评论
打印
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，时髦的咖啡厅里每个人依然对自由津津乐道。
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.
除了贵格会和流亡清教徒的偶尔指责，这一自由国度里的人们对于把他人用作工作机器一事都缄默不语。
The scale of profits sealed the conspiracy of silence.
在巨大的利益面前，人们沉默了。
Well, here's a little thing of devilish prettiness. It's silver, looks like jewellery. Might be a hat pin or something like that.
这有个美丽却邪恶的东西。它是银制的，看上去像首饰。会被误认成帽针之类的。
But it's not. This is an object which marked the passage of a human being to a thing. It's a branding iron.
其实不是。这件东西是把一个活生生的人变成器物的证明。这是块烙铁。
Once the initials were burnt into your flesh, you were no longer a person.
一旦这些字母烙进你的肌肤，你就不再是一个人了。
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。你隶属于他人。犹如一头牲畜。
Your journey into hell started months earlier in Africa.
通向地狱的旅行早几个月从非洲就开始了。
It's described in one of the few surviving accounts by Olaudah Equiano, one of the millions to experience the nightmare.
这一过程还能见于幸存下来的奥莱武达·埃奎亚诺的叙述中，他是数百万经此劫难者中的一员。
Captured as a small boy, he was separated from his sister... then dragged to the coast and to the waiting slave ship.
他年少时便被捉住，从此与妹妹分开，被拖至海岸边，送上等待他们的运奴船。
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.
我环顾船的四周，看见无数的黑人，被锁在一起，每个人脸上都写满了沮丧和悲伤。
I no longer doubted of my fate. And quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck.
我不再对命运抱有任何希望。已然被恐惧和痛苦压垮，我在甲板上一动不动。
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.
为了榨取利润，奴隶们在船舱里被排成两层，上下的木板间仅有60厘米的距离。
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.
空气很快难以呼吸，四周充斥着恶臭，最终引发疾病致使多人丧生。
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.
这凄惨的境遇因为锁链的折磨和不可避免的肮脏马桶变得更为恶劣，孩子们时常摔进去，险些窒息。
The shrieks of the women and the groans of the dying rendered it a scene of horror almost inconceivable.
女人们的尖叫和垂死者的呻吟构成了难以想象的恐怖场景。
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?
你如果是个船医。你需要每天早上进到船舱里检查货物的状况。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，你会发现许多奴隶的尸体，有些被捆绑在一起，活人和死人被绑在一组。
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.
你接下来怎么做呢？你把人拖到甲板上，用鞭子赶到船栏边，把活人和死人分开，把死人丢进海里。
There are the sharks, there always the sharks, waiting, grateful.
总会有鲨鱼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.
如果你有幸活着上岸，你的悲剧才刚开始。
Naked but for a loincloth, you were once again paraded and poked at, your teeth inspected like horses.
只有一块布裹体，你被再次示众以及捉弄，你的牙齿被像马一样检查。
Violence, the threat or the application of it, ran the system.
暴力和威胁充斥着这一过程。
Women were the objects of particular terror.
女人还会遇到特殊的恐吓。
In one year, a Jamaican overseer of a plantation, aptly called Egypt, gave 21 floggings to women, each no less than fifty lashes.
在一年内，一个牙买加的种植园监工被形象的称作埃及，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.
埃奎亚诺说在虐待结束后通常都会命令奴隶们跪下来感谢主人们的教训。
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.
就是这同一个监工，还被如实记载了那年和23个女奴隶发生了关系，这还不包括他正式的情妇。
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.
只有在周日有些许快乐的气氛。奴隶们通过集市和音乐重现一丝社区的感觉以及故乡非洲的场景。
At no time was there more joyous music than at a funeral, because death, at last, was liberty. Death was the return home.
在葬礼上的音乐反而那么愉悦，毕竟只剩死亡算是一种自由。死后是最终的安息。
It was very important for such a momentous journey to have something like this, something African, though made in Barbados.
在这最后一程上必须有这样的物品，有点非洲的气息，虽说是巴巴多斯制作。
A necklace of teeth, shells and bones, discarded trinkets, copper and bronze rings.
由牙齿、贝壳、骨头串成的项链，废弃的装饰品，铜币和青铜戒指。
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，一个法律上一无所有的民族得以留下他们私藏的物品，送死者最后一程，让他们的灵魂有尊严地回到非洲。
