LEGL 4500/6500 - Employment Law

Dawn D. Bennett-Alexander, Esq.

Terry College of Business

Spirits of the Passage is a touchstone American history. The lives of Ouladah Equiano and so many others stand as a poignant metaphor for the journey of millions of African people who travelled to the Americas aboard slave ships, and whose labor, perseverance and insight helped build the New World and shape its culture.

Through the prism of a single merchant slaver--the seventeenth-century slave ship Henrietta Marie--this book excerpt re-examines their history and finds, in the midst of tragedy, the extraordinary strength of people.

We are proud to partner in the sharing of this story, and to be the National Tour Sponsor of the exhibit, A Slave Ship Speaks: The Wreck of the Henrietta Marie.

General Motors.

With the wreck of the slave ship Henrietta Marie as its dramatic heart this important new book, Spirits of the Passage, gives a wrenching account of the transatlantic slaves trade during its early years. In this excerpt, a young African encounters Western slavery for the first time.

The youngest son of a titled Igbo man, Ouladah Equiano was an earnest child which had once thought himself destined to follow in his father’s footsteps, becoming a farmer and a man of high rank. Instead, the eleven-year-old boy had been stolen from his home although he did not yet know it, was bound for American slavery. As strange hands carried him roughly aboard the ship, terror coursed through him. On the deck of the ship, he noticed groups of disconsolate Africans from various nations, chained together-and a large copper cauldron boiling. Convinced that he was about to be eaten by the evil spirits with their white skin and strange, pale eyes, the boy fainted.

Equaino’s experience echoed that of millions of other Africans from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Through many of these embarked on the Middle Passage as mature adults, young boys like Ouladah Equiano were the most prized quarry of all, for they were considered old enough to do the work of a grown man but young enough to learn a new language quickly and be broken up of excessive attachment to their former lives. Stark evidence of this fact would be found three hundred years later in the shackles brought up from the wreckage of the seventeenth century slave ship Henrietta Marie. Among almost one hundred pairs of shackles, some were so small that they seem to have been forged for the wrists and ankles of a child Equiano’s age, or younger.

Once abroad ship, Equiano and the other prisoners entered a frightening new world. Branded with a hot iron and shackled in pairs, the prisoners were unable to move about the deck freely. Instead, they were forced to huddle and watch as the Europeans processed each new arrival for the long voyage ahead. Finally, the prisoners were thrust below, where they were packed in between decks with less than five feet of head room in the center and half that on the shelves on which they slept.

By virtue of their smaller numbers, crew deaths may have been proportionately higher than that of slaves, but the slaves’ suffering was far more acute. Not only werer they ill, but they had to endure their fevers in the stifling heat below deck. Portholes and windsails brought some relief in fair weather, but all ventilation was closed off when it rained or blew hard. "The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us," Equiano later recalled. "This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died….This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable, and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying rendered the whole scene of horror almost inconceivable."

The dying lay shackled to the living, the living to the dead. Even when the chains were removed, as they often were at sea, the slaves were little better off. They could reach the latrine buckets only by crawling over other human beings in a tossing ship, an endeavor that must have presented enormous difficulties and produced complaints and misery among the captives. In the face of such humiliation, survival must have seemed a vain objective, one that only the strongest and most determined would be able to achieve.
 
 
 
 

Excerpted from Spirits of the Passage, Simon Schuster, 1997.

For more information on this book, or to buy it, click here.