| F. E. Forbes, delt. | Lith. of Sarony & Co. N. Y. |
THE LOWER DECK OF A GUINEA-MAN IN THE LAST CENTURY.
Dr. Thomas Trotter, surgeon of the Brookes, says: “He has seen the slaves drawing their breath with all those laborious and anxious efforts for life which are observed in expiring animals, subjected, by experiment, to foul air, or in the exhausted receiver of an air-pump; has also seen them when the tarpaulins have inadvertently been thrown over the gratings, attempting to heave them up, crying out ‘kickeraboo! kickeraboo!’ i. e., We are dying. On removing the tarpaulin and gratings, they would fly to the hatchways with all the signs of terror and dread of suffocation; many whom he has seen in a dying state, have recovered by being brought on the deck; others, were irrevocably lost by suffocation, having had no previous signs of indisposition.”
In regard to the Garland’s voyage, 1788, the testimony is: “Some of the diseased were obliged to be kept on deck. The slaves, both when ill and well, were frequently forced to eat against their inclination; were whipped with a cat if they refused. The parts on which their shackles are fastened, are often excoriated by the violent exercise they are forced to take, and of this they made many grievous complaints to him. Fell in with the Hero, Wilson, which had lost, he thinks, three hundred and sixty slaves by death; he is certain more than half of her cargo; learnt this from the surgeon; they had died mostly of the smallpox; surgeon also told him, that when removed from one place to another, they left marks of their skin and blood upon the deck, and that it was the most horrid sight he had ever seen.”
The annexed sketch represents the lower deck of a Guineaman, when the trade was under systematic regulations. The slaves were obliged to lie on their backs, and were shackled by their ankles, the left of one being fettered close to the right of the next; so that the whole number in one line formed a single living chain. When one died, the body remained during the night, or during bad weather, secured to the two between whom he was. The height between decks was so little, that a man of ordinary size could hardly sit upright. During good weather, a gang of slaves was taken on the spar-deck, and there remained for a short time. In bad weather, when the hatches were closed, death from suffocation would necessarily occur. It can, therefore, easily be understood, that the athletic strangled the weaker intentionally, in order to procure more space, and that, when striving to get near some aperture affording air to breathe, many would be injured or killed in the struggle.
Such were “the horrors of the middle passage.”
CHAPTER IV.[1]
PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY—CLIMATE—GEOLOGY—ZOOLOGY—BOTANY.
Before proceeding to the colonizing era, it will be requisite to present an estimate of the value and importance of the African continent in relation to the rest of the world. This requires some preliminary notice of the physical condition of its territories, and the character and distribution of the tribes possessing them. Africa has not yet yielded to science the results which may be expected from it. Courage and hardihood, rather than knowledge and skill, have, from the circumstances of the case, been the characteristics of its successful explorers. We have, therefore, wonderful incidents and loose descriptions, without the accurate observation and statement of circumstances which can render them useful.
The vast radiator formed by the sun beating vertically on the plains of tropical Africa, heats and expands the air, and thus constitutes a sort of central trough into which gravitation brings compensating currents, by producing a lateral sliding inwards of the great trade-wind streams. Thus, as a general rule, winds which would normally diverge from the shores are drawn in towards them. They have been gathering moisture in their progress, and when pressed upwards, as they expand under the vertical sun, lose their heat in the upper regions, let go their moisture, and spread over the interior terraces and mountains a sheet of heavily depositing cloud. This constitutes the rainy season, which necessarily, from the causes producing it, accompanies the sun in its apparent oscillations across the equator.