In a private letter to his brother, written a couple of months later, Milne referred to the Africans on board as “actual skeletons with death in their countenances.” 3 Milne, a seasoned officer who had encountered several slave vessels before, confessed to be shocked as never before by the sight of “dead children lying about the deck” while others were in “the last stage, all calling for food and water & pointing to their mouths.” 4 2 Upon boarding the ship, Captain Milne reported that its decks were crammed with enslaved Africans kept in atrocious conditions. 1 The getaway attempt was short-lived, as the fast-sailing British cruiser soon caught up with the slave traders, although only after being forced to fire several shots at it and in spite of the heavy rains and winds that made the chase all the more difficult. On the brig-a slave vessel named Arrogante-the sailors saw a “large cruiser ship in the distance,” a circumstance that led the captain to give orders to find an escape route as quickly as possible. Keywords: cannibalism slave trade Jamaica Cuba Atlantic crossing West AfricaĪt dawn on November 23, 1837, HMS Snake, under the command of Captain Alexander Milne, spotted a suspicious brig on the horizon, just off Cuba’s westernmost point, the Cape of San Antonio.
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