Free The Amistad Rebellion by Marcus Rediker Page A

Any man the guards considered strong and dangerous was singled out for special treatment: he might be “beaten half to death to ensure his being quiet,” then heavily fettered and locked in place between two others to limit his movements. Any man who dared to resist his captors would be given vicious exemplary punishments in order to terrorize everyone else. The most rebellious might be flogged to death. 76
    The horror stories of Lomboko spread far and wide. Brazilian, Portuguese, and Spanish seamen told Captain Forbes “fearful tales” of fever, famine, and mass death at the factories. George Thompson heard that because of rough waters and the “bad bar” at the mouth of the Gallinas River, “hundreds of poor natives” had been lost to “swarms of sharks” when canoes overset. On one occasion, the sea for miles around was “red with their blood.” The
Amistad
Africans wouldcarry horror stories of their own as they left Lomboko and boarded the slave ship
Teçora
. 77
    A Brazilian Slaver
    As it happened, George Thompson went aboard a Brazilian slave ship of roughly the same size as the
Teçora
soon after he arrived in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in May 1848. The vessel had been captured by the British antislavery squadron. The five hundred enslaved on board would be liberated and the ship itself would be condemned and later sold at auction. Thompson, it must be noted, was no stranger to slavery. He was a committed abolitionist who had spent five years in a Missouri prison for his efforts to free the enslaved and ferry them to freedom. Still, he was profoundly shocked by what he saw. 78
    The first thing he noticed about the slaver was the extreme, promiscuous crowding: the “deck was literally covered with men, women and children
in a state of nudity—
many young girls and boys, and many
mothers
also!” Another two to three hundred people of all ages sat packed below on the lower deck, “
crowded between each other’s legs
” in a space of thirty to thirty-six inches headroom, “not sufficient for a person to sit up straight!” As he paced the main deck, everywhere Thompson looked, “a
dense mass
of human beings” stared back at him mutely. “It was a soul-sickening sight.” Will not the Lord awake? he wondered.
    Thompson included an image of the ship he visited, drawing, literally, on the abolitionist tradition of rendering the slave ship in order to make its horrors visible and real to a reading public. He provides three views of vessel. The main one, at the top, diagrams the “form, divisions, arrangement and cargo” of the ship, with its main deck, lower (slave) deck, and hold, along with gun rooms for the ship’s thirteen cannon, and the captain’s cabin. In the hold are “leaguers,” the huge water casks required to sustain hundreds as they crossed the ocean in the tropics, as well as smaller casks for food, and ship stores. At the bottom of the page is an aerial view of the ship’s main deck, showing the two small gratings that were likely the only sources of air to those locked below.

    View of a slave ship
    At the left is a depiction of the enslaved stowed on the lower deck, “crowded very thickly together.” Thompson wrote that they were “shackled and handcuffed together, two and two (the right leg of one to the left leg of the next, and also the arms) to prevent their rising on the captors.” In this dark and miserable place “deadly fevers” erupted, causing many bodies to be thrown overboard each morning to “the monsters of the deep.” Such was the grim reality for several weeks as such vessels carried four hundred to six hundred people to the slave markets of Brazil and Cuba.
    Thompson concluded that his efforts, in word and image, must be a failure: “No one can get a realizing sense of the horrors of a slave ship from any oral or written description—it must be
seen
or
felt
.” His final words on the subject were, “It certainly was the most awful and shocking sight that I