Question

Equiano describes an incident in which the white sailors catch some fish, eat their fill, and then toss the uneaten fish back into the sea, instead of offering them as food for the starving Africans. Those Africans who tried to get some of the discarded fish were flogged. Why do you think the sailors acted this way? What does it say not only about how they felt about a resource such as food but also how they felt about the Africans on board? Your response should be at least 150 words.

Answer 1

Answer:

European sailors acted in that way because they considered African Americans to be property that could be bought, sold, flogged, mistreated, and even killed. In other words, they did not think that African Americans were people who had rights, but a tool, or a merchandise, almost like a plough or a net.

These views prompted the development of a massive slave trade between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. The slaves were taken from the African Coasts by European sailors, merchants, and slave-traders (often sold by African leaders), and they took these enslaved Africans on ships to the Americas, were they would work in cash crop plantations.

Most of the slaves were taken to Brazil and the Caribbean, and a considerable minority were taken to the Southeastern United States, were a slave economy developed in the Tidewater region, and in the Deep South, were cash crops, profitable, but very intensive in labor, were cultivated (rice, tobacco, and mainly cotton).