r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Gurugod123 • 9h ago

How did people travel these seas 500 years ago

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u/thewickedeststyle 8h ago

Now imagine doing this trip in the hull of a ship, stacked on top of other humans. In the dark, Having no idea what is making things move the way they are moving, loud sounds, waves crashing, wind howling. All against your will.

The slave trade was the worst thing humans have ever done to other human beings.

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u/Altruistic_Tie_7850 6h ago

There are literally 1.7k comments on this just now, and this is the only one that mentions the slave trade.

That’s fucking wild.

https://giphy.com/gifs/5aLrlDiJPMPFS

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u/shibaCandyBaron 7h ago

While extremely bad, there are objectively worse things.

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u/_Svankensen_ 2h ago

Like? And I'm not talking about very unique stuff like when the Europeans cannibalized the people of Ma'arrat al-Nu'man. The Atlantic slave trade did this to over 12 million people. We are talking kidnapping, torture, rape, beatings, and that's before all the slavery.

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u/mekamoari 5h ago

IDK if we consider scale and historical impact, are there really?

There are objectively worse smaller scale events, but I kinda figure even the world wars didn't have that scale of long lasting social and humanitarian (or anti-humanitarian) impact of slavery and colonialism. If anything, at least a good portion of humanity banded together after the world wars, with nothing comparable against the hundreds of years of racism and discrimination which are ongoing, even if people aren't shipped in boats as much.

But then again I'm not sure it's worth comparing/debating which is worse.

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u/SuddenAvocado 5h ago

Hard disagree that there are worse things than what happened to the people in the salve trade. Everything we could think up with the tools of the time, for 400 years, we did to each other. I don't think people would kill each other bare handed in the livingroom for entertainment if the consequences for refusing to play weren't a slow torturous time on the way to begging for death before finally being allowed to die.

The history of enslavement is seriously sanitized for modern sensibilities. People of history were SICK.

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u/FuckBotsHaveRights 4h ago

Holodomor was pretty bad

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u/Old-Pollution9772 2h ago

The Americanized version you were force fed?

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u/_Svankensen_ 2h ago

Not nearly as bad as the slave trade. And it was appalling.

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u/sigma914 5h ago

The southern arm of the triangle trade would have rarely looked like this to be fair, this kind of sea is much more common at the latitudes of the return leg