Page 119 - 1619 Project Curriculum

6 SUNDAY, AUGUST 18, 2019

Left: An iron ballast block used to
counterbalance the weight of enslaved
persons aboard the São José Paquete
Africa slave ship, which left Mozambique
in 1794 and sank near what is now
Cape Town, South Africa.
Right: A child’s iron shackles,
before 1860.

Means

Of Control

‘‘THE IRON entered into our souls,’’
lamented a formerly enslaved man
named Caesar, as he remembered
the shackles he had to wear during
his forced passage from his home
in Africa to the New World. Used
as restraints around the arms and
legs, the coarse metal cut into
captive Africans’ skin for the many
months they spent at sea. Children
made up about 26 percent of the
captives. Because governments
determined by the ton how many
people could be fitted onto a slave
ship, enslavers considered children
especially advantageous: They could
fill the boat’s small spaces, allowing
more human capital in the cargo
hold. Africans were crammed into
ships with no knowledge of where

they were going or if they would
be released. This forced migration
is known as the Middle Passage.
As Olaudah Equiano, the formerly
enslaved author, remembered, ‘‘I
was soon put down under the
decks, and there I received such a
salutation in my nostrils as I had
never experienced in my life: so that,
with the loathsomeness of the stench,
and crying together, I became so
sick and low that I was not able to
eat, nor had I the least desire to
taste anything. I now wished for
the last friend, death, to relieve
me.’’ Overheating, thirst, starvation
and violence were common aboard
slave ships, and roughly 15 percent
of each ship’s enslaved population
died before they ever reached land.
Suicide attempts were so common
that many captains placed netting
around their ships to prevent loss of
human cargo and therefore profit;
working-class white crew members,
too, committed suicide or ran away
at port to escape the brutality.
Enslaved people did not meekly accept
their fate. Approximately one out of
10 slave ships experienced resistance,
ranging from individual defiance (like
refusing to eat or jumping overboard)
to full-blown mutiny.

Photographs by Erica Deeman