Sold into Slavery: The Middle Passage, The Story of Adaku Part II

By Mary Devey

The Middle Passage is one of the most horrific chapters of all times and has so rightfully been addressed as the African holocaust. Millions died during this passage of hell and their remains were scattered in the watery graves which eventually came to mark their final resting places. The Middle Passage is also a time that reflects on the shocking ability of man to sustain cruelty and slavery to such immense proportions on a ship not geared for a comfortable journey to the New World. In Part 2, Adaku finds life on a slave ship strenuous and while the good times are so few, Adaku meets people she grows to love including those from neighboring tribes she was always told to be cautious about. In the end, across the weeks, she finds company with many women beginning with Akanke and finally ending with Yaa, a woman so stoic about her own destiny to a new land she would confront on her own terms. All the women in this story come with the way the world has told them to be, but all walk knowing their allegiance and love is to the other.
Part 2 on the Middle Passage promises an inspiring journey that dwells on friendship and love, of hardships and terror, of betrayals and loyalties, all forged amidst the roar of slavery on the harsh Atlantic seas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mary Devey
• Release date: Feb 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301235629

Mary Devey

Mary Devey writes historical fiction and everything Wicca. Her first book "Sold into Slavery: The Story of Adaku" addresses the effects of African slavery and its consequence for one woman and the people who surround her. Highlighted in three parts, the first part addresses Adaku's life as a kidnapped woman sealed away from the rest of the African world in a place called a baracoon where she meets other kidnapped tribal women like her. Part II on The Middle Passage will be available soon at Smashwords.com. Mary has also recently completed Part I of her Wicca Trilogy which promises the most unusual - Rebirth: The Gathering of the Witches. Other books written include, "In Her Mama's Shoes" - a coming of age book that addresses the tragic consequences for a young girl who instead of looking onwards, turns the pages of time to only learn too much about her Mama.

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Sold into Slavery: The Middle Passage,

The Story of Adaku

Part II

By Mary Devey

All rights reserved. Copyright © 2013 Mary Devey

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The characters and events in this book are purely fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by author.

….she was welted in several parts of her body, her hands were swelled in consequence of the hanging, and her legs disfigured in a shocking manner; after this the witness saw her in convulsions, had her brought on deck, and rubbed her with volatile spirits; but every remedy was ineffectual: she languished away in this miserable state for three days, and on the third expired.

As disclosed by the Ship's Surgeon Thomas Dowling during the Trial of Captain John Kimber for the murder of two black women on the 7th of June, 1792

Also by the same author in the following series:

Sold into Slavery: The Story of Adaku, A Black Slave Woman Part I

Haunted Africa: True Ghost Stories Part I

Haunted England: True Ghost Stories Part II

Haunted Ireland: True Ghost Stories Part I

Haunted Ireland: True Ghost Stories Part II

Haunted Singapore: True Ghost Stories Part I

Haunted Singapore: True Ghost Stories Part II

Contents

Preface

A Poem That Breaks the Heart

Chapter 1: The Monster Ship

Chapter 2: Friends and Enemies

Chapter 3: The Demon Child

Chapter 4: Osinachi

Chapter 5: Sickness and Death

Chapter 6: Crimes and Punishment

Chapter 7: The Half Breed

Chapter 8: The Dead and the Dying

Chapter 9: Revolt

Chapter 10: Slaughter

Preface

The story of the Middle Passage had long surfaced before the fifteenth century. However, most recordings on paper tell more thereon of what happened for the next four to five hundred years when millions of Africans were transported across the high seas to new lands so far away from their own. This terrible journey of being displaced from the land they held so dear caused immense hardships and terror for naïve people who have not seen any other but their own. The Middle Passage also marks the years when the most unspeakable atrocities were committed against another human race, a time when murder and terror grew at its highest and where records of cruelty and savagery will forever linger into the annals of time. The reasons for much of these atrocities coming to light must always lie on those who make its existence known to mankind, and it is through the acts of these selfless and industrious people called the abolitionists that the education to end slavery began. These vigilant few maintained journals and diaries, reprimanding sometimes the officers of the law for failing to realize the intensity and cruelty fostered during this time on black people. They recorded how the passage had come to be and asked the questions why it was that in this destructive period that black people were treated like animals, to be wagered in auctions and fairs for the dissemination of cheap and most times free human labor most needed in the plantations across much of North America and the West Indies.

For much of the time, past and present, the The Middle Passage continues to be a subject for intense debate, an expression of loss and always a painful chapter for all to read. No one can dispense the pain and horror that must have crossed the faces of the many who were forced to take their living spaces in cramped corners of the deck and rooms where food, water and the ability to perform daily rituals expected of human beings were confined to the most terrible and filthy corners. Over time, these people simply lost the will the live, while some went horribly insane and others, out of desperation, conspired with the many people of their own nation, to lessen their own misery through mutiny and hence we have the mutinous events which were not limited to what happened in the Amistad and the Zong.

