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/