know an approximate of how many Africans were taken into the slave trade. Slaves were extracted from their homelands by force, boarding all of the inhabitants including men, women and children. The ships would anchor at the coastline and gather all the Africans. Sometimes, the Europeans would kidnap their cargo, however this was not common, unlike what people are led to believe. The reason being that it was risky to kidnap Africans and there were consequences. The crew risked getting killed by the natives, and sometimes the slaves from this vessel would be sold to another slaver, leaving the captain with no profits. During these times of gathering the slaves aboard the ship, it was not orderly and kind. The crewmembers abused the slaves and did not tell them where they were going. However, the slaves did not go without a fight. There are many cases of mutiny recorded
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