John Newton a slave ship captain who wrote amazing grace, as a Christian while making slave trade excursions. He testified before parliament saying some captains used thumb screws, he himself used them on children.
The regime of violence and terror that went hand in hand with the business of the slave trade was not the anomalous enigma but rather the tenacious norm of the slave institution while the slave resistance to this inhuman treatment was commendable and extraordinarily creative.
Many rebellious slaves were chained to the outer side of the slave ships to become bait and food for the sharks, some were thrown over board and some jumped to their deaths in order to escape the harsh treatment of slavery. The middle passage produced an indifferent form of abuse, which produced many psychologically unstable mental thorns within the slaves, thus having pessimistically influenced the health and the mentality of the slaves for generations to come. Merely lying on the hard wood floors chained together for months during the trip caused unusual health conditions, such as body lesions, torn flesh or ruptured skin from the boat rocking back and forth, insanity due to claustrophobia which often times lead to violence between slaves who killed one another for the privilege of obtaining more personal space aboard the vessel. Space was limited as the slaves were always over booked, packed like fish or sardines in a can, leaving two feet overhead and 18 inches between slaves. In addition to a lack of space, slaves were also chained tightly together, with very little freedom of movement, simultaneously fear and agitation was rampant among the slaves, the atmosphere was chilling of fear, damp and wet with discomfort.
Then there was the tremendous weight of a dead body pulling at the reins of the chains that bind many of the slaves to dead corpses, its rotting flesh, its over sensitized smell, the infection and diseases that emanated from its open wounds and vernacular orifice, the sight of the lice and worms that consumed the body; all of this was an average day, a testament of horror concerning the social environment aboard those hellish slave ships....
Influencing mental health of descendants for GENERATIONS is right! A lot of our issues start right here, all the way down to hypertension... knowledge
Tuesday, September 17th 2013 at 1:27AM
DAVID JOHNSON
