On July 2, 1839, La Amistad was sailing from Havana to Puerto Pricipe, Cuba, when the ship's unwilling passengers, 53 slaves recently captured from Africa, revolted. Led by Cinque, they killed the captain and the cook but spared the life of a Spanish navigator so that he could sail them home to Sierra Leone. The film, however, portrayed that the slaves only killed the captain and left the cook and navigator alive. The navigator instead managed to sail to Amistad, generally northward. Two months later, the U.S. Navy captured the ship off Long Island, New York, and towed it into New London, Connecticut. The mutineers were held in a jail in New Haven, Connecticut, a state in which slavery was legal. The Spanish government demanded for the return of the Africans to Cuba as did Martin Van Buren, our then President of the United States. President Van Buren, along with many newspaper editors, favored extraditing the Africans to Cuba in the hopes of

After some research on the actual event, several of the movie's key characters never existed in real history, and the people who did exist were only a faint ring of authenticity. The portrayals of a ten-year-old Queen Isabella II and several of the Spanish officials look as though they were modeled after today's society standards as interpreted by the director, Steven Spielberg. According to the movie, President Van Buren (Nigel Hawthorne), realizing that the lower court case was turning against the interests of his southern supporters whom he needed to win re-election, replaced Judge T. Judson with Judge Coglin. This depiction seems to be an invention of the writer's imagination. In truth, Judge Judson was a Democratic man and anti-abolitionist. There would be no reason for President Van Buren to replace him. Judge Judson relied on testimony from a famous Irishman, Richard Robert Madden, who was not mentioned in the movie. Madden was a former British official in Cuba and offered crucial information about the operation of Cuba's massive slave trade which was in violation of the Anglo-Spanish Treaty of 1817. Despite his prejudices against blacks and abolitionists, Judge Judson ruled on the evidence at the level of a federal district court that the rebels were free

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 862
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)