"Revolt on a Slave Ship" (caption translation)

"Revolt on a Slave Ship" (caption translation).

This imagined depiction of a slave revolt shows Africans and Europeans fighting with weapons on the top deck of an unidentified slave ship leaving an unknown region in West Africa. Laporte described a revolt aboard a French slaver, whereby a sailor "was asleep when he heard a big noise on the bridge; he went up only to discover the slaves had started a revolt. A slave revolt is terrible because one cannot fire on them, since each man is worth at least 1,000 francs. One has to resort to other methods of force. The crew finds refuge on the upper deck to escape the screaming mass of slaves who broke through their chains and evaded the deck barrier by throwing anything they could get their hands on at our heads. The carnage was horrible. Even though the enemy was beaten, the victory didn't seem to belong to us yet, and the danger became even greater in front of the resistance of the slaves and our exhaustion" (p. 265). There is some discrepancy surrounding the origins of this image. A larger version of the same image is also in Isabelle Aguet, A Pictorial History of the Slave Trade (Geneva: Editions Minerva, 1971), plate 64, p.71. The two variations suggest that LaPorte is not the original source for the image, although it is the earliest known and slightly cropped published version, which Aguet did not cite. For more details, please refer to image E006.

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