auntada:

The slave deck of the bark “Wildfire,” brought into Key West on April 30, 1860

The Wildfire carried 510 captives on this voyage from Africa, near the Congo River, to slave markets in the United States. The ship was not filled to its capacity of 1000. Although importing slaves to the United States was prohibited by law in 1808, the slave trade continued for many years. 

The Wildfire was intercepted by an American steamer and brought to port at Key West. The African captives were eventually freed. Charges were brought against the captain and crew of the Wildfire, but they were found not guilty, despite being caught red-handed.

Illustration in Harper’s Weekly, June 2, 1860

Library of Congress

(via dendroica)

Soldiers on Jinja Road in Kampala, Uganda.

Photograph taken in 1936 during “World Trunk” expedition along the Nile, traveling from the Nile Delta down to Lake Victoria.

US Library of Congress Digital Archives. Mason Photographs Collection.

“Tamed zebra jumping.”

While zebras have been tamed here and there through history, they’ve never been truly domesticated, like horses have been.

Photo by Frank G Carpenter. US Library of Congress Archives, 1890.

Political borders in Africa, ca. 1855.

Mitchell’s School Atlas: Comprising the maps and tables designed to accompany Mitchell’s School and Family Geography. 1857.

“Liberated Africans”

Traditional dress in Liberia. This country was established in 1822 by the American Colonization Society, for freed and liberated slaves in the United States.

Costumes on the West Coast of Africa. 1829.

dynamicafrica:

A Tunisian falconer with his birds, 1920s.

via legrandcirque

(via dinotits)

“Dancer of the Cafes”

A member of the Ouled Nail tribe dances at the cafes in Algiers. The mountain-dwelling tribe of the Ouled Nail was noted for their exotic “belly dancing” skills and their traditional outfits and moves have made their way into modern belly-dancing circles.

National Geographic Magazine. 1917. Vol. 31, p269.

biomedicalephemera:

Look carefully at this fish. It may bring you good fortune!

No, no, coelacanths aren’t the fish of Yeh-Shen, but they were referred to as the “Wish Fish” in many telegrams between JLB Smith and his colleagues in Grahamstown and back in England - though there had been reports of a “foul-tasting, oily, hideous fish” going around for decades, it seemed that since the first specimen was recovered intact, all of the reports evaporated like magic. No one heard of any new “uglyfish” caught by locals, no one caught any in the tedious trawling missions sent out by Rhodes University, nothing.

The first report of a new intact Coelacanth that had been caught by a local who had seen a reward poster happened at a most inopportune time: two days before Christmas Eve! Oh, it may seem like the perfect Christmas gift to Smith, looking back, but at the time it was a disaster. The fish had been caught out on the Cape, the other side of the country! And to make things worse, the next day was a Sunday, followed by Christmas Eve, Christmas, and Boxing Day. There would be no way Smith could get to the fish in time to preserve it for science, because, as one visiting Portuguese friend once noted to him:

You may talk of Russia and the Iron Curtain, but it is nothing to South Africa on a Sunday or a holiday. That is an Iron Curtain. It shuts down, boom, boom, everything like that, and everything is dead!

A Sunday followed by three Bank Holidays was the worst possible outcome, especially since the trawler that the fish had come in on had to ship out again the day after Boxing Day.

Through an agonizing maze of run-arounds and unreachable telegraph lines, Smith and his team did eventually manage to stall the trawler one day, and alert the Prime Minister on Boxing Day that they (the Grahamstown team) had secured a coelacanth. Though by many he was considered an antagonist to the sciences, and doubly so to an extremely English center such as existed in Grahamstown, he saw the magnitude of this news, and saw what a boon it would be to South Africa to be able to announce it as soon as possible. With direct orders from the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense procured a light airplane that could take Smith where he needed to go to retrieve the fish, and Smith’s team made preparations to announce everything on 27 December.

The Search Beneath the Sea: The Story of the Coelacanth. J. L. B. Smith, 1956.