On his journey to America Equiano faced some of the same hardships that the Pilgrims did when they traveled to America years before on the Mayflower. Even though some were the same, there were still many more hardships that made the journey for Equiano and other slaves much more difficult.
Equiano and the other slaves that were traveling on the same ship with him came to the Americas against their will. They had been captured from their home and forced on the ship only to be sold to some plantation owner to do work for them. While on the ship, they were not given any freedom to move around as they please or do whatever they wanted to. They had to do what their capturers said or else they would be whipped or abused in some other manner. Many of the slaves on board when hungry for days while the crew of the ship seemed to have an abundance of food, but would not share with them. At one point the crew had some extra fish left over from their meal, and instead of giving it to the slaves to eat, they simply threw it overboard to go to waste. They would have rather seen the food get wasted then to give it to these "investments" that were starving below decks. They did not think of the slaves as humans, there is no way they could of, most of the things that they did to them were horrendous and to think that someone could actually do this is very sad. There was so much more that the slaves had to go threw just while on the ship that I don't how any of them survived. .
Very differently, however, the Pilgrims came to America under their own freewill and were actually searching for their own freedom. When they were on the Mayflower, they were not chained and kept like animals, like Equiano and the slaves were, but instead were allowed to do what they pleased. They also were not thought of by the crew as being inferior and because of this there weren't nearly as many things that happened to them that were any where close to as bad as some of the things that happened to Equiano were.
