The year is 1694 and the British slave ship
“The Hannibal” is sailing in the Atlantic Ocean with 692 slaves on board. They’ve been purchased from African slave
owners and are heading to the New World where they will be forced to work in brutal conditions. Part way through this treacherous voyage,
scores of slaves die from dysentery; others willfully starve themselves to death rather
than bow to the demands of their so-called owners. Some others will just jump overboard. Because this loss of life is a loss of money
for the British who intend to sell the slaves in the Americas, some men are beaten and forcefully
restrained. When the ship reaches the New World only 372
of the enslaved men, women and children are still alive. 18 of the 70 crew members also died on the
journey. That was just one voyage in what’s called
the Atlantic slave trade, a trade that involved European countries sailing to Africa and taking
slaves to the New World, i.e. the Americas. The main offenders in this trade in terms
of buyers were England, The Netherlands, France, Spain and Portugal. Today we are certainly not going to attempt
to explain to you the long history of the African slave trade, firstly because it would
be absurd to think we could do so, and secondly because a short video would be an injustice
to those who suffered. Our intention is to attempt to describe to
you what the conditions were like on a slave ship during the era of the Atlantic Slave
trade. It was during the 15th and 16th centuries
when European ships were better capable of travelling greater distances. This was a time that is now called, “The
Age of Discovery.” It was also the age of trade and colonialism,
and it was the time when the Europeans surpassed the Arab World in terms of the export of African
slaves – usually slaves from West Africa... in part because this was the most convenient
part of Africa to buy slaves. Many of the slaves that were bought or traded
for were already enslaved by their African owners. From 1300 to 1900 about one third of the population
living between the Senegal River and the Gambia River in West Africa were enslaved. In fact, a great number of people living in
certain parts of the African continent during those centuries were living in various capacities
as slaves. Some were born slaves and some became slaves,
and how they were treated as one historian noted was with kindness or with cruelty. This is a long and difficult story, as we
said, so we won’t go that deep into the entire history. .
When the Europeans arrived in Africa looking for people to buy they sometimes met with
Africans now referred to as “middlemen”. Sometimes these middlemen would conduct raids
on certain African settlements, often ethnic minorities, and enslave the people they captured. Buildings called ‘Slave Castles”, were
actually built on the coast by the European traders with the purpose to hold captured
slaves for when they arrived in Africa. The Europeans in the early days of sailing
to Africa didn’t explore much of the interior. They were literally afraid to do so, but mostly
because of diseases. Those explorations came much later with the
likes of two British men named Henry Morton Stanley and Dr. David Livingstone, intrepid
explorers who became household names for their journeys through the heart of the relatively
unknown continent. This was after the British abolished slavery,
with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Let’s now get back to that voyage we discussed
in the introduction. The ship named the Hannibal was owned by the
Royal African Company. It set off from London and made its first
purchase of slaves in Ouidah, which is a city in southern Benin, West Africa. It made several more stops to purchase more
slaves along the Gold Coast and later delivered those who’d survived the perilous journey
to the British agricultural export colony of Barbados. The ship then returned to London. The ship set sail again to Africa, picked
up more slaves, returned to Barbados, and then sailed back to London. In all the two round-trips took 375 days. The captain was named Thomas PhillipsHe had
a crew of 70 men, and as you know, 18 of them died on the voyage. You can only imagine how dangerous the journey
was for shackled and maltreated slaves when such a large percentage of the crew died. 47 percent of the African slaves died on the
journey. Around 66 percent of the slaves were men,
26 percent were women, and the rest were children. The ship was a 450-ton vessel, and down in
the hold specially-made shelves had been constructed to keep the slaves. These shelves were so small that the slaves
could not even sit up on their long journey. Their living quarters you could say were a
torture, and you can only imagine what it would be like seeing men die so often in such
a confined space. They were given food and water, which consisted
of servings of cornmeal and beans and a liter of water a day. They were actually allowed to leave their
shelf for one hour or more a day for exercise, but this was certainly not out of humanitarian
concerns. It was merely because the slaves had to be
kept alive. A dead slave was worthless to those who had
procured him or her. In fact, documents show the exercise sometimes
consisted of jumping and dancing for an hour or two to a “bagpipe, harp, or fiddle.” That is one very sinister image, because as
you will see, those slaves were gripped by the worst kind of physical and psychological
torments. If the slave was delivered to Barbados the
ship’s owners would receive around ten pounds, but since so many people died, the operation
