Urban scene in Bahia, showing servants/slaves carrying a white woman. The Brazilian scholar, Gilberto Freyre writes: Within their hammocks and palanquins the gentry permitted themselves to be carried about by Negroes for whole days at a time, some of them travelling in this manner from one plantation to another, while others employed this mode of transport in the streets; when acquaintenances met, it was the custom to draw up alongside one another and hold a conversation (The Masters and the Slaves [New York, 1956], pp. 409-410).

Alcide Dessalines d'Orbigny, Voyage pittoresque dans les deux Amèriques...(Paris, 1836), facing p. 150, fig. 3. (Copy in Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library)

French

Image is in the public domain. Metadata is available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.

NW0317

South America--Brazil--Bahia

"Carrying a Sedan Chair (Palanquin), Bahia, Brazil, 1826", Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed January 23, 2021, http://slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/486