As a graduate student in the history of the Atlantic World in the nineteenth century, I have read a lot of material dealing with the impact and brutality of the Atlantic slave trade. Although I have been reading this material for years, it never fails to shock or sicken me due to the sheer grotesquery of what is being described.
Recently, I stumbled across an account of a captured slave ship, the Pons, in a missionary's memoir, Land of Hope: Reminiscences of Liberia and Cape Palmas. The missionary in question, William B. Hoyt, was a white man and held the racial prejudices common to his time. (At times he even refers to the victims in the story as creatures and brutes.) However, when a captured slave ship was brought to shore at Cape Palmas in Liberia, where he operated his mission, even he could not help but be moved and disgusted by the suffering he saw.
In this diary, I will reprint sections of Hoyt's account, which takes you far deeper into the horror of the slave trade than any text will or could. What follows is disturbing, but should be read by anyone who wants to know the true history of this atrocity.
My Gut Reaction: What's most disturbing about the case I'm going to describe is that it was not a notorious or especially noteworthy. This was what went on everyday in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries.
More below the fold...
Read More