Amistad Reflection

La Amistad wasn’t designed to be transport slaves across the Middle Passage. Abuse of La Amistad resulted in the uprising of the slaves. Half the slaves were on deck and other half were placed on the main level; this allowed the captives slight freedom to move about. La Amistad was primarily used to transport sugar from Havana to Guanaja. Rarely would it ever transport slaves to be sold and forced into labor. The Mende people on the Amistad had been transported on the Tecora, a much larger slave ship, from Africa to Havana before being held captive on La

La Amistad movie is a movie from the year 1997 and it is directed by the famous director, “Steven Spielberg”. This famous director has made a lot famous movies like for example the famous movie of “Jurassic Park” or “E.T”. Amistad is the word for “friendship” in Spanish. In this movie four different languages are spoken. English, Spanish, Portuguese and Mende. Mende is the language that the African slaves speak in. This movie is a little recreation of a true story about slave revolt on a small Spanish schooner in 1839. This revolt caused a series of trials beginning in the lower parts of Connecticut. This case not only marks a milestone for Abolitionists in their fight against slavery but it also questioned the natural laws of our Constitution.

The slaves are all on the boat, loaded in loose pack. They are laid on their backs, luckier than those who had to be in tight pack, but unfortunately continue to suffer. The slaves all cry, yell, and moan as they take off. All of them are miserably separated from each other, keeping them from communicating or supporting each other through the pain. Each one of them is chained to one another, forced to watch the other die slowly.

The video titled Africans in America: The Terrible Transformation thoroughly reassesses the history of slavery. The documentary tells of how slavery was brought to America, and of the conditions under which these slaves were forced to live. The trade that began in Africa was not initially focused on trading humans, but rather on gold. Gradually, the British took control and started trafficking Africans to their colonies in America. The conditions slaves lived under changed drastically from the original conditions when they first arrived to America compared to years after the slave trade had been functioning. This documentary re-examines the appalling social injustice

In documents one and two, the African American slaves were clearly getting taken advantage of by their white male plantation owner. They are seen as lesser than indentured servants and treated

Cinque also learned only a few words, as opposed to the whole american language, which Olaudah did. “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano” focuses more on the harsh conditions on the slave ships while the “Amistad” story spends more time on the trial that set the slave free. Olaudah Equiano fought against slavery in England while Cinque and the Africans of the Amistad became a symbol of freedom for the abolitionist movement in Pre-Civil War America.

In the movie, they had a net full of rocks at one end of a long chain with blacks shackled at the other end. When they threw the net of rocks into the ocean the gravitational pull drug the slaves to their deaths. That scene was really shocking and disturbing to watch. The surviving blacks arrived in Cuba on the boat called the Tecora. Once these blacks were sold, they were loaded onto another boat called “La Amistad.” In Spanish the word amistad means friendship. Once these blacks were on the ship, the next destination was the Caribbean. There where plantations on the island. However, they never reached the Caribbean’s. The Amistad was seized by a U.S. military ship. This action lead to a series of events.

The Slave Ship by Marcus Rediker is a great fiction novel that describes the horrifying experiences of Africans, seamen, and captains on their journey through the Middle Passage. The Middle Passage marked the water way in the Atlantic Ocean between Africa and the Americas. The use of slaves provided a great economy for the European countries due to the fact that these African slaves provided free labor while cultivating sugar cane in the Caribbean and America. Rediker describes the slave migration by saying, “There exists no account of the mechanism for history’s greatest forced migration, which was in many ways the key to an entire phase of globalization” (10). This tells us that African enslavement to the Americas causes a complete

For 63 days, the Amistad had been drifting toward the American shoreline. As conditions deteriorated aboard the vessel, it's inhabitants at the time, Africans, sick and dying, were in need of food and water. Desperate,

