Layout of the Slave Ship Brooks - Below Decks

Drawings of the Slave Ship Brooks.  Click on the image for an expanded view.

In his book, The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839), Thomas Clarkson describes the public's reaction to the drawings he and his colleagues commissioned of the Slave Ship Brooks:

"The committee, also, in this interval, brought out their famous print of the plan and section of a slave-ship, which was designed to give the spectator an idea of the sufferings of the Africans in the Middle Passage, and this so familiarly, that he might instantly pronounce upon the miseries experienced there. The committee at Plymouth had been the first to suggest the idea; but that in London had now improved it.

"As this print seemed to make an instantaneous impression of horror upon all who saw it, and as it was therefore very instrumental, in consequence of the wide circulation given it, in serving the cause of the injured Africans, I have given the reader a copy of it in the annexed plate..."

These are some of the referenced drawings.

Credits

Images and quoted passage, from Chapter 24, Clarkson, et al, The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839). 

Online, courtesy Project Gutenberg.