Ships

For three weeks, since the Portuguese São José Paquete d’Africa lifted anchor in Mozambique, the 512 enslaved Mozambicans crammed into its hold had been living a nightmare of seasickness, dehydration, disease, and degradation. Ahead lay a harrowing four-month crossing to Maranhão, Brazil, followed by a lifetime of forced labor in the cane fields. On the voyage perhaps 20 percent would die, the average mortality rate on a slave ship, where African people were shackled, packed in like cargo, and made to endure horrendous conditions. As many as two million souls perished on tens of thousands of ships that sailed the notorious Middle Passage, as the journey across the Atlantic is now known.

Few firsthand accounts exist of what it was like to be transported on a slave ship. One is an autobiography written in 1789 by author and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, who was abducted from the Ibo region of the Kingdom of Benin in present-day Nigeria and trafficked from West Africa to Barbados. “The stench of the hold, while we were on the coast, was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there . . .