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The Griot Museum of Black History
 

Slave Cabin
Ship Model
Griot Museum of Black History

Slave Ships
Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, tens of millions of Africans were forcibly taken from the Continent in ships similar to this one.  At least half of those enslaved died before arriving in the Americas.  The first vessels used were converted merchant ships that were later replaced by sailing boats specifically designed to hold as many enslaved Africans as possible.  

This ship model is known as a “clipper” and was developed in the mid-nineteenth century.  It might have been used to try to outrun naval frigates that patrolled the seas to stop slave ships still engaged in selling humans. This twenty-five- by ninety-two-foot ship’s ability to achieve high speeds in good weather meant voyages took much less time with less loss of life.  

Journey into Slavery
Enslaved people were put in the hold below, as seen on the drawing and as presented in a scale model replica at The Griot.  The human “cargo” was either “loose packed” or “tight packed.”  When it was “loose-packed,” the enslaved had a six-foot by one-foot space, barely wide enough to lie on one’s back.  If it was “tight packed,” there was less room than in a coffin.  Thus was the living condition for enslaved black people for months.  Temperatures of 120-130 degrees were typical.  Pestilence and epidemics raged, sometimes brought by rats, feces, urine, and disease from decaying bodies in the hold.  Open tubs were used as toilets, where urine and excrement would fester.  African children would sometimes fall into these tubs and drown.  As many as sixty million Africans died on the high seas or on the shores of Africa, trying to escape the perils that awaited them.  Those who survived and came to America arrived having established extremely close bonds; they had boarded the ship as strangers from different lands and different cultures, but they left united by the inhumanity they experienced, the degradation they suffered, and the tortures they survived on board.

 


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