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Primary Reading Sources

On Board a Slave Ship – Journal of Richard Drake, 1788

I am growing sicker every day of this business of buying and selling human beings for beasts of burden… On the eighth day [out at sea] I took my round of the half deck, holding a camphor bag in my teeth; for the stench was hideous. The sick and dying were chained together. I saw pregnant women give birth to babies whilst chained to corpses, which our drunken overseers had not removed. The blacks were literally jammed between decks as if in a coffin, and a coffin that dreadful hold became to nearly one half of our cargo before we reached Bahia.

(Pope-Hennessy, Ibid, p. 4).

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