The conditions in which the slaves encountered were terrible. As we can see in the image below the slave ships were filled to its capacity.
The Men, Women and Children were crammed into every available space. There was no room for people to move, eat or breath. There was a great smell due to the people’s faeces.
An example of a slave ship used is the ‘Feloz’. The Captain Jose' Barbosa recalls
“She had taken in, on the coast of Africa, 336 males and 226 females, making in all 562, and had been out seventeen days, during which she had thrown overboard 55. The slaves were all enclosed under grated hatchways between decks. The space was so low that they sat between each other's legs and [were] stowed so close together that there was no possibility of their lying down or at all changing their position by night or day. As they belonged to and were shipped on account of different individuals, they were all branded like sheep with the owner's marks of different forms.”
From Captain Barbosa’s account we can tell that the slaves were burnt with a red-hot iron.
A man who rescued slaves from slave ships describes his experience
“As soon as the poor creatures saw us looking down at them, their dark and melancholy visages brightened up. They perceived some- thing of sympathy and kindness in our looks which they had not been accustomed to, and, feeling instinctively that we were friends, they immediately began to shout and clap their hands. One or two had picked up a few Portuguese words, and cried out, "Viva! Viva!" The women were particularly excited. They all held up their arms, and when we bent down and shook hands with them, they could not contain their delight; they endeavored to scramble up on their knees, stretching up to kiss our hands, and we understood that they knew we were come to liberate them. Some, however, hung down their heads in apparently hopeless dejection; some were greatly emaciated, and some, particularly children, seemed dying."
As the Slave Trade grew and became more organised, slavers were especially built for the journey. By the 1770s most ships built in Liverpool were for slave trading. The area below deck was designed to hold the maximum number of enslaved Africans. With the high mortality rates in the early period of the trade, some Liverpool ships added ventilation, hoping to reduce deaths during the voyage.
Monday, 30 June 2008
