Biography of Mahommah G. Baquaqua

This is the only surviving account of the slave trade written by a man who was enslaved in Brazil. Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua was born in West Africa, captured and sold into slavery in 1845, and transported across the Atlantic to work in the brutal sugar plantations of northeastern Brazil. His story is extraordinary not only for what it reveals about the Brazilian slave trade, a dimension of the institution often overlooked, but for his daring escape in 1847 when the ship docked in New York harbor. After fleeing to freedom, Baquaqua studied at a New York college and eventually reached Canada, where he narrated his ordeal to abolitionist Samuel Downing Moore. His testimony documents the horrors of capture, the Middle Passage, the violence of plantation labor in Brazil, and the resilience required to survive. It is a document of unbearable weight: a man speaking across centuries about what was done to him and what he survived.