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Middle Passage
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====Suicide==== Slaves resisted in many ways. The two most common types of resistance were refusal to eat and suicide. Suicide was a frequent occurrence, often by refusal of food or medicine or jumping overboard, as well as by a variety of other opportunistic means.<ref>Taylor, Eric Robert. ''If We Must Die'', 2006, pp. 37β38.</ref> If an enslaved person jumped overboard, they would often be left to drown or shot from the boat.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/equiano1/summary.html|title=Summary of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself. Vol. I|publisher=University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill|access-date=November 15, 2017}}</ref> Over the centuries, some African peoples, such as the [[Kru people|Kru]], came to be understood as holding substandard value as slaves, because they developed a reputation for being too proud to be enslaved, and for attempting suicide immediately upon losing their freedom.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Johnston |first1=Harry |last2=Johnston |first2=Harry Hamilton |last3=Stapf |first3=Otto |title=Liberia |url=https://archive.org/details/liberia00unkngoog |year=1906 |page=110 }}</ref> Both suicide and self-starving were prevented as much as possible by slaver crews; the enslaved were often force-fed or tortured until they ate, though some still managed to starve themselves to death; the enslaved were kept away from means of suicide, and the sides of the deck were often netted.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Ruane |first1=Michael E. |title=Haunting relics from a slave ship headed for African American museum |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/haunting-relics-from-a-slave-ship-headed-for-african-american-museum/2016/07/13/1d794b04-43ad-11e6-88d0-6adee48be8bc_story.html |access-date=5 March 2021 |newspaper=Washington Post |date=13 July 2016}}</ref> The enslaved were still successful, especially at jumping overboard. Often when an uprising failed, the mutineers would jump ''en masse'' into the sea. Slaves generally believed that if they jumped overboard, they would be returned to their family and friends in their village or to their ancestors in the afterlife.<ref name="Bly">{{cite journal |last=Bly |first=Antonio T. |title=Crossing the Lake of Fire: Slave Resistance during the Middle Passage, 1720β1842 |journal=[[Journal of Negro History]] |volume=83 |issue=3 |year=1998 |pages=178β186 |jstor=2649014 |doi=10.2307/2649014 |s2cid=140948545 }}</ref> Suicide by jumping overboard was such a problem that captains had to address it directly in many cases. They used the sharks that followed the ships as a terror weapon. One captain, who had a rash of suicides on his ship, took a woman and lowered her into the water on a rope, and pulled her out as fast as possible. When she came in view, the sharks had already killed herβand bitten off the lower half of her body.<ref>Rediker, Marcus. ''The Slave Ship'', 2007, p. 40.</ref>
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