Students journey into slavery's past on Amistad replica

NEW HAVEN -- A group of American and British college students are learning about slavery the hard way, coping with seasickness, barked orders like "clean the galley!" and standing watch in the rain.

The seven students are aboard the Freedom Schooner Amistad, a near-replica of the famous ship that sparked a slave revolt. The ship left its home base in New Haven last month for a 16-month, 14,000-mile voyage to Nova Scotia, Britain, and Africa that traces a 19th century route of the slave trade.

Fifty students will board the ship for portions of the journey and share their experiences with millions of others worldwide through live webcasts and e-mail. Their journal entries, along with those of permanent crew members, are being posted on the ship's website.

"A lot of people around me are getting seasick, and by chance it hasn't hit me yet," Seth Bruin, a 19-year-old college student from Maryland, wrote. "All around me, I have people shouting orders, 'Take up on your halyard,' 'Slack the sheet,' 'Coil that line,' 'Clean the galley!' "

But amid the roughness of the sea, the students are learning about slavery.

"We washed dishes tonight to the prose of Frederick Douglass," wrote Joy Collins, a crew member.

Collins found solace in the quiet dawn while anchored at Sambro Harbor in Nova Scotia.

"The silhouette of trees lining a sleepy town that I only know from a distance," she wrote. "Various shades of greens and blues frame rocks and jewels of lights, waiting for the moon and coming sun to notice them."

Students are seeing major stars used in celestial navigation when the original Amistad set sail.

"The sky is much darker here than I'm used to, so I could see stars here that I can't usually, and I can see the Milky Way pretty clearly too," wrote Logan Senack, an American student.

Crew and guests said they hoped to inspire the world with the schooner's story of slaves who resisted captivity and later won their freedom.

In 1839, more than 50 African captives en route to Cuba on the Amistad schooner rebelled and took over the ship. After landing on Long Island, N.Y., they were captured and jailed in New Haven.

With help from area abolitionists, the surviving Africans won their freedom in a historic legal battle that started in Connecticut and ended in the US Supreme Court. US President John Quincy Adams represented the slaves.

Their story was depicted in the 1997 movie directed by Steven Spielberg.

"What I constantly end up asking myself is how, how HOW could the Amistad captives possibly have been able to have survived through it," Senack wrote, describing "cruel mind games" to avoid thinking about seasickness. "We're here with ginger ale on a spacious breezy deck with the comforting hand on our back, still feeling the worst we have ever felt."

Imogen Ashfield, a 17-year-old student from London, said she was thinking of fleeing in a safety boat or crawling back to her bunk for good. But then the ship anchored at Sambro Harbor, and Ashfield saw the line of Canadian pine trees.

"And we began to talk about Frederick Douglass and the books of slavery we are looking forward to read and discover," Ashfield wrote. "That, to me, was why it is important to get through those tough times."

Freedom Schooner Amistad was launched in 2000.