Learn About Historical Atrocities That Were Committed

¶ … learn about historical atrocities that were committed in the name of progress, moral righteousness, or simple commerce, but it is quite another to be confronted with a personal account of the horrors as they were committed and the people that committed them. Although the slavers that caused so much suffering for the slaves during the "middle passage" -- the journey across the Atlantic from Africa to the New World -- are not really prominently featured in this portion of the text, I found myself thinking more about these people than the slaves they practiced their atrocities and cruelties upon. It is not that the description of the slaves' conditions and level of despair was not gripping and emotionally powerful, and in fact quite the opposite is true, but I found that my emotional reaction to the filth, depravity, and deaths of the enslaved occupants of the lower portion of the ship kept coming back to the fact that this was something some human beings consciously and willingly did to other human beings. This led to many different intellectual and emotional epiphanies that continued to fire off even after the reading.

I knew previously, of course, that most individuals involved in the slave trade and even many other (perhaps most other) citizens of the Western world considered Africans and other tribe peoples as not fully human, either as a biological or a theological/philosophical/religious fact if not both. What this judgment of a subhuman status meant for the people actually involved -- both those who were judged to be subhuman and those that did the judging -- was something I had never really thought about too much, though, and was certainly not ever a concrete or detailed concept of mine. This brief text made it clear just what the subhuman designation meant, and how deeply and profoundly it was applied in directly practical ways. It is hard to imagine that the people running the slave ship could have stomached the conditions they inflicted upon the large populations of Africans captured if they actually thought of them as fellow human beings, and it is even difficult to imagine that herds of animals would have been treated to the same conditions the captured Africans were forced to endure. The subhuman designation with which these people had been designated apparently enabled their captors to discount any pain, discomfort, or outright anguish that the slaves displayed and allowed their torture to continue. That is, because the captors thought of the Africans as some sort of bastardized version of "true" men, they were worth less than common livestock in terms of ethical value and the need for proper treatment, and thus even when the slaves gave evidence of their humanity it was no given any credence or meaning by the slavers on the ship.

When people -- or creatures -- make it quite clear that they would rather die than continue enduring the circumstances they are unable to escape from, it should be taken as a sign not only that the pain and anguish being felt is real but that it is being felt by fully sentient creatures worthy of compassion if not full human dignity. Instead, the description of the suicide attempts that results in two "successful" drownings and one recapture ends with the recaptured slave being beaten for daring to prefer death to slavery. This displays the ultimate rejection by the slavers of any humanity or dignity possessed by the slaves more so than any of the other features of the slaving ship described in this text. Being chained together in spaces as small as coffins, forced to sit in pools of each other's vomit and human waste, and endure the other horrible conditions of the slave vessel are all certainly bad enough and should have been recognized as improper and damnable ways of treating any other living creature. Yet the fact that the slavers would rather force many slaves to die by enduring these conditions rather than allowing them even the simple choice to end their own lives with reduced suffering is the penultimate example of the slavers' own inhumanity, and the entirety with which the pain and anguish caused to the captured Africans was dismissed by the slavers as an acceptable feature of their business needs.