Word: slaving
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...slave-ship captain, how to pack the cargo was but one of many vexatious commercial calculations. Another was whether to throw ailing slaves overboard or not. If they had something really contagious, it was a good move. If not, it was a needless loss of one of the most profitable cash crops in history. Salable slaves were continually trying to starve themselves to death too. But for this at least, civilized man's ingenuity had a remedy-a caliperlike instrument called a speculum oris (i.e., mouth opener). Its pointed shaft was hammered between the teeth of the recalcitrant black...
When conscience nagged, slave owners cited the Bible (Leviticus 25:44-"Thy bondmen shall be of the heathen") as justification. But the trade offered the chance of such fantastic commercial gain that few men could resist it. In the 1780s, when a man could live on ?6 a year, the merchants of Liverpool with 87 ships working the African coast netted ?300,000 profit in one twelve-month period...
...Britain outlawed the slave trade, and Royal Navy squadrons cruised the African coast.'But these watchdogs were eluded or defied by the ships of the newly independent American colonies. Southern planters needed slaves to maintain an expanding economy. To meet the demand, Northern shipowners sent ever bigger and faster ships to Africa loaded with New England rum, as well as guns, to exchange for slaves. "Worter yr. Rum as much as possible," one owner counseled his captain, "and sell as much by the short mesuer as you can." In the 1840s, so many Yankee ships from Salem traded...
...brothers all lived in the apartment. The young Chekhov's output was so great that in a few years he was able to buy a small country estate at Melikhovo, where he planted a cherry orchard and began, as he put it, to "squeeze the last drop of slave out" of himself. At Melikhovo, Chekhov was a lavish host, dressed up as a hussar to amuse his guests, flirted with his sister's pretty friend "Lika" Mizinova...
...ancient mythology, he did so out of respect for classical form and balance rather than in an effort to record again the long familiar heroics. He succumbed to none of the emotional excesses of his romantic contemporaries, and while he was always true to nature, he never became a slave to realism. To heighten mood, he sometimes painted his figures in green and orange-a practice that was to become one of the hallmarks of the later expressionists...