was a failure for the British businessman who’d invested in the voyage. The price of slaves fluctuated a lot, but
here are a few examples. Not long before the Hannibal set sail the
Dutch were paying 2,000 pounds of sugar per slave. In the year 1750 a slave sold in Virginia
might go for forty pounds, but if that slave was bought in Gambia he or she might cost
£12.80. We found some notes from the captain of the
Hannibal and he described why so many people died. He wrote that some of the slaves, “are so
willful and loth to leave their own country, that they have often leap'd out of the canoos,
boat and ship, into the sea, and kept under water till they were drowned, to avoid being
taken up and saved by our boats. We have likewise seen divers of them eaten
by the sharks.” He said the sharks circled the ship often,
not only because some people threw themselves overboard rather than go to their destination,
but when people died on board they were thrown into the ocean. The captain wrote that 12 slaves refused to
eat and died of starvation, believing that they would return to their homeland in death. It was literally a fate worse than death for
some slaves to go to their new destination. Just imagine if someone stormed into your
room right now and took you from your family. They shackled you and beat you and told you
that you’re going to a place on the other side of the world. You later find yourself shackled to another
man, among many men whose languages you don’t understand. Subsequently you’re forced into a dark,
stinky hold where you might perish. If you live, all you know is that you’re
going to be enslaved. You’ll never see your loved ones again. You’ll never feel human again. For some slaves, death was a better option. On the Hannibal, when slaves boarded they
were shackled together by the hands and the legs. Because the owners of the ship wanted them
to be known as Hannibal occupants, the slaves were all branded with an “H”. This has been described in documents you can
find today, with the captain saying slaves were branded on the shoulder or the breast. Men, women and children. This, said the captain in his own words, “caus’d
but little pain” because palm oil had been rubbed on the body part prior to the branding. Perhaps that captain should’ve branded himself
and experienced first-hand how little the pain was... After that disastrous voyage Captain Phillips
wrote a book called, “A Journal of a Voyage Made in the Hannibal of London.” We found excerpts from the book online, and
it helped us to understand more what conditions on the ship were like. You might have earlier wondered how men jumped
overboard when they were shackled, but the book explains that when the ship was out at
sea the slaves were let out of their iron chains. Phillips said that they didn’t rebel due
to the fact they wouldn’t have known how to sail the ship. The slaves vastly outnumbered the crew, but
the crew were armed with guns and other weapons. Even if a slave mutiny could have been successful,
their lack of sailing and navigation skills would have made it almost impossible to get
back home, a place where African slave traders were no doubt waiting. The hopelessness the slaves felt has been
documented in many books. Captain Phillips wrote in his book that most
of the slaves died of something called “white flux”, which we had to look up because we’d
never heard of it. It’s actually just an old term for dysentery,
which is an infectious diarrhea that can cause severe dehydration. He said others died of smallpox. Phillips seems to take a sympathetic view
as to what happened to the enslaved men and women and children, and says their experience
on that ship of “misery and stench” made them into “creatures nastier than swine.” It is in Phillips' book where we learn something
more gruesome than you can imagine. He writes about other slave ships and how
captains sometimes punished slaves who had disobeyed commands or tried to jump overboard. He wrote, “I have been inform’d that some
commanders have cut off the legs or arms of the most willful, to terrify the rest.” Philips wrote that he himself would not, “put
in practice such barbarity and cruelty to poor creatures, who, excepting their want
of christianity and true religion, (their misfortune more than fault) are as much the
works of God’s hands, and no doubt as dear to him as our selves”. If that’s a mouthful for you, he’s saying
even Christian non-believers should be protected under the grace of God. In what was no doubt unusual for the times,
or at the very least a minority opinion, Phillips also said he couldn’t understand someone
being despised for the color of their skin. In his own words, he wrote, “I can’t think
there is any intrinsic value in one colour more than another, nor that white is better
than black, only we think it so because we are so.” This is why he is a controversial figure today,
since historians have written he “wrestled with his conscience”... although we are
quite sure he was happy to collect the 10 percent of the profits he was promised from
the voyages he captained. He might not have sawn off the legs of alleged
offenders, but he certainly wanted to claim his bit from the bounty of slavery. Ok, let’s move on. There were a hell of a lot of slave ships
floating around the Atlantic. The full route from Europe to Africa and to
the new world was known as a triangular voyage , and it was the “Middle Passage”, a journey
taking six to eight weeks, which is what we are discussing today. That’s the journey from Africa to the Americas. We have few first hand accounts of the voyages
