The chapter on the Atlantic Slave Trade
Dec. 30th, 2007 09:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vcmwI was right to dread it.
I woke up at 3AM from a screaming nightmare that involved another dimension crowded with tiny iron boxes suspended above a horrible floor, and every box full of a squished up person. Some of the people were alive and some were rotting but still alive. And a devilish looking person in formal dress came down the street to molest and torture the people in the boxes.
Which, y'know, is actually a reasonably close recreation of what it seems to have been like in the hold of a slave ship, except for how my dream was merciful on me and didn't provide a sense of smell. And every person in my dream had their own squished-up tiny box. And the street was much cleaner than a slave-hold ship deck would be. Sometimes I think that I am not suited to learn history because my stomach is not strong enough. My last big bout of confronting historical creepiness was when I was 11 and researching the Inquisition, and I had nightmares for years. Modern United States living (where seeing someone with bad teeth or one sore on their body that is visible is kinda rare) does not prepare you mentally for the levels of grossness that humans have inflicted on each other at various points in time.
There was a bit in the history book that said that a 1713 regulation required that in the ship hold, each slave should be allotted "five foot in length, eleven inches in breadth, and twenty-three inches in height" (quoted on page 389).
OK, that's so terrifying to me. People are not sized like that. So clearly they were all intertwined, and... and then... there are quotes from surgeons who were assigned to ships about the floor of the hold being thickly coated with "blood and mucus". And what makes this super-horrible is that they wouldn't bother to make a regulation like that unless, during the two centuries previous, people had been squishing slaves into their holds with much less room per person than that. *brrr*
Which, y'know, is actually a reasonably close recreation of what it seems to have been like in the hold of a slave ship, except for how my dream was merciful on me and didn't provide a sense of smell. And every person in my dream had their own squished-up tiny box. And the street was much cleaner than a slave-hold ship deck would be. Sometimes I think that I am not suited to learn history because my stomach is not strong enough. My last big bout of confronting historical creepiness was when I was 11 and researching the Inquisition, and I had nightmares for years. Modern United States living (where seeing someone with bad teeth or one sore on their body that is visible is kinda rare) does not prepare you mentally for the levels of grossness that humans have inflicted on each other at various points in time.
There was a bit in the history book that said that a 1713 regulation required that in the ship hold, each slave should be allotted "five foot in length, eleven inches in breadth, and twenty-three inches in height" (quoted on page 389).
OK, that's so terrifying to me. People are not sized like that. So clearly they were all intertwined, and... and then... there are quotes from surgeons who were assigned to ships about the floor of the hold being thickly coated with "blood and mucus". And what makes this super-horrible is that they wouldn't bother to make a regulation like that unless, during the two centuries previous, people had been squishing slaves into their holds with much less room per person than that. *brrr*
