Avery

“The men negroes, on being brought aboard the ship, are immediately fastened together, two and two, by hand cuffs on their wrists, and by irons riveted on their legs.”

-Alexander Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa, 1788

Ships of Horror

by Avery S.

Enslaved people thrown on to the vessels,

Tightly chained to wood.

They were crammed conjointly on top of each other.

They felt pulling on their muscles, their skin, their bones, their hair.

They had no voice-

They had no rights-

They had no say in what would happen to them.

The smells on the ships were as bad as rotten corpses-

The ships smelled like vomit, feces, urine.

Human beings treated like animals-

They were not animals.

They were human beings with families and friends,

With brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers and aunts and uncles.

They should have a voice.

They should have rights.

They should have a say in what happens in their lives.

Barely any survived.

They died because of unhygienic conditions-

Scurvy,

Starvation,

Dehydration.

They were so parched they could drink all the water in the ocean.

Human beings were being suffocated in these ships,

But this was still not all-

The life on the ships were only half the battle of enslavement-

Ships of horror.

Avery's Writer’s Statement:

I decided to create a poem about the slave ships during the Slave Trade in the 16th to the 19th century, which captured and transported enslaved people. Theophilus Niger was either born in America or transported to America on these ships, so this poem expresses what he possibly went through. The challenge that the enslaved people had to endure on these was less than equivalent to the title, “Ships of Horror”. I chose a quote to further express the tragedy these people had to go through from one of the documents we studied and analyzed. The quote was from a book by Alexander Falconbridge, who was a doctor on British slave ships in the 1780s. After reading Falconbridge’s quotes and many other documents, I crafted this poem to describe the terror and conditions that enslaved people experienced.