Story Overview
Enslavement | The Baracoons of Gallinas | The Middle Passage
The Cuban Slave Market | The Revolt | The Black Schooner
The Africans in America | The Amistad Trials | Return to Africa
Enslavement
Sengbe Pieh was seized on the road -- nabbed by four men who secured
him by tying one hand to his neck and led him to a neighboring village. Within a
few days his captors sold him to another man, Bamadzha. 
Sengbe's new owner was not Mende as Sengbe was, but Vai. In fact, Bamadzhu
was the son of a Vai king, Siaka, who was a key figure in the slave trade on the
coast. A month later Sengbe traded hands again, this time to a European slave trader
at Lomboko, on the Gallinas River. So the man who would become known as "Cinque"
was sucked into a powerful, international, transoceanic vortex. His long journey
was just beginning.
At least nine of the other Africans who would find themselves on the Amistad were also "stolen while walking in the road." It was a common story throughout the hinterland of the Gallinas River, not only among the Mende but the Bolem, Kisi, Temne, Kono and other peoples of the interior. This was dangerous country to travel in 1839. The Gallinas had become a watershed draining men, women and children out to the ocean. The man who would eventually translate the Amistad Africans' story for Americans, James Covey, had himself been captured from the same country several years before; his Mende name, "Kaw-we-li," signified "war road," meaning a road frequently raided by slavers.
The slave trade was not all banditry-scale kidnapping. Of the 36 other Amistad Africans who survived long enough to tell Americans something of their story, six were seized when their villages were raided by larger parties of slavers, most often by "soldiers" hired by rival chiefs or kings. Fuliwa, for one, fell into slavers' hands when soldiers surrounded his town, put down an effort at resistance, and marched the survivors on a month-long trek to the coast.
A handful of the others were condemned and sold as punishment for committing crimes within their villages -- three of these for adultery. And several others were sold to pay off debts. Grabeau, for instance, was sold after another slave that his uncle had sold to pay off a debt ran away. The slave trade was not just a series of violent seizures. It had insinuated itself into the everyday workings of law and business along the coast of West Africa.
Some of the Africans served in African households before coming into the hands of European slavers. Pugnwawni, for one, was sold by his uncle (to pay for a coat, he reported), and spent the next several years with an African master, Garloba, working in rice fields alongside his master's wives and children, before changing hands and entering a very different kind of servitude.
Fatefully, though, these Africans ended up in the hands of Europeans, set up in slave "factories" on the Gallinas.
KEY DOCUMENTS:
The most comprehensive account of the Africans'captures and journeys to the coast was a pamphlet compiled by John Barber in 1840, "A History of the AMISTAD Captives."
