Meanwhile, some ship doctors attempted to remedy the captives’ melancholy with forced dancing.

Some attempted to terrify them into obedience, singling out those deemed particularly willful and using torture, murder, and the disfiguration of bodies to create an example for the rest.

Mallipeddi writes that ship captains resorted to extreme measures to keep their prisoners alive, flogging those who refused to eat or force-feeding them using a speculum oris-a mechanical device for prying the mouth open. Some ship doctors attempted to remedy the captives’ melancholy with forced dancing. Almost a century later, another observer told of a healthy African man who, after being shackled on the ship, “lost his spirits irrevocably” and expressed a determination to die, which he did nine days later. One Royal African Company agent who voyaged to Africa between 16 described captive Africans falling into deep despair and refusing to eat even when their captors beat them the prisoners ultimately starved to death. Mallipeddi shares that many of these enslavers attributed physical suffering of their captives, including scurvy and diarrhea, to an essentially mental condition sometimes known as “fixed melancholy.” As Captain John Ashley Hall, who sailed the slave ship Neptune in the 1770s, put it, the ailment was the result of being “taken forcibly from their nearest and dearest connections, and their native country.”

The descriptions-some of which are reproduced below-were horrific. But, as English language scholar Ramesh Mallipeddi writes, their enslavers did record the physical and emotional traumas, sometimes in the context of trying to figure out how to keep the humans they were trafficking alive long enough that they could be sold in the New World. The suffering they endured is hard to imagine, and few of them left written records of what happened to them. The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR.īetween the mid-fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries, more than 10 million Africans were forcibly shipped across the Atlantic.

Facts about the brookes slave ship