October 18th, 1788
My name is Thomas Trotter. Today is the third week that I’m working on the Brooks, a slave ship. The Brookes was built in 1781 for Joseph Brooks Jr., a slave-trade merchant in Liverpool, the most prosperous of England's three slave-ship ports. The reasons why I’m here because I needed a job and it required having a doctor on the ship. The ship started from Africa to bring millions African slaves to the “New World.” I heard that this one was big business, one merchant described it as “the hinge on which all trade of this globe moves.” The days on this ship, I have to face with danger, fear, and screaming. All in my head now is the screaming and sorrow faces of my patients.
Every day, I have to come to see if there is any people are sick or dead. Most of them were injured because of being beaten or bad condition. They have to sleep in very small space. So small was the place allowed to each, they had not so much room as a man in a coffin. They were placed lying on their back, and sometimes they were packed spoon ways, one on the other; so close were they, you could not walk without treading on them, but then they were only slaves. One kind-hearted sailor, when passing over them, would remove his shoes so as not to hurt them. So close and foul was the stench arising from the Negroes, they have been known to be put down the hold strong and healthy at night; and have been dead in the morning. A trader stated that after remaining ten minutes in the hold, his shirt was as wet as if it had been in a bucket of water. What must have been their feelings, the acute pains of those poor wretches, whose only crime was that of color? As many as 800 have been stowed in the holds of these infernal ships, and to add to their wretchedness, remaining in for a four-month's voyage to the West Indies; the white man arrogated to himself the supreme privilege of being