They were chained and loaded on to ships. The trip was very hard because the slave trade was across the Atlantic Ocean. The slaves were chained together in the ship and were crowded and not able to move about. Diseases were very common because of the unhealthy conditions they were in, the crew would give food only to those that looked healthy and skipped the others, people were left chained and unable to get up and go toilet. When the slaves died they would still remain chained to the people around, until the crew would take away the body.
Amos Fortune, Free Man is a true biography written by Elizabeth Yates. This book is about a man who was born free in Africa and abducted as a teenager to be sold as a slave in the new colonies. It was the year 1725. Evil Europeans would barge into an African camp and capture black members of the tribe to be sold as slaves. These African people were helpless.
Document 7 reveals how these punishments were horrid and fear causing. Document 9, reveals how inferior they were treated and lost their freedom. Finally, Document 3 shows a clear image of how it all happened from capturing the Africans. All this harm done for thinking Africans don’t deserve any humanity at all. My first example on how deleting our humane feelings caused harm is Document 7 by James Ramsay called, “Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies”.
*The Ordeal of the Slave* -A state of perpetual terror: 1) first caught from her/ his tribe by the Europeans or another tribe. 2) All rounded up and put on the ships. 3) Having to survive on a ship. 4) Got to the destination with low attitude. -Slavery in the Chesapeake and South Carolina toon on two forms primarily: !
(McKay, Chap 21, pg 570) In order to get a good perspective on what being a slave was like, we will look into a narrative written by Olaudah Equiano. Equiano was a native of Iboland who was captured at the age of eleven. He describes how some villagers would wait until the adults would go out in the plantations to work to abduct their younger children. Once Equiano was sold to the Europeans he says that they were treated horribly beaten and cramped on a very small boat. The reason that the slaves were treated badly could have been due to the fact that the Europeans had to pay a high price for them or just due to a lack of space.
Columbus’s exploration of the New World ended lives and heritage of many people. The Discovery of the New world was later on followed by series of minor developments in navigation, geography, astronomy and economy through the Atlantic circuit but in contrast it even these minor devalopments were ”Not..worth price of human lives.”(Sale 188). Additionally Europeans imposed and substituted their institutions, ideas,languages, cultures, technologies and economy for the New World’s original heritage and language. Also” it gave birth to the most infamous and the most atrocious of all traffics, that of slave, the most execrable of crimes against nature (Reynal /190)”. Ships of African slaves crossed the Atlantic to the Americas to work on European sugar and tobacco plantations under the harshest conditions, which led to an end of many slaves’ lives.
The African prisoners were being taken to a scary, unknown world awaiting an unknown future. They were taken from their families, homes and didn’t know why or where they were going. Many Africans believed they were going to be eaten by the Europeans. Europeans considered Africans as savage and inferior. They were treated as cargo and placed below the deck.
Slave raids and even wars increased. A young man named Equiano was one of these very slaves. He thought “that he had got into a world of bad spirits, and that the whites were going to kill him.”(Equiano, 10) After the potential slaves were kidnapped, merchants forced them to walk in slave caravans to the European coastal forts. Which was sometimes as far as 1,000 miles. Locked up and poorly fed, only half the Africans survived these death marches.
Jennifer Martinez Section 61012 Paper 1 September 26, 2014 Slavery? The Norm or Inhumane? I believe slavery victimized everyone because it damaged society spiritually and morally. What if the tables were turned? What if the Africans/African Americans were the slave owners?
Equiano depicts horrifying details of his life. What surprised me the most was how he nearly died because of the terrible conditions on the slave ship. Another upsetting thing was how his African kidnappers took him without mercy. Overall,