Themes this can be used for:

			Middle Passage

Watch an actor read the words of Thomas Buxton, making a speech in the House of Commons on 9 May 1826.

In the speech Buxton describes the horrors of how slaves are packed in the holds of ships like cargo, with no space to move, and how this leads to an extremely high death rate. This speech was actually made after the slave trade had being abolished by Britain but Buxton founded the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery which sought to end slavery altogether.

Conditions on slave ships did, in fact, improve over the course of the slave trade and the mortality declined. While the British may have no longer been legally trading in 1826 many other European countries still were.

Credit/copyright