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A Slave Trade Journal

An Account of the Slave Trade
Dr. Alexander Falconbridge

Some wet and blowing weather having occasioned the portholes to be shut, and the grating to be covered, fluxes and fevers among the negroes ensued. While they were in this situation, my profession requiring it, I frequently went down among them, till at length their apartments became so extremely hot as to be only sufferable for a very short time. But the excessive heat was not the only thing that rendered their situation intolerable. The deck, that is the floor of their rooms, was so covered with the blood and mucous which had proceeded from them in consequence of the flux, that it resembled a slaughter-house. It is not in the power of the human imagination to picture to itself a situation more dreadful or disgusting. Numbers of the slaves having fainted, they were carried up on deck, where several of them died and the rest were, with great difficulty, restored...

(first published in London, 1788, from Pope-Hennessy, Ibid, P. 102)

SOURCE: Colonial Triangular Trade: An Economy Based on Human Misery, Perspectives on History Series Edited by Phyllis Raybin Emert, Discovery Enterprises, Ltd.