May 13, 2019 Monday
Bedtime Story
Violence Aboard Atlantic Slave Schooners
“The problem that comes up time and again
are: the failure to genuinely engage with historical methodologies; the
unquestioning use of dubious sources; the tendency to exaggerate the violence
of the past in order to contrast it with the supposed peacefulness of the
modern era; the creation of a number of straw men, which Pinker then goes on to
debunk; and its extraordinarily Western-centric, not to say Whiggish, view of
the world.”
That is quite a serious disapproval verging
on near-total denunciation of Pinker’s conclusion on world peace.
We shall now return to our story on the
African trade slave which in turn had a major bearing on the War of 1812 and
then the American civil War of 1861 both of which occurred in the life time of Johns
Hopkins.
Because of inhuman conditions, cramping,
overcrowding, beatings, whippings along with malnutrition and dehydration
disease and death was widespread on the slave ships ferrying bonded slaves from
the Western Coast of Africa to the New world.
Dysentery and scurvy were rife with an
average death rate of 15% which at times went up to 30% or even more claiming
up to one third of the slaves along the arduous journey.
Whenever there appeared that food and water
would not suffice for the total number of slaves packed for the long journey
then 30 to 40 slaves who were weak or thought to be starving or dying would be
chained together, a heavy weight would be attached at one end and thrown
overboard.
The weight along with the chain would drag
in all the tied up slaves underwater drowning them and this was most
dramatically depicted in the movie “Amistad” and you should watch just that
clip to get a visual mental understanding how it would have played out.
Slaves would scream and cry in terror of
their impending death by drowning as they would be whipped, lashed, dragged out
and sometimes even brutally shot at point blank range.
Yet quite to the contrary of what was shown
in the movie nothing of this sort actually took place on La Amistad since it
was only a local cargo ship which accidentally had managed to load in 53 slaves
from Havana and transporting them to their purchasers who owned plantations.
In the movie La Amistad was shown to be
slave ship travelling from Cuba to the United States in 1839 which is a
historical inaccuracy.
The slaves unlike as depicted in the movie were
not all chained up as the merchant ship (one can call it that) lacked
purpose-built slave quarters but were partly kept in the main hold and the rest
on deck.
The section of slaves that were kept in the
main hold were shackled and bonded.
Those on the deck were relatively free to
move about which was one of the reasons that instigated the rebellion and
mutiny on the ship followed by the whole drama enacted in the master-class
movie.
The slaves that were kept bounded in the
hold found for them a rusty file that allowed them to grind and file away their
metallic shackles.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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