A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows - William Blake after John Gabriel Stedman (1792)

the Ribs to a Gallows

Engraving

British Museum

This engraving by the British artist and poet William Blake (1757–1827), made after a sketch by the Scottish-Dutch soldier John Gabriel Stedman, depicts an enslaved man suspended from a gallows by a metal hook driven through his ribs—a scene of extreme colonial violence in 18th-century Surinam. Scattered skulls and bones on the ground and a ship visible on the horizon compound the image's indictment of the slave trade's brutality. The print was published as one of a series of illustrations for Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (first published 1796), a firsthand account of colonial military campaigns and the savage repression of enslaved people in Dutch Surinam. Though the Narrative was embraced by abolitionists, Stedman himself was understood to advocate reform of the slave trade rather than its outright abolition.