Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, where the cult of liberty was still on everyone's lips in smart coffee houses.
在布里斯托,利物浦和格拉斯哥,時髦的咖啡廳里每個人依然對自由津津樂道。
Apart from the occasional visiting Quaker and exiled Puritan, there was a deafening silence in the land of liberty about turning fellow men into work animals.
除了貴格會和流亡清教徒的偶爾指責,這一自由國度里的人們對于把他人用作工作機器一事都緘默不語。
The scale of profits sealed the conspiracy of silence.
在巨大的利益面前,人們沉默了。
Well, here's a little thing of devilish prettiness. It's silver, looks like jewellery. Might be a hat pin or something like that.
這有個美麗卻邪惡的東西。它是銀制的,看上去像首飾。會被誤認成帽針之類的。
But it's not. This is an object which marked the passage of a human being to a thing. It's a branding iron.
其實不是。這件東西是把一個活生生的人變成器物的證明。這是塊烙鐵。
Once the initials were burnt into your flesh, you were no longer a person.
一旦這些字母烙進你的肌膚,你就不再是一個人了。
You were an object, you were a commodity. You belong to someone. You were a beast of burden.
你成了器物,成了商品。你隸屬于他人。猶如一頭牲畜。
Your journey into hell started months earlier in Africa.
通向地獄的旅行早幾個月從非洲就開始了。
It's described in one of the few surviving accounts by Olaudah Equiano, one of the millions to experience the nightmare.
這一過程還能見于幸存下來的奧萊武達·埃奎亞諾的敘述中,他是數百萬經此劫難者中的一員。
Captured as a small boy, he was separated from his sister... then dragged to the coast and to the waiting slave ship.
他年少時便被捉住,從此與妹妹分開,被拖至海岸邊,送上等待他們的運奴船。
When I looked around the ship and saw a multitude of black people of every description, chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow.
我環顧船的四周,看見無數的黑人,被鎖在一起,每個人臉上都寫滿了沮喪和悲傷。
I no longer doubted of my fate. And quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck.
我不再對命運抱有任何希望。已然被恐懼和痛苦壓垮,我在甲板上一動不動。

To make the venture profitable, the slaves were stacked in two layers in the hold, with only about two feet between the planks below and planks above them.
為了榨取利潤,奴隸們在船艙里被排成兩層,上下的木板間僅有60厘米的距離。
The air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves of which many died.
空氣很快難以呼吸,四周充斥著惡臭,最終引發疾病致使多人喪生。
This deplorable situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains and the filth of the necessary tubs in which the children often fell and were almost suffocated.
這凄慘的境遇因為鎖鏈的折磨和不可避免的骯臟馬桶變得更為惡劣,孩子們時常摔進去,險些窒息。
The shrieks of the women and the groans of the dying rendered it a scene of horror almost inconceivable.
女人們的尖叫和垂死者的呻吟構成了難以想象的恐怖場景。
You're a ship's surgeon. It's your job to go into the hold of a morning and examine the condition of the cargo. What do you find?
你如果是個船醫。你需要每天早上進到船艙里檢查貨物的狀況。你看到了什么?
Well, for a start, you find a lot of dead slaves, some of them manacled together, the living and the dead, still chained as one pair.
首先,你會發現許多奴隸的尸體,有些被捆綁在一起,活人和死人被綁在一組。
What do you do then? You take the pair up to the deck, strap them to the grating, sort out the living from the dead, throw the dead overboard.
你接下來怎么做呢?你把人拖到甲板上,用鞭子趕到船欄邊,把活人和死人分開,把死人丟進海里。
There are the sharks, there always the sharks, waiting, grateful.
總會有鯊魚在海里愉快地等待捕食。
If you were one of those who made it to land alive, your troubles had just begun.
如果你有幸活著上岸,你的悲劇才剛開始。
Naked but for a loincloth, you were once again paraded and poked at, your teeth inspected like horses.
只有一塊布裹體,你被再次示眾以及捉弄,你的牙齒被像馬一樣檢查。
Violence, the threat or the application of it, ran the system.
暴力和威脅充斥著這一過程。
Women were the objects of particular terror.
女人還會遇到特殊的恐嚇。
In one year, a Jamaican overseer of a plantation, aptly called Egypt, gave 21 floggings to women, each no less than fifty lashes.
在一年內,一個牙買加的種植園監工被形象的稱作埃及,鞭打女人21次,每次不少于50下。
Equiano says it was common at the end of the beating to have the victims kneel and thank their masters for the treatment.
埃奎亞諾說在虐待結束后通常都會命令奴隸們跪下來感謝主人們的教訓。
The same overseer also recorded, with the same matter of fact manner, that he'd had sex with 23 slave women that year, not including his regular mistress.
就是這同一個監工,還被如實記載了那年和23個女奴隸發生了關系,這還不包括他正式的情婦。
Only Sundays offered some moments of joy. The market and music let slaves to recreate some sense of community and the Africa they had left behind.
只有在周日有些許快樂的氣氛。奴隸們通過集市和音樂重現一絲社區的感覺以及故鄉非洲的場景。
At no time was there more joyous music than at a funeral, because death, at last, was liberty. Death was the return home.
在葬禮上的音樂反而那么愉悅,畢竟只剩死亡算是一種自由。死后是最終的安息。
It was very important for such a momentous journey to have something like this, something African, though made in Barbados.
在這最后一程上必須有這樣的物品,有點非洲的氣息,雖說是巴巴多斯制作。
A necklace of teeth, shells and bones, discarded trinkets, copper and bronze rings.
由牙齒、貝殼、骨頭串成的項鏈,廢棄的裝飾品,銅幣和青銅戒指。
So, a people who legally had no possessions at all, reserved what they'd hidden away for this last important journey, so their spirits could return to Africa with dignity.
所以,一個法律上一無所有的民族得以留下他們私藏的物品,送死者最后一程,讓他們的靈魂有尊嚴地回到非洲。