Three hundred years ago, wooden ships left the coast of Africa loaded with people bound for a life of slavery in the New World.
Those ships represent one of the most shameful episodes in world history. The reverberations from those overcrowded slavers filled with the dead, the dying, and the terrified are still felt around the world.
The New York Times now tells us that history is tragically repeating itself.
A photographer named Aris Messinis has been recording refugee efforts around the Mediterranean Sea for Agence France Presse. Aboard the rescue ship Astral, he and other rescuers have seen thousands of asylum seekers crammed into leaking wooden vessels.
The people come from sub-Saharan Africa, countries including Somalia, Namibia and Eritrea. They have made the desperate journey north toward the uncontrolled country of Libya, where there is no government to prevent boat owners from taking advantage of the desperate asylum seekers.
When the Astral found the boats about 12 miles off of the Libyan coast, they were filled with people. Men, women, children and even infants were crammed onto the small craft, evoking stories of the slave trade.
The boats were filled with the bodies of those who had been crushed in the night. The survivors were forced to climb over the corpses of friends and relatives to get to the relative safety of the rescue ships.
The desperate asylum seekers on the boats waved frantically and screamed as the rescuers approached. Many jumped into the water to escape the horror on the boats. Some parents held tiny babies up to show the rescuers their plight.
The images described in the Times article, and shared here, bring up the question of just how far humanity has come in the past three centuries.
We no longer have ships filled with unwilling captives who die on the journey across the sea. Yet somehow we continue to ignore the specter of thousands of our fellow human beings who die every week in search of a better life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fcCsuWTIvw
Featured image via YouTube Video Screenshot.
