Shadow from Shadow by Steve Blaque

as instrumental there are no lyrics, though for a significant period of time both myself and New York Steve back n' forthed with a monologue taken from a reporter's journal ways back in 1687 from Lagos. The Monologue has been posted below and is the principle reason of the background sounds of a Slaver's Ship.

Before the aside a snippet of information on the industry of Slavery
"Portugal and Britain were the two most 'successful' slave-trading countries accounting for about 70% of all Africans transported to the Americas. Britain was the most dominant between 1640 and 1807 when the British slave trade was abolished".

Monologue

Shadow

what i was looking at defeated even my senses. i’d seen everything i thought up until this moment, but nothing prepared for what lay in front of me.

as far as i could see and even further, iron cages lined the docks in rows of 3 deep adjacent to, from what i counted as 10, but who knows maybe there were more vessels victualing for the 40 day journey that awaited all those who would soon sale.

as gruesome the sight of cages filled with once free and proud people; as ghastly as this may have been it was far outweighed by the unfathomable cruelty of the guards and deck hands who would soon be overseeing these lost souls last freedoms before an even further sub or inhuman existence in the New World.

What horror awaited those who had been sold out by former friends and neighbors alongside those whose only crime was being defeated in battle or who came from a tribe deemed unworthy of living any longer within the community and now were being cast aside; thrown from the known world by a trade so cruel that it belied cruelty itself to acknowledge such inhumane treatment of man towards man. what horror awaited these caged people perhaps only God knew, and if God knew then you could argue that no sane God could ever sanctify such horror. watching priests bless the vessels ahead of the journey further demeaned a trade that could only bestow heinous consequences upon any world let alone a new world.

Blacks whites and half caste stood surrounding the cages in various stages of mercantile meandering. so called white gentlemen and their accompanying book keepers, clerks, tally men and other assorted jobs mixed openly with black traders and tribal leaders adorned with pouches for gold coins and honorary notes that underpinned the shipments soon to journey north west across the Atlantic ocean to the Americas.

dockside the unmistakable sounds of anvil strikers plying their trade in final preparations for the enslaved to be even further debased clanged across the sea of hopelessness engulfing the human cargo. Not just the clanging though, since from the cages sounds of tears, groans, screaming and perhaps the most unsettling the shrill crying of young children on either side of the caged walls. families in some cases being torn apart, families in some cases selling their own family members. the whole view leaving a taste so sickening that it was all i could do to contain myself from spewing my organs onto the ground at the feet of all who were capitalizing from this subjugation.

it was a day, though the sun shone strongly, that such darkness rendered the strongest shadows invisible.

adapted from journals
Lagos
1697AD

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