Of the 12.5 million Africans loaded onto 35,000 Atlantic ships by American and European slave traders, few left personal written accounts of their ordeal. Some of their life experiences were described as entries in the voluminous commercial papers of those
Of the 12.5 million Africans loaded onto 35,000 Atlantic ships by American and European slave traders, few left personal written accounts of their ordeal. Some of their life experiences were described as entries in the voluminous commercial papers of those involved in the slave system and are remembered mainly by the way their lives were recorded by their captors and tormentors. As a result, their stories have remained largely hidden behind the statistics—their monetary value, their gender and age distributions, their physical condition, their health and death, and their tragic numbers.
Yet we know a great deal about those who suffered upon Atlantic slave vessels and their transfer from shore t