The Triangular The Triangular TradeTrade

Images & information Images & information gathered fromgathered from

www.hitchcock.itc.virginia.edwww.hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slaveryu/Slavery

Titled "Plan and Sections of a Slave Ship," this detailed and famous drawing shows cross-sections of the ship," and how Africans were stowed in the holds. The inset drawing depicts a revolt aboard a slave ship, showing the crew shooting insurrectionists. The Brookes carried 609 slaves (351 men, 127, women, 90 boys, and 41 girls) crammed into its decks. Published 1789.

Shackles recovered from Slave Ship Henrietta Marie, 1700, which transported about 200 slaves from the Bight of Biafra, West Africa to Jamaica.

Pencil and watercolor by Lt. Francis Meynell, "Slave deck of the Albaroz, Prize to the Albatross, 1845", shows liberated Africans. The Albaroz (or, possibly, Alboroz) was a Portuguese/Brazilian vessel, bound for Brazil, captured by the Royal Navy ship, Albatross, off the mouth of the Congo River in 1845; 300 Africans were on board.

Beads from the Henrietta Marie, 1700, which would have been used by European merchants to buy slaves from local African traders.

Engraving showing the treatment of an African slave girl by the British Captain Kimber of the merchant ship ‘Recovery’. The girl, aged 15, was whipped to death for allegedly refusing to dance naked for the captain. Following a public outcry, Kimber was arrested and tried before the High Court of Admiralty in 1792. He was ultimately acquitted (let off), the jury having concluded that the girl had died of disease, and not maltreatment.

Branding irons with the owners’ initials.

Whip lash marks on the back of a slave in the late nineteenth

century.

Iron shackles used in the slave trade.

An iron mask with hooks around the neck to stop slaves running away or resting. The mask also stops the slaves from eating or drinking due to a flat piece of metal which goes into the mouth. The shackles and spurs would also have made it difficult for captured slaves to run away.  

Poster announcing a slave auction in Virginia, USA, 1823

This eighteen-year-old girl was whipped by her owner for refusing to have sex with him. She received 200 lashes for her actions.

An illustration from a novel showing the deck of a slave ship as it anchors in Jamaica, while the slaves were being prepared for sale. They were brought up on the top deck. “Each individual was seized by a sailor, who stood by with a soft brush in his hand and a pail at his feet; the latter containing a black composition of gunpowder, lemon-juice, and palm-oil. Of this mixture the unresisting captive received a coating which, by the hand of another sailor, was rubbed in the skin, and polished with a brush" until his skin glistened like a newly-blacked boot. . . . . It was not the first time those unfeeling men had helped prepare a slaver's cargo for market.”  

"Captives . . . are hobbled with roughly hewn logs which chafe their limbs to open sores; sometimes a whole tree presses its weight on their bodies while their necks are penned into the natural prong formed by its branching limbs.” Written by E.J. Glave, The Slave-Trade in the Congo Basin

"The clothing . . . is limited, the children usually going about stark naked, the women with only a calico dress on, and the men wearing only their pants. it is rather a novel sight, at the eleven o'clock halt from work, to see these people gathering for their rations, which are served out to them once a day" Written by Samuel Hazard visiting a plantation in Cuba in 1886.