QUESTIONNAIRE ABOUT LA AMISTAD

1. What is the movie about? Summarize the plot of the film mentioning the main characters.

The movie tells the story of 53 Africans who are captured  and introduced in a slave ship called La Amistad.As the ship is crossing from Cuba to the United States, Joseph Cinqué, a leader of the Africans, leads a mutiny forcing two Spanish navigators to help them sail the ship back to Africa. However, the ship is stopped by the American Navy, and the 53 living Africans imprisoned as runaway slaves.

In an unfamiliar country and not speaking a single word of English, the Africans find themselves in a legal battle. District Attorney William S. Holabird brings charges of piracy and murder. Besides, the Secretary of State John Forsyth, on behalf of President Martin Van Buren (who is campaigning for re-election), represents the claim of Queen Isabella II of Spain that the Africans are slaves and are property of Spain based on a treaty and the two Spanish navigators produce proof of purchase. Nevertheless,a lawyer named Roger Sherman Baldwin, hired by the abolitionist Lewis Tappan and his black associate Theodore Joadson, decides to defend the Africans.

Baldwin argues that the Africans had been captured in Africa to be sold in the Americas illegally. Therefore, the Africans were free citizens of another country and not slaves at all. In light of this evidence, the staff of President Van Buren has the judge presiding over the case replaced by Judge Coglin, who is younger and believed to be impressionable and easily influenced. 

Judge Coglin rules in favor of the Africans. After pressure from Senator John C. Calhoun on President Van Buren, the case is appealed to the Supreme Court. Despite refusing to help when the case was initially presented, ex president John Quincy Adams agrees to assist with the case giving a impassioned and eloquent speech for their release, which results successful.

Because of the release of the Africans, Van Buren loses his re-election campaign, and tension builds between the North and the South, which would eventually culminate in the Civil War.

2. What was the Triangular Trade? What nations benefited from it?

Triangular trade or triangle trade is a historical term indicating trade among three ports or regions. Triangular trade usually evolves when a region has export commodities that are not required in the region from which its major imports come. Triangular trade thus provides a method for rectifying trade imbalances between the above regions.

The best-known triangular trading system is the transatlantic slave trade, that operated from the late 16th to early 19th centuries, carrying slaves, cash crops, and manufactured goods between West Africa, Caribbean or American colonies and the European colonial powers, with the northern colonies of British North America, especially New England, sometimes taking over the role of Europe. The use of African slaves was fundamental to growing colonial cash crops, which were exported to Europe. European goods, in turn, were used to purchase African slaves, who were then brought on the sea lane west from Africa to the Americas, the so-called Middle Passage.

The main nations of  Western Europe, as well as North America (new England). Great Britain, Netherland and Spain. In La Amistad the slaves which appear were captured in Sierra Leona.

3. Do some research and explain the conditions in which slaves were captured and transported from Africa to the Americas.

Slave ships spent several months travelling to different parts of the coast, buying their cargo. The captives were often in poor health from the physical and mental abuse they had suffered. They were taken on board, stripped naked and examined from head to toe by the captain or surgeon. 
Conditions on board ship during the Middle Passage were appalling. The men were packed together below deck and were secured by leg irons. The space was so cramped they were forced to crouch or lie down. Women and children were kept in separate quarters, sometimes on deck, allowing them limited freedom of movement, but this also exposed them to violence and sexual abuse from the crew.

The air in the hold was foul and putrid. Seasickness was common and the heat was oppressive. The lack of sanitation and suffocating conditions meant there was a constant threat of disease. Epidemics of fever, dysentery (the 'flux') and smallpox were frequent. Captives endured these conditions for about two months, sometimes longer.

In good weather the captives were brought on deck in midmorning and forced to exercise. They were fed twice a day and those refusing to eat were force-fed. Those who died were thrown overboard. Contrary to this, in La Amistad, the amount of food was not enough and therefore some slaves were thrown overboard as well. 

The combination of disease, inadequate food, rebellion and punishment took a heavy toll on captives and crew alike. Surviving records suggest that until the 1750s one in five Africans on board ship died.

4. What enlightened ideas appear in the movie?

Nearly all the enlightened ideas of the movie appear in the impassioned and eloquent speech of John Quincy Adam who defended the same ideas of John Locke, one of the most important philosophers and thinkers of the time. He claimed that humans are rational, independent agents with natural rights (life, freedom, equality, independence) that join political society (social contract) to be protected by the rule of law. Therefore, the end of a law should be to preserve and enlarge freedom. Locke also argued that people would have the right to revolt in order to take back the power they had given to illegitimate governments. Men deserve freedom.

5. Who was Joseph Cinqué? Did he really existed? 

Cinqué was born in 1814 in what is now Sierra Leone, also known as Sengbe Pieh, was a West African man of the Mende people who led a revolt of fellow Africans on the Spanish slave ship, La Amistad. After the ship was taken into custody by the United States Coast Guard, Cinqué and his fellow Africans were eventually tried for killing officers on the ship, in a case known as United States v. The Amistad. This reached the US Supreme Court, where Cinqué and his fellow Africans were found to have rightfully defended themselves from being enslaved through the illegal Atlantic slave trade and were released. Americans helped raise money for their return to Africa. But Little is known of his later life.

6. What is the role of John Quincy Adams, former US President, in the movie?

John Quincy Adams the sixth President of the United States from 1825 to 1829.He was the son of second President John Adams Had a very important role in the movie because after the abolitionists asked him for help, he accepted serving them as a lawyer. Thanks to his speech the Supreme court was convinced and declared that those black men were elegal slaves and because of this free men.