Middle Passage

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NORTH AMERICA NEW ENGLAND New York Boston MIDDLE COLONIES CHESAPEAKE LOWER SOUTH rum, slaves Charleston sugar, molasses, W e s tI n wood products, grain, rice The Slavers fish, livestock, and meat, Williamsburg d i e s SOUTH Philadelphia AMERICA manufactured products manufactured products grain, iron manufactured productstobacco, iron fish, furs, whale products, naval stores manufactured products rice, indigo, deerskins, naval stores sugar, rum ATLANTIC OCEAN Slave ships were usually small and narrow. A ship’s size, measured in tonnage, theoretically determined how many slaves it could carry, with the formula being two slaves per ton. A large ship of three hundred tons, therefore, was expected to carry six hundred slaves. But captains often ignored the formula. Some kept their human cargo light, calculating that smaller loads lowered mortality and made revolt less likely. But most captains were “tight packers,” who squeezed human beings together in hope that large numbers would offset increased deaths. For example, the 120-ton Henrietta Marie, a British ship that sailed from London on its final voyage in 1699, should have been fully loaded with 240 slaves. Yet it carried 350 from West Africa when it set out for Barbados and Jamaica. Another ship designed to carry 450 slaves usually carried 600. The cargo space in slave ships was generally only five feet high. Ships’ carpenters halved this vertical space by building shelves, so that slaves might be packed above and below on planks that measured only slaves manufactured products slaves MAP 2–3 The American, British, African Commercial Triangle. rum manufactured products GREAT BRITAIN ENGLAND London Middle Passage Chapter 2 EUROPE AFRICA five and a half feet long and one and a third feet wide. Consequently, slaves had only about 20 to 25 inches of headroom. To add to the discomfort, the crews chained male slaves together in pairs to help prevent rebellion and lodged them away from women and children. The most frequently reproduced illustration of a slaver’s capacity for human cargo comes from the Brookes, which sailed from Liverpool, England, during the 1780s. At 300 tons, the Brookes was an exceptionally large ship for its time, and the diagrams show how tightly packed the slaves were who boarded it. While those who wished to abolish the Atlantic slave trade created the diagrams, their bias does not make the diagrams less accurate. In fact, as historian James Walvin points out in his study of the trade, the precise, unemotional renderings of the Brookes’s geometrically conceived design scarcely indicate the physical suffering it caused. The renderings do not show the constant shifting, crushing, and chafing among the tightly packed human cargo caused by the movement of the ship at sea. Also, during storms the crew often neglected to feed the 31
32 Chapter 2 Middle Passage In this late-eighteenth-century drawing, African slave traders conduct a group of bound captives from the interior of Africa toward European trading posts. slaves, empty the tubs used for excrement, take slaves on deck for exercise, tend to the sick, or remove the dead. Not surprisingly, mortality rates were high, because the crowded, unsanitary conditions encouraged seaboard epidemics. Between 1715 and 1775, slave deaths on French ships averaged 15 percent. The highest recorded mortality rate was 34 percent. By the nineteenth century, the death rate had declined to 5 percent. Overall, one-third of the Africans subjected to the trade perished between their capture and their embarkation on a slave ship. Another third died during the middle passage or during “seasoning” on a Caribbean island. It would have been slight consolation to the enslaved to learn that because of the epidemics, the rate of death among slaver crews was proportionally higher than their own. A Slave’s Story In his book The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, published in 1789, former slave Olaudah Equiano provides a vivid account of his capture, sale, and voyage to America in 1755. Equiano was an Igbo, the dominant group in what is today southern Nigeria. When he was 10 years old, African slave raiders captured him and forced him to march along with other captives to the Niger River or one of its tributaries, where they traded him to other Africans. His new captors took him to the coast and sold him to European slave traders whose ships sailed to the West Indies. Equiano’s experience at the coastal slave factory convinced him that he had entered a sort of hell, peopled by evil spirits. The stench caused by forcing many people to live in close confinement made him sick to his stomach and emotionally agitated. His African and European captors tried to calm him with liquor. But because he was not accustomed to alcohol, he became disoriented and more convinced of his impending doom. When the sailors lodged him with others below deck on the ship, he was so sick that he lost his appetite and hoped to die. Instead, because he refused to eat, the sailors took him on deck and whipped him. Later Equiano witnessed the flogging of one of the white crew
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Middle Passage

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