Slave Coffle, Sierra Leone, 1793
Description
Color drawing, cropped from a page of a ship's log, showing coffle of slaves and guards armed with bows and arrows and spears; African village in the foreground. The first line of the caption reads: Representation of a Lott of Fullows [Fula, Fulani] bringing their slaves for sale to the Europeans . . . . This illustration is from the log of the Sandown, a slave ship that sailed from London to Sierra Leone in 1793. Accompanying this illustration, the ship's captain, Samuel Gamble, describes how slaves were brought to the coast, sometimes . . . upwards of one thousand miles out of the interior part of the country, by the Fulani to sell to Europeans. The Fulani captors make fast round the neck [of the captives] a long stick which is secur[e]d round the others awaist from one to another so that one man can steer fifty and stop them at his pleasure. At night their hands are tied behind their backs, which causes them to lay down with great difficulty. The Sandown eventually arrived in Jamaica where over 200 captives were sold. See also the excellent annotated publication of Gamble's log, which also includes a clearer b/w reproduction of this image, edited by Bruce L. Mouser, A Slaving Voyage to Africa and Jamaica: The Log of the Sandown, 1793-1794 (Indiana Univ. Press, 2002).
Source
Samuel Gamble, Log of the Sandown, 1793-1794, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, London (neg. D7596)
Language
English
Rights
Image is in the public domain. Metadata is available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.
Identifier
NMM-3
Spatial Coverage
Africa--Rivers
Item sets
Citation
"Slave Coffle, Sierra Leone, 1793", Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed April 13, 2021, http://slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/414