Ottabah Cugoano was about thirteen years old when he was kidnapped from his home on the Gold Coast in present-day Ghana. He and some eighteen or twenty boys and girls were playing in a field "when several great ruffians came upon us" with pistols and swords. Distraught after his abduction, young Ottobah refused to eat or drink for several days. The horrors he saw and felt, he later wrote, "cannot be well described; I saw many of my miserable countrymen chained two and two, some handcuffed and some with their hands tied behind." When the slave ship arrived off the coast to take them away to the New World, "it was a most horrible scene; there was nothing to be heard but rattling of chains, smacking of whips, and the groans and cries of our fellow men." Aboard the vessel, there was an aborted attempt at a revolt. "Death", Ottobah wrote, seemed more preferable than life", and the boys and women, who were not shackled, plotted to "burn and blow up" the ship "and to perish all together in the flames".
~Mintz, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood
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