Slave Market

We had a short tour of the old slave market, given by a genial old man who joked that he looked like Morgan Freeman (he did a little). He was a lot of fun, despite the grim location; all that’s left of the market are the tiny, horrible little cells where slaves were kept before being sold.

The cells had low ceilings, two tiny, narrow slits for windows and a sort of channel in the middle, for use as a toilet; the incoming tide would sweep in and wash away all the sewage a couple of times a day. A single chain shows how the slaves would have been tied together. The biggest problem here was ‘suffocation’.

The market itself was replaced with a coral and lime Anglican cathedral built after the abolition of slavery here in the 1870s – the old whipping post is marked by a marble spot at the altar. This is where slaves were whipped to see how ‘strong’ they were, before fetching a better price.