The Slave Ship

The story opens on the island of Cuba. The Amistad has just arrived, its cargo hold laden with slaves from the coast of West Africa. Negotiations for the slaves are taking place between a Yankee ship's captain, the American ambassador to Cuba, the Cuban governor, and several Cuban plantation owners. A young slave boy, Ka-le, narrates the stories of how the Africans were overpowered and kidnapped and sold to the white slave traders. As Ka-le leans over his dying mother in the barracoon, the slavepen, she slips him a file, and tells him to pass it to Cinque. Cinque then, becomes the leader of the mutiny as the ship sails for Hispaniola.

            After the slaves seize control of the ship, she weaves unevenly up the coast of North America because none of them know how to sail, and eventually comes ashore off the coast of New York, where slavery is illegal. They are met by abolitionists there who try to help but eventually they are jailed, awaiting trial as their court date approaches to determine whether they are slaves from the Caribbean (Bozals), in which case they are “grandfathered” as slaves and would need to be prosecuted as mutineers and murderers, or newly imported slaves from Africa, in which case their captors would need to be captured and prosecuted. No one, of course, can communicate with the Africans until a seaman is finally located who can speak the Mandi language, which Cinque also speaks.

            At trial, Cinque tries to take the full blame for the killing, after all, he prevented everyone else from killing. This trial ends in favor of the slaves. But the slave traders in Cuba who claim ownership of the Africans continue to prosecute, so the trial must go to a higher court, and then the Supreme Court, where the slaves are defended by the now elderly John Quincy Adams.

            Eventually, as history shows, the Africans were exonerated of all charges, but unfortunately, not all of them saw freedom for many of them died during the long years of trials. Some of them chose to stay in America as freemen...only a handful, led by Cinque, ever made it back to their homes in Africa.

            This is the famous story of the uprising aboard the Amistad in 1839 which has many written and televised versions, retold for elementary aged children. If you manage to pick this up in the wild in a vintage copy like I did, it might be titled The Long Black Schooner. It is very helpful for understanding this famous historical event. I was reminded about the historical context and routes of the slave trade, its economic connection to the sugar industry, slavery in the West Indies, and I learned about early trial procedure in a young America.

            All in all, this book deals with a very difficult subject, treated compassionately and humanely for this young age group. Devastating events are not described with any detail. The following section, which is lengthy, I encourage you to read not as a list of reasons NOT to read this book, but as a list of reasons to do the research and be ready to discuss this very difficult period of history with your students.

Content considerations: original meaning of the word “gay.”

A slave woman commits suicide by walking into the sea.

The following words and phrases are used in reference to the buying, selling, and shipment of precious humans beings: “slavepen,” “imports,” “selling,” “make an offer,” “slave block,” “buy fifty blacks,” “not good buys,” make a “bid,” “bought only three slaves,” “arranged for transport,” “Negros,” “consider them cargo,” “yoked,” “chained,” and “padlocked.”

An anti-Slavery American sea captain is described as having some “peculiar ideas,” and as an “abolitionist” with a negative connotation.

Africa referred to as “a barbaric land.”  Other phrases include “how fortunate these heathens are” and “all the trouble with these blacks.”

A slave is flogged, a deceased slave's body is thrown into the sea.

Mourners sit in silence because “to speak the name of the dead disturbs the spirit that has left the body.”
One man is shot and another is stabbed during the uprising.

“The devil” is referenced, and the word “tarnation” is used.