"The Beginning of the Slave Trade"
Slaves Aboard a Ship
My
excerpt tells of two tales about a young woman upon a slave ship by the name of
Sarah and a cabin boy aboard another slave ship by the name of Samuel Robinson.
The first account, of Sarah, explains how she was a slave woman who was put on
a Liverpool slave ship (The Hudibras) in Old Calabar during 1785.
According to the words of many African slaves aboard the ship, she was near to
perfect due to all her characteristics such as beauty and she soon became a
dancer as well as a singer for the slaves. She was given the name Sarah by the
captain, in his hopes of her always being loyal to him throughout the journey.
While aboard the ship, the enslaved African men and women devised a plan to
take over the ship by killing the company and gaining control of the vessel; by
which Sarah was also apart of. It doesn't quite say whether or not the
insurrection worked or not, but it did say that Sarah survived through the
Middle Passage and whatever punishment she was given for being apart of the
mutiny. She was then eventually sold at Grenada in 1787. The second account, of
Samuel Robinson, says he was a thirteen-year old Scottish boy who boarded The
Lady Neilson in 1801 to travel with his uncle (coincidentally the captain of
the ship) from Liverpool to the Gold Coast, then to Demerara. It was also said
that Samuel made journal entries during his voyages because he was against the
slave trade and wanted have something to counter argue against all of the
propaganda about the slave trade. Robinson's experience upon the slave ship was
typically of that of a young sailor in that he would constantly be bullied or
picked on along with getting in a great deal of brawls and or fights.
The
evidence of resistance and or turmoil in this excerpt is when in Sarah's case
the men and women aboard the ship devise a plan to take over the ship by means
of mutiny/rebellion, and when Samuel himself writes entries within his journal
to fight against the propaganda of the slave trade and all the cruelty that
goes on within it. While Sarah was aboard the ship, the enslaved African slaves
created a plan to kill all of the company on the ship in order to seize control
of the vessel. This was to fight against all the terrible things that went on
within the slave trade. Samuel, although not a slave himself, still went
through hardships as a sailor and rebelled against the cruelty given by the
officials aboard the ship he was on by writing things that went against what
was told through propaganda.
Some
things I have learned about slavery, slave ships, and the slave trade after
reading these personal stories are that mutiny was common in most Slave ships
even though it may not seem like it and that more people than just the slaves
themselves disagreed with the slave trade being a good thing. Although
generally we see that the slave trade went "smoothly" as far as the
slaves cooperating, it seems that the accounts of slaves themselves proved that
mutinies happened frequently upon slave ships and that none of them wanted to
be doing what they were doing. And, as we can see through Samuel Robinson, even
non-slave people that have experienced or witnessed didn't want the slave trade
to continue because of just how cruel it really was.
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