An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa

In 1788, a British surgeon who had spent years aboard slave ships published an account that would help tip the moral scales of a nation. Alexander Falconbridge witnessed what few Europeans had seen and lived to tell of it: the overcrowded holds, the chains, the starvation, the suicides, the corpses thrown overboard to sharks. He documents enslaved Africans from the moment of capture through the brutal Middle Passage to their sale in the West Indies. But Falconbridge also turns his eye inward, toward the sailors and officers who manned these voyages, revealing a system that brutalized everyone it touched. This short, devastating book was written in the heat of the abolitionist debate, a direct plea to the British public to see what commerce had made normal. It stands as one of the earliest and most urgent testimonies from inside the trade, a document of witness that refuses to look away.