Week 6: Equiano Team and the Atlantic Slave Trade

    To start off, I think the Equiano team did a great job with their presentation, establishing a lot of the historical context in Equiano’s narrative. What stuck with me the most was the diagram and additional information about the layout and space of the ships on the Atlantic slave trade. While I had already known about the trade and the awful, inhumane conditions found within, the presentation opened my eyes to some other terrible details that made it even more real than it was. The StoryMap states that merely 68 out of 251 were less crowded than what the diagram showed, a diagram specifically used by abolitionists to draw attention to these injustices. The space in the diagram had already seemed incredibly crowded and unlivable, but then we learned that the ships had carried upwards of 740 people at one point, almost twice as many as in the diagram. This would mean that strangers would literally be sleeping on top of each other, and in excrement. It was to the point where the air could become unbreathable, and many of the slaves would die just to the unhealthy conditions in the ships. These facts are incredibly upsetting and disturbing, and it continues to baffle me how so many people could either condone or be a part of slavery knowing how awful it was. It goes to show how powerful dehumanization and societal standards are on the human psyche, that any average citizen raised as you would expect can be completely okay with slavery. It especially shows in Equiano’s narrative when he is continually treated as lesser in common encounters as a free, educated man.

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