The dramatic story of the Amistad, which was featured in a major motion picture that opened in December, is found among the court records at the National Archives - Northeast Region at Waltham, MA, and in the Supreme Court records at the National Archives in Washington, DC. In 1839, 53 African natives were kidnapped .from an area now known as Sierra Leone and illegally sold into the Spanish slave trade. They were transported to Havana, Cuba and sold at auction as native Cuban slaves to two "Spanish gentlemen." The Spaniards were transporting the Africans and other cargo to another part of Cuba on board the Spanish schooner Amistad when the Africans staged a revolt, seizing control of the schooner, killing the captain and the cook, and driving off the rest of the crew. The two "Spanish gentlemen" were ordered to sail back to Africa. By day, the Spaniards sailed eastward and by night they surreptitiously sailed westward, hoping to land back in Cuba or the southern United States. The ship was seized and towed to New London, Connecticut, where the imprisoned Africans began a lengthy legal battle to win back their

On July 2, 1839, 53 hostage Africans on board the Amistad, a slave ship, broke out of their chains and snuck up to the primary deck, where they overpowered and killed two crewmembers and incapacitated the rest. Having hence seized control of the ship, they endeavored to cruise back to their country, just to be deluded into traveling north rather than east. Throughout the following two months, they went around 1,400 miles from Cuba to Long Island, New York, until the point when the Naval force lifted them up and re-imprisoned them. The Amistad was not the only slave revolt, but one of the most significant. This revolt was an integral part of slave history because it brought attention to the issue of slavery, inspired many, and helped establish laws and court systems today.

The African Americans sustained many hardships and had very bad lives as slaves.They were beaten and not fed, and most starved to death.When or if they died they would be thrown overboard the ship and fed to the sharks.If they did make it they would be forced to do hard labor without pay and very little food. They were given poor sleeping conditions. When the slaves were brought from Africa they were auctioned to the buyers and were split up from their families, and they were treated unfairly. In addition to this, they were whipped and beaten as punishment. The slaves worked on the fertile lands of North America, where they grew rice, cotton, indigo, and tobacco.On the plantation the slaves cleared the land, timber, and worked the fields

“Amistad” was released in 1997 on the territory of the United States of America.The historical period, portrayed in the film, is the year of 1839. It was the year when a terrible rebellion took place on board the Spanish ship La Amistad, which transported slaves. It was the time when the slavery was abolished in the North and the South of the United States of America was discontented for they severely needed slaves to work for them. American courts still decide whether the black person is free according to the place he comes from. The trial over the rebels from La Amistad asks the main question: ”Are these rebels slaves or free people?”. The “free giving” North and the “enslaving” South were already opposing each other and their relations were rather problematic. The incident became a scandal as it truly reflected the conflict of that time. According to the American laws back then only Africans could be considered free people. The story takes place in the time-gap before the Civil War, which lasted from 1861 till 1865. “Amistad” is a true story about the slaves that try to go back to their motherland – Sierra Leone. ”La Amistad” is the name of a Spanish vessel with 53 African slaves on board the ship.

And in the cases of Alabama, there were at least 100,000 African American men between the 1890s and the 1930s were leased or sold by the state of Alabama to coal mines, iron ore mines, sawmills, timber harvesting camps, cotton plantations, turpentine stills, all across the state. And so at least 200,000 African Americans, just in Alabama, were forced into the system, just in the most informal ways. And there are very well documented records of thousands of Black men who died under these circumstances during that period of time. Stories of men like Jonathan Davis, who in the fall of 1901, left his cotton field trying to reach the home of his wife's parents, where she was being cared for and would soon die of an illness. He was trying to reach her before she died. And on his way to the town, which was 15 or 20 miles away where she was being taken care of, he was accosted on the road by a constable, and essentially is kidnapped from the roadway and sold to a white farmer a few days later for $45. This is something that is named in the book to dozens of people that happened to. It's clear some version of that sort of kidnapping happened to hundreds and hundreds of other African Americans. And again, all of that is just in Alabama, and there were versions of this going on in all of the

This essay is going to be about the movie called Amistad. It is a 10 of December 1997 American film directed by Steven Spielberg which was a very famous Hollywood director, based on a story which happened in 1839 about some Spanish man in a ship called Amistad which had captured many slaves to sell. This history of the movie was made in Connecticut in the coast were a case occurred to save the slaves which had ended up in the united states, it was a hard case, but the case was given to the liberty of the slaves, the case took around four years to be solved.