NEW HAVEN, Connecticut (AP) ¿ Seasick but awestruck at times, a group of American and British college students are learning the wonders of the sea and the horrors of slavery.

The seven students are aboard the Freedom Schooner Amistad, a near-replica of the famous ship that sparked a slave revolt. The ship is crossing the Atlantic for the first time after leaving New Haven in late June for a 16-month, 14,000-mile voyage to Nova Scotia, Britain and Africa that traces a 19th century route of the slave trade.

Fifty students will board the ship for portions of the journey and share their experiences with millions of others worldwide through live web casts and e-mail correspondence. Their journal entries, along with those of permanent crew members, are being posted on the ship's website.

"A lot of people around me are getting seasick and by chance it hasn't hit me yet," writes Seth Bruin, a 19-year-old student at Frostburg State University in Maryland. "All around me, I have people shouting orders, 'Take up on your halyard', 'Slack the sheet', 'Coil that line', 'Clean the galley!'"

Despite all, Bruin isn't satisfied with the six- to nine-foot swells. "I want a torrential storm to hit us just because I want that to be part of my experience," he writes.

But Michael Simon, a British student who attends Liverpool Community College, said the waves are rough, "which is not really fun when you have water coming over the sides and getting all sea water in every nook and cranny, including my mouth!"

Amid the roughness of sea, the students are learning about slavery.

"We washed dishes tonight to the prose of Frederick Douglass," writes Joy Collins, a crew member.

Students are seeing major stars used in celestial navigation when the original Amistad set sail.

"The sky is much darker here than I'm used to so I could see stars here that I can't usually and I can see the Milky Way pretty clearly too," writes Logan Senack, a University of Connecticut student.

Crew and guests said they hope to inspire the world with the story of more than 50 African captives who took over the Amistad schooner while it was en route to Cuba in August 1839. The ship however was seized off Long Island, New York, and the slaves were captured and jailed in New Haven.

With help from area abolitionists, the surviving Africans won their freedom in a historic legal battle that started in Connecticut and ended in the US Supreme Court. Former President John Quincy Adams represented the slaves.

Their story was depicted in the 1997 movie directed by Steven Spielberg.

"What I constantly end up asking myself is how, how HOW could the Amistad captives possibly have been able to have survived through it," Senack writes, describing "cruel mind games" to avoid thinking about seasickness. "We're here with ginger ale on a spacious breezy deck with the comforting hand on our back, still feeling the worst we have ever felt."

Imogen Ashfield, a 17-year-old student from Sixth Form College at Crown Woods School near London, said she was thinking of fleeing in a safety boat or crawling back to her bunk for good. But then the ship anchored at Sambro Harbor in Nova Scotia, where Ashfield saw the line of Canadian pine trees.

"And we began to talk about Frederick Douglass and the books of slavery we are looking forward to read and discover," Ashfield wrote. "That, to me, was why it is important to get through those tough times."

Freedom Schooner Amistad, constructed at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut, was launched in 2000. The ship has travelled around the country, but this is its first voyage tracing the slave route. Actor John Amos, who starred in Alex Hailey's "Roots'', is filming the voyage for a documentary.

In Nova Scotia, a pump that turns ocean water into drinking water was repaired before the ship departed. It is making the voyage across the Atlantic in hopes of reaching London by early August to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain.

The vessel will head to Liverpool for the August 23 opening of the International Slavery Museum and then travel to Portugal and Sierra Leone, the original West African homeland of many of the Amistad captives.

The Amistad will return to the United States next year to commemorate the bicentenary of legislation to ban the importation of slaves.

Newman Lawrence, a deckhand, said watching the seasick passengers got him thinking about much harsher conditions the captives endured.

"Hundreds of captives chained together covered in their own excrement and vomit, crying out in anguish, not knowing what the future held for them except pain," Lawrence writes. "In reality they are the brave and courageous ones and we are simply following in their footsteps trying to bring a better future to all that we can reach."

Even Bruin admits to being homesick, which makes him wonder about the hero of the slave revolt and the other captives.

"I can't imagine what it was like for the slaves who were captured and forcefully taken from their family and village not knowing what lay ahead," he writes. "When Sengbe Pieh returned home, his whole family was gone."