Kossula was just 19 years old when rival African warriors swept through his town in what is now Nigeria, killing and capturing him and others. The captives walked for days, then were penned up for weeks before being loaded onto the Clotilda for a 45-day journey across the water to the United States. Terrified, the prisoners of that 1860 voyage were crowded onto “shelves, their clothes ripped from them, and they lay for days in their own filth, crying for water and food.” Once they reached their destination, they were chained and marched through swamps and woods until they were sold into slavery. The Survivors of the Clotilda, by Hannah Durkin (Amistad) After a lifetime that included brutal slavery and years of poverty and starvation, Kossula, still remembered the terrors of his capture and the details of his homeland shortly before his death in 1935, at the age of 94.