Advanced Search 
Plan of an African Ship's Lower Deck, with Negroes in the Proportion of Not Quite One to a Ton.
1789
Medium/Technique
Etching
Dimensions
Height x width: 10.8 × 33.7 cm (4 1/4 × 13 1/4 in.)
Credit Line
Fund in memory of Horatio Greenough Curtis
Accession Number2021.422
NOT ON VIEW
ClassificationsPrints
This is the first American version of a diagram that would become an iconic image of the antislavery movement. It shows the arrangement of nearly 300 enslaved Africans in the hold of the English ship Brooks, which made eleven voyages from West Africa to the Caribbean between 1781 and 1804. The diagram was created in 1788 by William Elford for an abolitionist pamphlet published in Plymouth, England, and the graphic horror it conveyed had an immediate and visceral impact in Britain. This version appeared the next year, in the May 1789 issue of The American Museum, a magazine published in Philadelphia. The American version appeared just two months after the United States Constitution came into force; Article 1, Section 9 of that document explicitly banned the passage of any federal law intended to outlaw the “migration or importation” of enslaved men, women, and children until 1808.
As Elford noted in his pamphlet, parts of which were reprinted in The American Museum: “It may perhaps be conceived, from the crowded state in which the Slaves appear in the Plate, that an unusual and exaggerated instance has been produced; this, however, is so far from being the case, that no ship, if her intended cargo can be procured, ever carries a less number than one to a Ton, and the usual practice has been to carry nearly double that number ... .”
The diagram was copied, reworked, and republished many times, on both sides of the Atlantic, and its influence on the struggle against slavery echoed down the decades. In any version, the diagram is an iconic image, and few works made in the eighteenth century still carry so much meaning or have such a capacity to shock viewers today. The diagram has had wide influence on contemporary artists, including Sanford Biggers, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, and Willie Cole, all of whom are represented in the MFA’s collection with works that quote or echo this print.
For examples of such works, see John Biggers, Lotos (125th), (accession number 2020.373) and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Untitled (acc. no. 1993.542).
As Elford noted in his pamphlet, parts of which were reprinted in The American Museum: “It may perhaps be conceived, from the crowded state in which the Slaves appear in the Plate, that an unusual and exaggerated instance has been produced; this, however, is so far from being the case, that no ship, if her intended cargo can be procured, ever carries a less number than one to a Ton, and the usual practice has been to carry nearly double that number ... .”
The diagram was copied, reworked, and republished many times, on both sides of the Atlantic, and its influence on the struggle against slavery echoed down the decades. In any version, the diagram is an iconic image, and few works made in the eighteenth century still carry so much meaning or have such a capacity to shock viewers today. The diagram has had wide influence on contemporary artists, including Sanford Biggers, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, and Willie Cole, all of whom are represented in the MFA’s collection with works that quote or echo this print.
For examples of such works, see John Biggers, Lotos (125th), (accession number 2020.373) and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Untitled (acc. no. 1993.542).
DescriptionFirst published in, and extracted from, The American Museum (Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, May 1789).
Provenance2020, sold by an unidentifed bookseller, Massachusetts to Bickerstaff's Books, Maps, Etc., Scarborough, ME [see note]; 2021, sold by Bickerstaff's to the MFA. (Accession Date: June 16, 2021)
NOTE:
Said to have belonged to an unidentified collector of magazines.
NOTE:
Said to have belonged to an unidentified collector of magazines.