Eyewitness accounts from such esteemed pro-abolitionists as Dr. Alexander Falconbridge, a former slave ship’s surgeon, on his Account of Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa in 1788 helped place many things in perspectives and eventually many consorted to seek its total abolishment across much of Europe and the colonial world. To shut the Middle Passage as an unfortunate consequence of time would be ludicrous; to support its need for survival of the few who transcended across the European civilized world would be even more disconcerting. What gives the right of another man to destroy the life that was not his' to take from the start?

So, what is the Middle Passage? What is it about this passage that has made one feel the agony of hopes lost, of families devastated, of man justifying that killing and that savagery is a necessity of the times? Just how does one live with such crimes? No one can deny that the African slave trade is an unfortunate consequence of man's rabid propensity to commit unspeakable crimes against the human race because of the thirst for wealth accumulation. The slave trade is a testimony to man's barbaric capacity to uphold and sustain cruelty in its every form to the benefit of the few who pleasured in the fruits of which such laboring of human forms afforded them. That a select group of people were able to rationalize its existence over a sustained period of time that crossed the centuries is disturbing. What questions would come to bear on our mind quibbling over the African man's taste for the goods that he wants from the European world when stories abound telling of the father who would shamelessly barter his child for that share in wealth, a king his subject and the scurrilous fights that crossed across the face of Africa when neighbors fought with neighbors securing the weak as captives and thereon communicated these people as commodities for sale in exchange for the paltry benefits that arose from European commerce?

It has posed great significance to me as I write the story of Adaku and it may thus pose the same to you, my readers, as it would have done to all those who paged through the material that testified to its existence that slavery is evil. But while many have discounted the business of slavery, there are many questions to be noted and many answers to be made by all those who were involved in the slave trade starting with the British slavers, the middle man in Africa who handled the sale and transaction of the slaves to interested buyers, and for the enslaved man, woman and child who became unwitting pawns in the slave trade. That so many human beings could be so involved in the sale and distribution of human flesh across the world most of which was confined to the Atlantic slave trade was abominable but to say that the African blacks should have been more acute of the wants of their unfortunate fellow citizens than to have submitted them for the exchange of material goods would be to deny the actual reason for the origins of slavery. And also, be it known that while the slave trade was abolished in 1807, the British Navy was still actively involved in the slave trade, possessing slaves in its dockyards in Jamaica and Antigua. Aside from being prominently involved in controlling the sugar islands of the West Indies, the British Navy also used black slaves as personal slaves to officers aboard ships so that a ship captain would have his own personal black slave to attend to his immediate needs.

The Middle Passage is one of the most horrific chapters of all time and is possibly a holocaust none comparable for its time transcended the centuries. The number of Africans who were transported during the Middle Passage may not be historically accurate and estimates have ranged from five million to thirty million. Many died during the capture and many more deaths may not have been documented to avoid the scrutiny of the British Parliament who after initiating the Slave Trade Act 1807 abolishing the act of slave trade in the British Empire finally brought to fruition the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 which abolished slavery through the British Empire still with exceptions of all territories in the possession of the East India Company. This book pays tribute to the many African men, women and children who died during the Middle Passage and the many others who upon realizing the savagery that came from the business of selling human flesh, all agree that man has yet to learn the value and harmony of human life even in the civilized world, and that race should never be reason for not achieving the peace and unity most needed in this world we live in today.

A Poem That Breaks the Heart

The ravages of the Middle Passage are felt in all its intensity in poems by many of the abolitionists who were quick to engage and warn the public about the caustic effects of slavery. The following poem by the once famed American Quaker poet named John Whittier Greenleaf is like no other. Greenleaf who was known to be colorblind, had put forward so succinctly the terrors of what the black slaves and all the crew men on board the French ship Rodeur went through when the dreadful disease of the eye struck the latter during the passage across the waters. Decisions, many brash and most cruel, were made by the white men against the black men and terrible, terrible things happened along the way. The poem is in all its classification is but one that is colorful, descriptive and certainly engineered with the emotional turmoil and terror of being on the sea with nothing but the other to shield as company!

The Story:

In 1819 while sailing from Bonny, Africa, the captain of the French ship Rodeur grew alarmed when a terrible malady of the eyes plagued the slaves he had secured. With lack of medicine and water reserved to half a glass each day, the captain was facing a terrible problem in his hands. There was no cure for this dreadful disease called ophthalmia. It results in complete blindness and is highly contagious and so, the captain, troubled by the lack of medicine and knowing that water was simply not enough to go around the crew least of all the one hundred and sixty black slaves he had on board, embarked with a desperation to correct the problem and lessen its impact on the other slaves who were untouched by the disease.

