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Capture
"One day a big ship stopped off the shore." For innumerable Africans, a ship's appearance on the horizon meant their last days of freedom. Whether captured by European or African slave traders or taken as prisoners during war, their fate was the same: being shackled, boarded on a ship, and transported thousands of miles away to be sold for forced labor. Here we read several accounts from both perspectives, the enslaved and the enslavers. In the first group are Venture Smith (captured in Guinea at seven), Boyrereau Brinch (captured in west Africa at age 16), and formerly enslaved African Americans interviewed in the 1930s whose parents or grandparents had been captured in Africa. In the second group are two commanders of slave ships, Thomas Phillips, who describes the boarding of slaves onto his ship in the late 1600s, and William Snelgrave, who describes slave mutinies under his command in the 1730s.
How many of these captured slaves came to the North American continent and are thus the ancestors of most African Americans? Of the twelve million Africans brought to the Americas, the vast majority (95%) were taken to the Caribbean islands (West Indies) and Latin America (Central and South America). The other five percent, about 500,000 Africans, were brought to British Atlantic colonies on the eastern coast of North America.1 (xx pages.)
Discussion questions
- Compare Venture Smith's and Boyrereau Brinch's accounts of being captured as children. What do they emphasize? What aspects are not mentioned that a reader might expect to find in the accounts?
- Compare these accounts of capture with several in the earlier sections of this Toolbox. How did capture by Europeans and by Africans differ?
- How do the slave ship commanders, Phillips and Snelgrave, differ in their descriptions of the enslaved Africans? How does Phillips respond to his personal empathy for the enslaved Africans?
- From the WPA accounts, what aspects of capture and enslavement were often described by African-born slaves to their children? Why might this be so?
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Framing Questions
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How did Africans live in freedom before enslavement? |
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How did Europeans and African Americans perceive African cultures? |
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What was the experience of capture and enslavement for those who became African Americans? |
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Printing
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Supplemental Sites
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Image: Illustration (detail) in T. Clarkson, Letters on the slave-trade . . . , 1791, p. 36, plate 2 (detail). Courtesy of Jerome S. Handler, Michael L. Tuite, Jr., and the University of Virginia Library, in online collection The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record.
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1 Colin A. Palmer, Passageways: An Interpretive History of Black America, Vol. I: 1619-1863 (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Group, 2002), p. 25.
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