2.4 African Resistance on Slave Ships and the Antislavery Movement

Captives aboard slave ships faced deracination (being torn from their homeland and culture), commodification (being treated as goods for sale) and lifelong slavery. They resisted alone and together. Some refused to eat. Some tried to jump overboard rather than live enslaved. Others overcame language differences to plan revolts, even though they were chained and outnumbered by armed crews.

Resistance made the trade more expensive and more dangerous. Enslavers responded by changing ship design: they added barricades on deck, nets along the sides to stop people from jumping, more guns and larger crews.

In 1839, more than 30 years after Britain and the United States banned the transatlantic slave trade, a Mende man from Sierra Leone named Sengbe Pieh (also known as Joseph Cinqué) led a revolt aboard the Spanish schooner La Amistad off Cuba. The captives took control of the ship, which was later seized off Long Island, New York.

A two-year legal battle followed. The 'Plea to the Jurisdiction of Cinque and Others' argued that the captives had been illegally kidnapped and were free people. In 1841 the Supreme Court agreed and freed them, and survivors returned to Sierra Leone. The trial won wide public sympathy for abolition. Sketches of the survivors made during the trial show them as individuals with names and faces.

The most famous diagram shows the British slave ship Brookes, drawn from above with rows of human figures packed into every space. Diagrams like this show how enslavers arranged captives to fit as many people as possible and maximize profit.

Read them critically. They usually show only about half the people actually carried on a voyage. They show the cramped, unsanitary conditions that spread disease, disability and death during a crossing that could last up to 90 days. But they rarely show the guns, nets and force-feeding tools enslavers used to crush resistance. And by drawing Africans as identical, nameless shapes, the diagrams reflect the way the trade turned people into goods.

In the 1700s and 1800s, Black and white antislavery activists printed and shared slave ship diagrams to show the public the horror of the Middle Passage. African resistance itself also fueled the antislavery movement.

Since abolition, Black visual and performance artists have reused the image of the slave ship to work through historical trauma and to honor the more than 12.5 million people forced onto those ships. In Stowage (1997), the artist Willie Cole made a large print using the shapes of household irons. A long horizontal shape stands for the slave ship itself, and the prints of steam-iron bottoms, whose rows of holes look like faces, stand for the different African peoples packed aboard. The iron links the Middle Passage to the household labor many enslaved people and their descendants were forced to do.