Amistad

Amistad by Israel
This book , is based on a real story occurred in 1839. It tells the horrible sequence of events that a group of fifty three young men and women in which the principal character a young man name Sengbe Pieh (who would become to be called Cinque), was involved since the beginning of the book when they where captured in Africa and became illegal slaves, the fight for hisfreedom, to the end when they returned to Africa. And the story is this:
The story begins when one night Sengbe a tall, twenty four year old muscular man, jumped from his bed, when he felt a presence around him, he saw a big animal, he recognized the lion. This lion had a bad reputation, this lion was a man eater. The lion slowly approached to Sengbe, he took a smooth gray stone, and when the lionstart to gallop to him, he hurled the rock at the aproproaching lion, hitting it right between the eyes. It fell immediately. And from this moment, whenever a person talked of Sengbe, they called him the “lion killer”. The story was often told and danced at celebrations. But Sengbe now called Cinque felt uncomfortable with such attention. But his entire reality had been replaced by chains and the airof slaves ships. He was aboard the Amistad in a journey of wretchedness and pain. He was pack in a hold with fifty three other Africans, many of them from his mende tribe, but there were also from other tribes. He was bound to live the rest of his life as a worker, in service to his white master.
The Tecora that had been the ship in which Cinque and more than seven hundred Africans had beenenchained and tortured in the journey from Africa to Habana Cuba. It had been a horrible heart breaking journey . Death and violence, starvation, beatings, disease and mass murder surrounded them all the time. It had been a monstrous journey, but Cinque have survived. But then he was bought for four hundred fifty four dollars and now marched aboard the Amistad. But in the middle of the voyagerCinque found a nail and with it he broke his chains, then the chains of the other Africans, one by one until the entire slave deck was free. Then all the slaves killed the white crew except for two men, Ruiz and Montes, these two men were forced by the Africans to take them back home to Africa, but when all the Africans were slept they changed the course of the ship in a different direction to USA orCuba, until one day the ship reach land, the Africans believe they were in Africa, but the truth is that they a were in USA. In USA the Africans were capture by some sailors which heard the voices of Ruiz and Montes shouting for help. The sailors captured the Africans and put them in jail, days later the Africans went to court, because they were accused of murder, the lawyer who defended themwas a man named Roger Baldwin, he was a lawyer who didn’t suffer from lack of clients, but many of his clients used to pay him in all manner of ways, for example books, goats, chickens, corn.
When the Africans when to court, there were some missionaries praying for them, and an African called Yamba took a bible of one of them. Inside the court Ruiz and Montes said they where the owners of theAfricans, and that they where slaves who had born in an island near Cuba, and they had been slaves since they were born, but the truth was that they were Bozales these are the illegal slaves that had been kidnapped in Africa. Days later in t jail, Yamba was reading the bible that he took of one of the missionaries and Cinque asked Yamba to gave a blanked to another African named Fala, because hewas very sick, but Yamba began a discussion with Cinque because Yamba was the leader of a tribe and Cinque only was a farmer, and Yamba didn´t like Cinque. Days later Fala died.
One day Baldwin planed to find someone who speaks the same language of the Africans, he memorized some numbers in Mende(a language spoken in west Africa). And he started counting these numbers while he was walking...