This human cargo, which usually numbered several hundred people per vessel, was then taken to America on the Middle Passage, suffering mortalities of about 15 percent. In , the Royal African Company lost its monopoly and soon was eclipsed by private British and American merchants.
Those based in Bristol and London dominated the Virginia trade until the s, when the London merchants were overtaken by others based in Liverpool.
Nearly two-thirds of the Atlantic slave trade took place between and British abolition in — About a quarter of all African-born slaves came to the Americas after abolition of the British and United States trades. Slave ships ranged in size from the ten-ton Hesketh , which sailed out of Liverpool and delivered slaves to Saint Kitts in , to the ton Parr , another Liverpool ship that sailed in the s.
Ships comparable in size to the Hesketh were designed to carry as few as six pleasure passengers; refitted as a slaver, the Hesketh transported a crew plus thirty Africans. The Parr , on the other hand, carried a crew of and a cargo of as many as slaves. Most ships—nicknamed Guineamen, after the Gulf of Guinea on the west coast of Africa—were sized somewhere in between, growing in tonnage over time as the Atlantic trade itself grew.
American traders preferred somewhat smaller ships than their British counterparts: two-masted sloops 25 to 75 tons and schooners 30 to tons required smaller crews and shorter stays on the African coast, where tropical diseases were a constant threat to crew and cargo alike. At first, merchants adapted general merchant vessels for the slave trade. The low clearance would have precluded many of the Africans from standing. The lower deck generally was divided into separate compartments for men and women, with the males shackled together in pairs.
Most women were left unchained but confined below, while children had the run of the ship. African men and women used the children as means to communicate with one another and, in some cases, to plan insurrection. The captain and his officers enjoyed personal cabin space, usually below the raised quarterdeck at the stern of the ships, while common sailors slept on the main deck, sometimes under cover of a tarpaulin or in the longboat.
The Africans spent about eight hours a day on the main deck, and the so-called barricado separated the African men from the women. Once the crew was ready to begin the Middle Passage, they removed the house and hung netting from the sides of the ship. This was designed to catch anyone who tried to escape by jumping overboard. In the warm waters, sharks often followed the ships, feeding off refuse.
The dangers of the Middle Passage for its crew often were greater the closer the ship was to Africa. While both Europeans and Africans suffered from dysentery, the leading cause of death, the sailors on the ship also were susceptible to diseases prevalent along the African coast, such as malaria and yellow fever. In addition, measles, smallpox, influenza, scurvy, dehydration, and depression took their tolls on the captives below decks as the journey progressed.
Escape attempts and insurrections also presented a particular danger early in the voyage, when enslaved Africans clung to some hope of making it back to the mainland. As an employee of a merchant or company in Europe or the Americas, he hired and managed the crew; outfitted the ship; sold its cargo for humans on the coast of Africa; enforced a harsh discipline on crew members and Africans alike on the Middle Passage; worked to prevent mutiny, insurrection, and sickness; aided other captains when in need; and sold the slaves in America for the best possible price.
Rebellion or mutiny could spread like a virus, and many captains attempted to snuff out resistance by terrorizing the accused either crew members or Africans in full view of their fellows.
Merchants often put in writing that their captains should refrain from mistreating the African cargo, but few held their employees to account. Hence the survival of the slave trade well into the 19th century. For much of its history, the Atlantic slave system had few critics.
Moreover, their voices were usually drowned out by the wealth generated by successful slaving. That began to change, quickly, after the declaration of American independence in The rise of a new political and religious sensibility — part Enlightenment, part theological — prompted the rise of a widespread abolition sentiment.
Revolutionary and wartime violence corroded slavery. And so too did the actions of the slaves themselves. Their voices and actions, their defiance, resistance and flight, helped tip the balance.
When the west became abolitionist, the most persuasive critics had been the slaves and their allies, who promoted the cause of freedom. And the most persuasive evidence was the horror stories that emerged from the bellies of the slave ships.
Much of our understanding about slavery has been defined by national boundaries slavery in the US, in Jamaica, in Brazil , etc. But innovative research on the Atlantic slave trade has exposed slavery as a ubiquitous, global force. For all the obvious boundaries of national interests — in colonial, trading and military affairs — slavery had global consequences. There were extensive trading routes not unlike the old silk routes which bound Atlantic slavery to a wider world economy.
Goods from Asia found their way onto Atlantic slave ships. Slave-grown produce could, by the late 18th century, be found in far-flung global locations. The profits from slaving enabled western consumers to acquire luxury goods from China — a country that even used silver from the high Andes as its currency. Africans were scattered to all corners of the globe — and so too were the commodities they produced.
Although the Atlantic slave trade was physically defined by the ocean, its consequences were global, from Africa to the American frontiers — where, for example, great damage was inflicted on native peoples by slave-grown rum, which was exchanged for pelts and furs.
More crucially, the importation of African slaves to the Americas helped create a platform for the remarkable material development of the Americas. The slave ships thus contributed to laying the foundations from which the modern world emerged. The west turned against slavery and the slave trade — slowly — in the 19th century. In , no western state had abolished it. By , it had gone. Sometimes the captured Africans were told by the white men on the ships that they were to work in the fields.
But this was difficult to believe, since, from the African's experience, tending crops took so little time and didn't require many hands. So what were they to believe? More than a few thought that the Europeans were cannibals. Olaudah Equiano, an African captured as a boy who later wrote an autobiography, recalled. When I looked round the ship too and saw a large furnace of copper boiling, and a mulititude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate and quite overpowered with horrow and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted.
I asked if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces and long hair? Their "living quarters" was often a deck within the ship that had less than five feet of headroom -- and throughout a large portion of the deck, sleeping shelves cut this limited amount of headroom in half. For more details of these cookies and how to disable them, see our cookie policy.
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