from actual slaves since most of them couldn’t read or write, but one great man named Olaudah
Equiano wrote down his experiences. He was kidnapped along with his sister when
he was just 11. They were taken by raiders from a village
in what is present day Nigeria, and then sold into slavery. This is how he described the scene when he
first boarded his slave ship: “When I looked round the ship too, and saw
a large furnace of copper boiling, and a multitude of black people of every description chained
together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow.” He said the stench where the men were chained
in the hold was unbearable, and soon he could not eat. Like other men and women we’ve mentioned,
his only desire was to die, but the crew would not allow him to starve himself. After refusing food he was tied up and flogged
mercilessly. If you don’t watch our punishment shows,
that means being tied up and hit across the back with a device that has lots of separate
tails. Equiano echoed some things we have already
mentioned, such as men wanting to leap from the ship to their deaths. In his own words Equiano wrote, “Not being
used to the water, I naturally feared that element the first time I saw it; yet, nevertheless,
could I have got over the nettings, I would have jumped over the side.” He said the crew watched them all the time,
making sure they couldn’t jump. His words tell a story that describe the very
nadir of human depravity, how men profit from others’ pain, how “suicide prevention”
can ultimately become something incredibly selfish. He said those men who tried to jump and failed
were cut deep with knives or whipped until their blood stained the wooden deck. Most slaves did not speak Equiano’s language,
but when he finally found someone who he could communicate with his first question was “where
are we going.” He was told he was going to the white man’s
country to work. Equiano later wrote that the white men looked
so fierce and acted so savagely he wondered if they might just work him to death or kill
him. He didn’t know it then, but that’s what
happened to a lot of slaves. In his own words, Equiano said, “I had never
seen among any people such instances of brutal cruelty.” He even described how officers would act savagely
towards their own crew. Equiano wrote, “One white man in particular
I saw, when we were permitted to be on deck, flogged so unmercifully with a large rope
near the foremast, that he died in consequence of it; and they tossed him over the side as
they would have done a brute.” He said this made him fear his captors even
more, seeing that they could do this to one of their own crew members. The psychological impact of this was devastating
for the enslaved men. On one particular ship carrying 602 slaves,155,
or 25.7 percent of them, died. A doctor who was aboard that ship said about
two-thirds of those deaths were the result of melancholy. If there can possibly be anything positive
to say now it is that Equiano gained his freedom and became an outspoken abolitionist in London. Later in life he spent much of his time helping
former slaves in that city, people who’d been freed by the British during the American
Revolution. Not all the men working on those ships were
heartless savages. The trade itself was the devil, and the evil
in the end was all down to business and power. Some people, albeit few at the time, detested
the savagery of this business. At the age of 17 a young Englishman named
Edward Rushton was sent to work on a slave ship, and what he saw disgusted him. The year was 1773. The depravity he witnessed appalled the young
man, and he spent much of his time on the ship sneaking down to the hold to give stolen
food to the slaves. Many of those slaves on that particular ship
were suffering from a serious eye condition called ophthalmia. This is a highly contagious disease. This fact would change Rushton’s life because
he would develop the disease and later become 90 percent blind, but before that happened
he was charged by the British with mutiny for helping the slaves. He spent much of his life as an abolitionist
speaking out about the horrors of the slave trade and he also became a disability rights
campaigner, something he knew a lot about since he was blind. Somewhere within that black heart of darkness
of the slave trade there were glimmers of light, and those people urged the madness
to stop. It would take the rest of the world some time
to catch up and realize what horrors so many African people had faced. The United States would experience a bloody
civil war over slavery, and it wasn’t until 1863 when the last U.S. state, that of West
Virginia, abolished slavery. If you go to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
Database you’ll discover that around 450,000 of African-American’s ancestors were sold
as slaves in the United States. That same database tells us that 12.5 million
people were shipped to various parts of the New World from 1514 to 1866. Of those who were sent as slaves to the New
World 1.2–2.4 million died during their transportation. Many more would die doing the work they were
forced to do, and the barbarity they suffered at the hands of slave-owners is a story for
another day. Ok, so that was one very heavy video, so now
we’d like to cheer you up with one or two of our comedy challenge shows. Sit back and have a laugh at one of these,
“No Talking For 7 Days Challenge,” or “I Did 30 Push-Ups For 30 Days And This
Is What Happened.” Don’t wait! Click one now!
