Famine and War

The horror ship of the eighteenth century is the slave ship, the horror ship of the nineteenth century is the ‘coffin ship’ of the Great Famine. The slave ship preparing for its two month voyage, collecting its cargo over as long a period, the crew sickly and abusive, shackling their numbered cargo, stowing the male portion down below, bringing them up for feeding with firearms trained on them to discourage revolt, which nevertheless often took place. The awful moment when the ship sailed, the Africans howling and clashing their chains below decks, stories circulating in the foetid darkness that they were to be eaten by these white cannibals, their bodies skinned to make shoes, then squeezed into oil, their blood drunk as red wine, their bones ground for gunpowder. Stormy passages where the necessary tubs overflowed and the decks grew slippery with vomit, faeces and bloody mucus; becalmed voyages where food and water ran low and the sick were thrown overboard for insurance purposes. Attendant sharks often followed such vessels for days on end. At the close of the voyage the slaves would be washed, oiled, encouraged to dance, have their anuses corked to disguise the presence of dysentery. In the eighteenth century it was the British and French who brought transatlantic trade to its most horrifying, extensive and efficient; the Portuguese who began it in the fifteenth century and tenaciously and illegally plied it on into the late nineteenth, called their ageing slave ships tumbas (coffins). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Coffin · Gunpowder · Seal (emblem) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History

• Slavery and human progress

  David Brion Davis•Slavery and human progress•1984

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• A Pro-slavery Crusade

  William W Freehling, Ronald Takaki et al.•Journal of American History•1972

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