Digital History>eXplorations>Servitude and Slavery

Exploration 1: Enslavement

Log of the Sandown, 1793-1794, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, London (neg. D7596)
Color drawing, cropped from a page of a ship's log, showing coffle of slaves and guards armed with bows and arrows and spears; African village in the foreground.
Image courtesy of The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record website at http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/index.html

What do the following accounts tell us about the process of enslavement?

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Exploration 2: Shipboard Conditions

George L. Sulivan, Dhow chasing in Zanzibar waters and on the eastern coast of Africa (London, 1873), facing p. 168; also, published in The Graphic, London (March 8, 1873), p.233
Caption, "Group of Negro men and boys taken out of captured Dhow in state of starvation."
Image courtesy of The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record website at http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/index.html

What do the following accounts tell us about shipboard conditions during the Middle Passage?

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Exploration 3: Experiences

Henry Bibb, Narrative of the life and adventures of Henry Bibb, an American slave, written by himself (New York, 1849), p. 201.
(Copy in Library Company of Philadelphia)
Image courtesy of The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record website at http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/index.html

What do the following accounts tell us about the experiences of enslaved Africans upon their arrival in the New World?

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