Le Rodeur's Enslaved Captives Are Blinded
Poet involved
What happened
The French slave ship Le Rodeur suffered an outbreak of severe eye disease during its voyage from West Africa to Guadeloupe in 1819. Nearly all aboard were reportedly blinded, and enslaved captives considered commercially worthless were thrown overboard. Abolitionists circulated the incident as evidence of the slave trade's calculated cruelty.
Literary impact
John Greenleaf Whittier recounted the atrocity in The Slave-Ships, using Le Rodeur to indict both slavery and the societies profiting from it. The poem transformed a documented voyage into abolitionist testimony directed at readers' moral imagination.
Source: Wikipedia
