Equiano Project

One of the biggest things I learned from researching on the Equiano Team was from John’s part about the Middle Passage. I always knew the slaves were given unsanitary and uncomfortable living spaces and I use the word living extremely lightly. John talked about how the diagram of the ship had 470 captives which means each captive had only 7 feet of room, which is not even 2 human beings in any direction. The most shocking part was that the ship was actually even more packed than the diagram made it seem with the ship even having almost double the captives once at 710. This means that people had around 4 feet of a room which is not even the height of a teenager, much less a man.


Equiano described his voyage in the Middle Passage as horrible, but this research John did really put it into perspective. Equiano described the stench as being horrible, and I kind of just glanced over that, but now after knowing just how many people were probably on the ship there I can see why the stench was so bad. Equiano described how easily people died from sickness and now I understand why it was so easy for people to get sick. There was just no room, if one person got sick, everyone was getting sick, and it was up to their immune system alone as there were no treatments for the slaves. People just had to hope that they could beat the sickness, which some people like Equiano probably did not as they hoped to die and end their misery rather than wait until the end of the voyage


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