Details of horrific first voyages in transatlantic slave trade revealed

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/transatlantic-slave-trade-voyages-ships-log-details-africa-america-atlantic-ocean-deaths-disease-a8494546.html

by Thevet • 8 years ago

117 39 8 years ago

independent.co.uk

dylanz• 8 years ago

I made it through 1/4 of the article and couldn’t take the reading experience. I’m on an iPhone and it was nonstop ads and odd breaks in content. Bummed!

CharlesW• 8 years ago

Safari's Reader Mode is ideal for this scenario. You won't see the associated media (at least not on this particular page), but you can read the story in peace.

foxes• 8 years ago

Why should you have to use a "reader mode" in the first place?

++ As in it's a "workaround" for an issue that should never have been allowed to exist in the first place - bloat, ads etc.

That aside, umatrix on firefox mobile has been the best improvement in mobile browsing.

Bucephalus355• 8 years ago

In school, I used to wonder how people survived this voyage if they were shackled below the whole trip (3 weeks). Wouldn’t the stores they were in, which were only a few feet high (couldn’t stand up), fill up with feces?

Apparently they were let up on deck for 2 hours a day.

If anyone has any clarification to add to this / that wasn’t in the article, please add.

aphextron• 8 years ago

In school, I used to wonder how people survived this voyage if they were shackled below the whole trip

They didn't. You have to understand that African slaves were seen as cargo, not human beings. A good percentage would die every single time, and be thrown overboard. This was just accepted as part of the cost of doing business, the same way chicken breeders ship baby chickens in the mail today with the expectation that some will die in transit. The few that die off are more than made up for in profits by your ability to jam as many as possible into one shipment.

It's one of those facts that really makes the transatlantic slave trade stand out as perhaps the worst genocide in human history. It wasn't just killing. It was the industrial scale treatment of millions of human beings as cattle for over 300 years.

javiramos• 8 years ago

Your comment reminded me of the famous J.M.W. Turner painting[1] which depicts the throwing overboard of hundreds of slaves so the captain of the ship could collect insurance payments.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Ship

clarkmoody• 8 years ago

worst genocide in human history

Yes, racial slavery was a terrible evil. But it wasn't genocide, which has a specific definition (intention to wipe out a specific people). Slave traders wanted enough people alive to sell at a profit.

The scope of the death toll was large, but spread over a long period.

From Wikipedia:

Approximately 1.2 – 2.4 million Africans died during their transport to the New World. More died soon upon their arrival.[1]

Over 300 years.

Compare to other genocides[2], which murdered similar numbers (or much more) but happened over just a few years.

Maybe you meant "worst" in the sense of most injustice? It certainly stands out, but it doesn't hold a candle to the death inflicted on a colossal scale by the governments of the 20th century during both war and peace. Estimates place Stalin's body count between 3-9 million.[3] WWII civilian deaths are estimated at 50 million and included the genocide of the Halocaust.[4]

Slavery is evil, but war is so much worse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_tol...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_deaths_in_the_Soviet...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

ComputerGuru2• 8 years ago

It was the industrial scale treatment of millions of human beings as cattle for over 300 years.

Actually, in pretty much every developing society cattle are considered prized ownership and are treated well and cared for. Farmers with thousands of sheep or cows still try to avoid the loss of even one.

Slaves were treated far worse than that. Perhaps like some used trash you were selling to a junkyard.

vixen99• 8 years ago

Meanwhile let's remember that there are an estimated 45 million slaves today according to the World Economic Forum 2017.

talonx• 8 years ago

I would recommend James Michener's Chesapeake for a graphic account of how the slaves were treated right from the time they were shackled in chains in Africa and made to march hundreds of miles, dying along the way, dying on the voyage, and the lives -if you can call it that - they lived as slaves once they reached America. Although this is a work of fiction, it does a good job of portraying the horror.

goatlover• 8 years ago

I still wonder how anyone can do that to other human beings for three weeks. Even if you don't view them as the same status, they can clearly speak and think and come from societies with tools, clothing, art and shelter. Were the slave traders all sociopaths?

I also wouldn't want to do that to any animal, although apparently it's seen as acceptable with factory farming.

BadassFractal3• 8 years ago

Contemporary Westerners constantly underestimate a human's ability to commit unthinkable atrocities under the right conditions. I don't know if it's our education's fault. Maybe we just don't bother to ever emphasize this point. Maybe it's too uncomfortable of a subject to deal with.