But the slaves having witnessed the pain and melancholy on their fellow mates, decided to jump overboard hoping that rebirth would bring them back to the beloved soil that is Africa. That would solve all problems they had thought. Angered by the naïve behavior of these slaves, the captain reprimanded the runaway slaves who were caught and began his own treatment to punish slaves for escaping his ship. Consequently, many were shot or hung as a lesson for all slave wanderers who chose the easy way of drowning. He was determined to set an example to all others who engaged in their own plans for escape but the disease as crippling as it was, was quick to spread to the others even before the captain could take his own fruitful measures to contact the drastic effects and soon many of the twenty-two crew members became consumed with the dreadful disease.

The captain and his men then engaged on a brazen attempt to secure their losses through insurance claims and knowing that there was nothing he could do to stop the spread of the disease while those were still standing on his ship, decided that thirty-six of the blind black slaves would be thrown into the sea. He would claim they were not saleable and he hoped that would give enough grounds to file a claim against the underwriters. But the disease had begun to take its eventual toll and soon by the end of the journey, only one man walked without the terrible malady.

This one man walked afraid that he would secure the dreaded disease and when he hailed the Spanish ship Leon seeking assistance, he was shocked to find that the same disease too plagued the ship with none able to see. The ships then parted and the story goes that the Leon was never seen again. The French ship in the meantime had reached Guadaloupe on June 21, 1819. The only man who still bore the sight was able to dock the ship into port only to find that the disease had taken him three days after he arrived on land!

So, here's the story of the slave ship by the American abolitionist Whittier who had so much to tell expressing the terror on the ship and all told through the delicate nature of his poetry:

The Slave-Ships by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)

LL ready? cried the captain;

Ay, ay! the seamen said;

"Heave up the worthless lubbers,--

The dying and the dead."

Up from the slave-ship's prison

Fierce, bearded heads were thrust:

"Now let the sharks look to it,--

Toss up the dead ones first!"

Corpse after corpse came up,--

Death had been busy there;

Where every blow is mercy,

Why should the spoiler spare?

Corpse after corpse they cast

Sullenly from the ship,

Yet bloody with the traces

Of fetter-link and whip.

Gloomily stood the captain,

With his arms upon his breast,

With his cold brow sternly knotted

And his iron lip compressed.

Are all the dead dogs over?

Growled through that matted lip;

"The blind ones are no better,

Let's lighten the good ship."

Hark from the ship's dark bosom,

The very sounds of hell!

The ringing clank of iron,

The maniac's short, sharp yell!

The hoarse, low curse, throat-stifled;

The starving infant's moan,

The horror of a breaking heart

Poured through a mother's groan.

Up from that loathsome prison

The stricken blind ones came;

Below, had all been darkness,

Above, was still the same.

Yet the holy breath of heaven

Was sweetly breathing there,

And the heated brow of fever

Cooled in the soft sea air.

Overboard with them, shipmates!

Cutlass and dirk were plied;

Fettered and blind, one after one,

Plunged down from the vessel's side.

The sabre smote above,

Beneath, the lean shark lay,

Waiting with wide and bloody jaw

His quick and human prey.

God of the earth! what cries

Rang upward unto thee?

Voices of agony and blood,

From ship-deck and from sea.

The last dull plunge was heard,

The last wave caught its stain,

And the unsated shark looked up

For human hearts in vain.

Red glowed the western waters,

The setting sun was there,

Scattering alike on wave and cloud

His fiery mesh of hair.

Amidst a group of blindness,

A solitary eye

Gazed from the burdened slaver's deck,

Into that burning sky.

A storm, spoke out the gazer,

"Is gathering and at hand;

Curse on 't, I'd give my other eye

For one firm rood of land."

And then he laughed, but only

His echoed laugh replied,

For the blinded and the suffering

Alone were at his side.

Night settled on the waters,

And on a stormy heaven,

While fiercely on that lone ship's track

The thunder-gust was driven.

A sail!--thank God, a sail!

And as the helmsman spoke,

Up through the stormy murmur

A shout of gladness broke.

Down came the stranger vessel,

Unheeding on her way,

So near that on the slaver's deck

Fell off her driven spray.

"Ho! for the love of mercy,

We're perishing and blind!"

A wail of utter agony

Came back upon the wind:

"Help us! for we are stricken

With blindness every one;

Ten days we've floated fearfully,

Unnoting star or sun.

Our ship's the slaver Leon,--

We've but a score on board;

Our slaves are all gone over,--

Help, for the love of God!"

On livid brows of agony

The broad red lightning shone;

But the roar of wind and thunder

Stifled the answering groan;

Wailed from the broken waters

A last despairing cry,

As, kindling in the stormy light,

The stranger ship went by.

In the sunny Guadaloupe

A dark-hulled vessel lay,

With a crew who noted never

The nightfall or the day.

The blossom of the orange

Was white by every stream,

And tropic leaf, and flower, and bird

Were in the warm sunbeam.

And the sky was bright as ever,

And the moonlight slept as well,

On the palm-trees by the hillside,

And the streamlet of the dell:

And the glances of the Creole

Were still as archly deep,

And her smiles as full as ever

Of passion and of sleep.

But vain were bird and blossom,

The green