In the House of Commons, William Wilberforce demonstrated how enslaved people were transported across the Atlantic using a model of the ship ‘Brookes’. Designed to transport 482 men, women, and children in the hold, he stated that as many as 609 slaves had been carried on the same ship. Olaudah Equiano, a formerly enslaved Londoner, wrote of 'the loathsome smells . . . the chains . . . the filth . . . the shrieks of the women and the groans of the dying' during his transportation from Africa to the West Indies.