This last century has presented a rich buffet of historical options to choose from when looking for examples of ideologies that allowed otherwise perfectly normal, God-fearing, salt of the earth folk to turn into horror-machines of rape, mutilation and slaughter. Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, you name it. Maybe even a relative or a next door neighbor in our very own US of A, sent to the wrong Vietnamese village at the wrong time. That seed of pure horror is in all of us, and it's ready to rear its ugly head when the conditions are right.

I don't think as a species we've quite figured out how to suppress it.

patrickg_zill• 8 years ago

I'd ask you to think about pretty much any of the recent wars that have happened... Innocent people died, sometimes in extreme pain, in each of them.

rule_follower• 8 years ago

Consider how the men who toiled on the ships of that era lived: https://www.newworldexploration.com/explorers-tales-blog/lif...

leoc2• 8 years ago

While the crews of slave ships surely tended to be somewhat self-selecting, it seems highly unlikely that they were all or mostly sociopaths. The reality is that it's quite easy for a perfectly normal person to convince themselves that bad things that happen to a group of people of radically different physical appearance, culture, language and religion don't really count. When their society already has a cultural consensus to that effect, and when their job depends on it, it's ridiculously easy. The two universal and constant features of human nature are stupidity and evil. Radical evil is more or less always here now, but people always and everywhere choose to believe that it is only in the past or in the village over the next hill. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445240

forapurpose• 8 years ago

Most evil is done by ordinary people, who have great capacity for it. It is a critical error, I think, to suppose that evil is done by the 'bad guys' and that I and my group, whoever that is, are somehow invulnerable to it. Instead, we must realize there is nothing different or special about us, and be ever on guard for its symptoms and the things that lead to it (IMHO, ideology and intolerance, and anything that puts my power and my desires above those of others').

Germany was arguably the cultural and scientific heart of the world in the 1920s and 1930s. The Nazis murdered 11 million people. That isn't done by a few evil people; it requires the labors and cooperation of large numbers, and the passive acceptance of millions more.

linuxkerneldev• 8 years ago

Were the slave traders all sociopaths?

No. Just people who were willing to tolerate things being done to other people that they didn't care about. Sometimes even people they did care about. People forget that the 45 year old Tom Jefferson took a 14 year old child, Sally Hemmings to France as his sex slave. He fathered 6 children with her and did not free them. That's right. He kept those 6 children as slaves. Was he sociopath? Or just a product of a toxic culture that enabled him to commit such actions and still sleep well?

Jaruzel• 8 years ago

Those who have power will always subjugate those who don't.

I'm not defending it, not at all. But mankind has been beating on his fellow man since the dawn of time. We truly are a horrific species.

lordnacho• 8 years ago

I think you'll find that plenty of people are willing to not think so hard about such problems as long as it's in the course of a legal business. I'm sure it was also easy to find justification from commentators at the time when slavery was legal. You could just go about your slavery business and point at some guy's essay as to why you shouldn't feel guilty at all.

phobosdeimos• 8 years ago

The popular opinion is that it was all evil white devils. The historical answer is that African tribes and kingdoms had been trading slaves for thousands of years. It was a nice source of income for them. When England abolished slavery there was a lot of resentment among the African elite.

code_duck2• 8 years ago

One has to eat food to create feces, especially food with fiber in it. If you’re starved nothing comes out because nothing is going in. I doubt the unfortunate human ‘cargo’ were fed very much or even at all.

ComputerGuru2• 8 years ago

I’m not sure why you were downvoted, but it is true and certainly would have factored into the situation.

sasaf5• 8 years ago

Auto-loading video. RIP mobile data...

jzl• 8 years ago

"Almost completely ignored by the modern world, this month marks the 500th anniversary of one of history’s most tragic and significant events – the birth of the Africa to America transatlantic slave trade."

A (relatively) small step in the right direction: The slave trade and its origins is one of the primary focuses of the incredible new museum in Washington DC: the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), steps away from the Washington Monument. This museum is a national treasure. I highly, highly recommend it to anyone who might have an opportunity to visit. The subject matter, the incredibly detailed and thorough exhibits, the culturally infused architecture, the underground memorial, and many other factors all combine to create one of the most engrossing and memorable museum experiences in the US. It's a must-see if you're in DC.

perfmode• 8 years ago

as a black person, it is hurtful and alarming to read these comments and see how people in our industry feel about the slavery of my people. the callous, cold minimizations lack humanity.

Details of horrific first voyages in transatlantic slave trade revealed

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