Avalon Jacka's Blog

12.3.2009

December 8, 2009 at 2:50 am (Uncategorized)

This is the first draft of my introduction paragraph of my final essay.  It is pretty longwinded, and definately needs to be refined, but my computer crashed the night before it was due so I had to throw something together the morning before class.  It is the basic ideas that I want to cover, but obviously very rough, and definitley needs some refining before it can be turned in even with the second draft. with that in mind, here it is:

Nowadays, many people think of travel as a leisure activity, something to do in your spare time when you have money.  We often travel with our families, sometimes fighting over who will get the window seat.  However, this is a fairly new way of thinking of travel.  Through the centuries, travel has been an exhaustig excursion.  sometimes, as in the experiences of the Africans kidnapped for the slave trade, it is forced upon the traveler, making the journey terrible and painful.  They are separated from their loved ones, most likely never to see each other again.  in the times of Olaudah equiano, travel was not for fun, but a necessity. the slaves of the autobiography The Interesting Narrative f Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African and “The Black Man’sLament” by Amelia Opie suffered immensely in their travels.  Their voygaes from Africa to The New World would take months. Hundreds died from disease and exhaustion.  Even if you survived, you were almost punished for it because of what waited for you after you were sold to a planattion owner. The end for the slaves did not justify the means of how they got to  their destination. In this essay, I will explore how travel has not always been something fun that we can do over the weekend, but rather was once a very difficult and painful thing.