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This excerpt will haunt you, if you can get through it
This is from a Charles Blow op-ed in the NY Times a couple of days ago. I can't get the nightmare images described here out of my mind.
Want to know what the Republican Party and their racist voters stand for? This is the reality and ultimate outcome of their sick, malicious, purely evil ideology.
One of the few written accounts of the atrocious conditions on these ships comes from a man named the Rev. Robert Walsh. The British government outlawed the international slave trade in 1807, followed by the United States in 1808. The two nations patrolled the seas to prevent people from continuing to kidnap Africans and bringing them to those countries illegally. In 1829, one of the patrols spotted such a ship, and what Walsh saw when he boarded the ship is beyond belief.
The ship had been at sea for 17 days. There were over 500 kidnapped Africans onboard. Fifty-five had already been thrown overboard.
The Africans were crowded below the main deck. Each deck was only 3 feet 3 inches high. They were packed so tight that they were sitting up between one another’s legs, everyone completely nude. As Walsh recounted, “there was no possibility of their lying down or at all changing their position by night or day.”
Each had been branded, “burnt with the red-hot iron,” on their breast or arm. Many were children, little girls and little boys.
Not only could light not reach down into the bowels of those ships, neither could fresh air. As Walsh recounted, “The heat of these horrid places was so great and the odor so offensive that it was quite impossible to enter them, even had there been room.”
These people, these human beings, sat in their own vomit, urine and feces, and that of others. If another person sat between your legs, their bowels emptied out on you.
These voyages regularly lasted over a month, meaning many women onboard experienced menstruation in these conditions.
Many of the enslaved, sick or driven mad, were thrown overboard. Others simply jumped. In fact, there was so much human flesh going over the side of those ships that sharks learned to trail them.
This voyage was so horrific that I can only surmise that the men, women and children who survived it were superhuman, the toughest and the most resilient our species has to offer.
The ship had been at sea for 17 days. There were over 500 kidnapped Africans onboard. Fifty-five had already been thrown overboard.
The Africans were crowded below the main deck. Each deck was only 3 feet 3 inches high. They were packed so tight that they were sitting up between one another’s legs, everyone completely nude. As Walsh recounted, “there was no possibility of their lying down or at all changing their position by night or day.”
Each had been branded, “burnt with the red-hot iron,” on their breast or arm. Many were children, little girls and little boys.
Not only could light not reach down into the bowels of those ships, neither could fresh air. As Walsh recounted, “The heat of these horrid places was so great and the odor so offensive that it was quite impossible to enter them, even had there been room.”
These people, these human beings, sat in their own vomit, urine and feces, and that of others. If another person sat between your legs, their bowels emptied out on you.
These voyages regularly lasted over a month, meaning many women onboard experienced menstruation in these conditions.
Many of the enslaved, sick or driven mad, were thrown overboard. Others simply jumped. In fact, there was so much human flesh going over the side of those ships that sharks learned to trail them.
This voyage was so horrific that I can only surmise that the men, women and children who survived it were superhuman, the toughest and the most resilient our species has to offer.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/28/opinion/george-washington-confederate-statues.html
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