Revolt

The Revolt
Mutiny on the Amistad
The Trip to Puerto Principe usually took three days however, on the second day the winds began to shift. The Captain, knowing the voyage would take longer than expected, severely cut the slaves food rations. On June 30, 1839, the third day out, a slave named Sengbe (who was given the spanish name, Cinque) removed a loose spike from the deck. Back in the slave hold he used the spike to unlock his shackles and the shackles of his fellow captives. The Africans had been led to believe that once they reached their destination, the spanairds would slaughter and eat them. Afraid for his life and the lives of the others, Sengbe armed himself and the others with sugar cane knives he found in the ship's cargo hold.
At 4:00am, Sengbe led the other captives on deck where they killed the Captain Ferrer and the cook, but not before the captain killed two slaves. The two seaman escaped in a small boat. Ruiz and Montez were spared and brought to the quarterdeck where Singbe ordered them to sail the vessel toward the rising sun, in otherwords, east to Africa. Montez, however, sailed west hoping to remain in Cuabn waters. The winds ended up taking the vessel northeast in a zigzag along the United States coastline for two months. During that time eight more slaves had died.
On August 25 1839, the schooner had reached the eastern tip of Long Island. Sengbe and some others went ashore to negotiate with the local seamen to take them back to Africa in exchange for gold they claimed to have on board. The seamen and the captives agreed to meet the next morning.
On August 26 1839, that meeting was interupted by the U.S.S Washington, a naval ship that was surveying the coast. The commander, Lieutenant Thomas Gedney seized the Amistad and towed her to New london, Connecticut.

Voyage (from tecora to amistad)

In Lomboko, a slave trading island near the Gallinas Coast, 500 illegally kidnapped Africans boarded a Portuguese slave ship named the Tecora. The Tecora would be crossing the Atlantic or "middle passage" to Havana, Cuba. The voyage would take approximately two months.
Conditions on the Tecora were extremely brutal. Captives were chained naked in groups of five and each was given only 3 feet-3 inches of headroom. Disease spread quickly through the unventilated slave deck. With so many captives, supplies ran low. When this happened, the crew would chain 30-40 slaves together and attach a heavy weight at the end and throw it overboard, drowning every slave attached to it. By the time the Tecora had reached Cuba, a third of the captives had died.
Upon arrival in Cuba, the remaining slaves were brought on deck to be prepared for sale. To make them appear as healthy as possible, they were bathed, clothed, and given extra food. Then they were brought on shore and marched 3 miles inland to the jungle, where they would be housed in warehouses. After weeks in the warehouses they were again marched several miles to the slave market in Havana. There they would join several hundred other captives who were to be auctioned off to Cuban plantation owners.
After days at the slave market, two Spanish plantation owners-Jose Ruiz and Pedro Montez, bought 53 slaves to take back to their sugar plantation 300 miles away in Puerto Principe. Since importing Africans was illegal in Cuba, Montez and Ruiz aquired documents claiming the slaves were legally obtained in Cuba and each African was given a spanish name. Then 53 Africans and 7 crew members boarded an American-built schooner, originally and ironically named Friendship. The ship had changed ownership and was renamed, La Amistad (spanish for friendship). Montez and Ruiz had chartered the Amistad from Ramon Ferrer, the owner and captain. The Amistad was not a slave ship, she was actually a cargo ship that carried mostly sugar products for coastal trade. On June 28 1839, the Amistad left for Puerto Principe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tecora
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/la_amistad
http://amistad.mysticseaport.or/discovery/story/welcome.html
http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/amistad/

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In 1839, a Spanish schooner carrying slaves, who were kidnapped in Africa, was taken over by the captives off the coast of Cuba. The schooner was later recaptured off the coast of Long Island, New York by the United States Navy. The events that followed, including the widely publicized court case helped propel the abolitionist movement of the mid 19th century. This is the story of the AMISTAD.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Amistad

Bibliography info

Don' t forget to send me the urls, because I need to create a bibliography as well...Thanks.

project notes

ok ladies, this is where we post our project notes. So I guess we each post what we want to use in the project and when we are done and I figure out how to do a webpage...we can put it together...aigh't? Tracey