The dungeons can still shock, two
centuries after their last inmates were freed. Damp and fetid in the tropical
air, immersed in virtual darkness, this is where slaves were kept, often for
months at a time—before being led down a tunnel through the “door of no return”
to ships riding in the surf, ready to begin their appalling voyage over the
ocean.
Just one of the countless inmates
left a written record. Having been sold to white traders for a gun, a piece of cloth
and some lead, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano recalled waiting in the dungeon till his
time arrived: “To conduct us away to the ship, it was a most horrible scene;
there was nothing to be heard but rattling of chains, smacking of whips, and
groans and cries of our fellow men. Some would not stir from the ground, when
they were lashed and beaten in the most horrible manner.”
When the dungeons were excavated in the
late 19th century, a mass of caked excrement was removed, together with the
bones of birds and animals on which the slaves presumably fed. On such misery
was founded a global trading system that in its heyday, in the mid-18th
century, was taking about 85,000 Africans a year across the Atlantic to work on
sugar and tobacco plantations that made Europe rich.
