The pains of the past, the harrowing thoughts of the unknown.
O, but to think back to my homeland, that blessed sunshine, compared to the black, dreaded night under the sea; the solid orange-green ground with the beautiful sunshine on my face, as to the dark, mirky underworlds of a ship. Upon my stool that bent me near, with hundreds of pants and screams and tears; So as till the unknown we sail, and my heart beats out for bounds. The ground creaks and groans, as we moan for our homeland far from shore. The little time we spent on deck, wreathed in anguish painful sigh, as our captors broke our backs with flailing whips that cracked above our thighs. Oh where is our destined misfortune to be? To what avail for our suffering must ends meet? On that distant day in which the ship opens doors, and we are greeted with the marvelous sun upon that shore; What short-lived happiness that greeted thee and me, was our painful experience yet to be. But as for now as we wept and sigh, and cry out on High, yet a little voice tells us not to wheep; But to save our tears for the dying light. For as it brings the next morn of painful things, behold...
...Our pain has just begun.
~
Answer:
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Explanation:
For weeks, months, sometimes as long as a year, they waited in the dungeons of the slave factories scattered along Africa's western coast. They had already made the long, difficult journey from Africa's interior -- but just barely. Out of the roughly 20 million who were taken from their homes and sold into slavery, half didn't complete the journey to the African coast, most of those dying along the way.
And the worst was yet to come.
The captives were about to embark on the infamous Middle Passage, so called because it was the middle leg of a three-part voyage -- a voyage that began and ended in Europe. The first leg of the voyage carried a cargo that often included iron, cloth, brandy, firearms, and gunpowder. Upon landing on Africa's "slave coast," the cargo was exchanged for Africans. Fully loaded with its human cargo, the ship set sail for the Americas, where the slaves were exchanged for sugar, tobacco, or some other product. The final leg brought the ship back to Europe.
The African slave boarding the ship had no idea what lay ahead. Africans who had made the Middle Passage to the plantations of the New World did not return to their homeland to tell what happened to those people who suddenly disappeared. Sometimes the captured Africans were told by the white men on the ships that they were to work in the fields. But this was difficult to believe, since, from the African's experience, tending crops took so little time and didn't require many hands. So what were they to believe? More than a few thought that the Europeans were cannibals. Olaudah Equiano, an African captured as a boy who later wrote an autobiography, recalled . . .
When I looked round the ship too and saw a large furnace of copper boiling, and a mulititude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate and quite overpowered with horrow and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted. . . . I asked if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces and long hair?"
The slaves were branded with hot irons and restrained with shackles. Their "living quarters" was often a deck within the ship that had less than five feet of headroom -- and throughout a large portion of the deck, sleeping shelves cut this limited amount of headroom in half.4 Lack of standing headroom was the least of the slaves' problems, though. With 300 to 400 people packed in a tiny area5 -- an area with little ventilation and, in some cases, not even enough space to place buckets for human waste -- disease was prevalent. According to Equiano, "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. 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."
