Chapter 2/4

In Chapter's 2 and 4 of Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains, Hochschild addresses the truly tragic elements of life as a slave juxtaposed  to the elegant lifestyles of those that profited from them through the sugar trade. Hochschild introduces us to Equiano who is one of the few slaves to write about the conditions on a slave ship.  His descriptions of the horror and cramped conditions give us a glimpse of one of the few difficulties a slave had to endure just to reach adulthood.  This does not include the forced marches from interior Africa which accounted for half the slaves deaths or the first three years of slavery which many never saw the end of. While Equiano was one of the lucky few who was able to buy his independence his experience shows that even when freed, without the abolishment of slavery, he could never truly be safe from its grasp.  Hochschild's next account cannot be told directly through the experiences of a slave as none who led this life would ever learn to read or write.  The main export from slave labor was not the tobacco of America's south or coffee but was sugar.  The sugar industry was located in the Caribbean and accounted for 60% of the slaves brought through the triangle trade route.  It is here that conditions were harshest and many believed that it was more cost effective to work slaves to death and buy new ones than to keep those that they already had healthy.  While the atrocities committed were numerous nothing quite illuminates them more than the wealth that was associated with them.  Hochschild depicts the utterly impoverished and dying slaves next to the insatiable appetites and grandeur of the plantation owners.