It’s 1525. We’re on the coast of Salto in West Africa as a Portuguese ship is setting sail. The ship’s destination is New Spain, the newly established Spanish territory in the Americas. There’s nothing particularly unusual about this voyage. It’s the 16th century and maritime trade is the bedrock of empires.
And with new territories in new lands, long oceans spanning voyages have become pretty commonplace. But this ship is different. Down in the boughels lies a different kind of cargo. Rather than spices, gold or textiles, this ship carries people. It will take months for the ship to sight land in the Americas. And over that time, many of those people will have lost their lives, passing away in misery in the dark, squalid conditions below decks.
These tragic anonymous victims will become the first lives claimed by the Middle Passage, the route by which enslaved people are transported from the coast of Africa to the colonies and plantations of the new world. They may be the first to make this grim voyage, but they will not be the last. Over the next 400 years, millions more will die on this crossing right into the mid-9th century and even beyond.
Human beings will fall victim to this trade. They’ll have their dignity stripped from them and they’ll be loaded into boats becoming part of one of the most shameful chapters in human history. The Atlantic slave trade is a sprawling and deeply upsetting topic. We are focusing on the boats themselves, the grim mechanism that kept these murderous trade routes moving.
The practice of slavery, that is the practice of one human being owned by another human, is older than civilization itself. But the development of the Atlantic slave trade from the 16th century onwards brought the whole thing to a new and horrifying level.
It became an industrialized practice as human beings were systematically captured, brutalized, and sold into slavery across continents. They sailed on ships bearing many different flags such as Portugal, Britain, and Spain, as well as France, the Netherlands, the United States, and Denmark, amongst others.
It’s believed that between 12 and 15 million people were forcibly captured in Africa and then transported across the Atlantic to the Americas. To put that into perspective, the population of modern Portugal is only around 10.7 million. Most of these people were transferred via the Middle Passage. In other words, they sailed west from Africa directly across the Atlantic to South America, the Caribbean, or north to the North American colonies.
This might take a month, or it could take 6 months if the weather was bad, and every inch of the way, enslaved peoples would be subject to the most horrendous conditions and abject misery. It was essentially an extended act of violence designed to break the spirit of its victims and eliminate any chance of escape. And this violence began from the very moment the victims were captured.
Abu Bakr al-Sadik was born to an affluent family in what is now Mali in 1794. Like most young people, Abu had dreams and hopes of his own. And when he heard about the gold mines in Bana, today’s Ivory Coast, he knew what he had to do. But when conflict between two sultanates tore the region apart, Abu found himself captured.
He was sold into transatlantic slavery and forced to undergo conversion from his Muslim faith to Christianity. Abu’s story is a familiar one. Hundreds of thousands of people were captured in warfare as victorious armies profited from the defeat of weaker opponents. But there was a problem. There simply weren’t enough wars to keep up with demand.
To fill the gap, private raiding parties emerged. These were bands of pirates and propheteers who rounded up human commodities ready to be sent to the colonies of the new world. In doing so, they provided the economic foundation for globes spanning European empires. This was how a young man named Oluda found himself sold into slavery. Aluda was born in 1745 in an Igbo village named Asaka in what is now Nigeria.
His early years were spent in relative normality. He had a happy childhood. His parents would go out and tend to their work and he and his sister would stay at home and watch the house until they returned. In his own words:
“I still look back with pleasure on the first scenes of my life, though that pleasure has been for the most part mingled with sorrow because one day this early life changed.”
He and his sister were at home as usual when two men and a woman Ula didn’t recognize came into the yard. Ola and his sister were bound, gagged, and then carried off into the woods. There they were separated and taken away to the slave markets to be sold. This separation was at the heart of the slave trade. Victims would be snatched unexpectedly and then separated from their friends and family.
They’d be taken far away to places they’d never seen before and sold from person to person until there was no hope of ever returning home. Disoriented, frightened, and hopelessly alone, enslaved people would become trapped in a system from which there was no escape. Oluda would have been chained and shackled.
A taming stick would have been placed around his neck, connecting him to another captive. Then he and his fellow victims were marched in long lines known as coffles from which there was no escape. As kidnapping victims were marched to the slave markets on the coast, they would have had a glimpse of what awaited them if they tried to escape.
By the roadside, bodies decomposed into skeletal remains. The remnants of those who had tried to make a run for it. If this deterrent wasn’t enough, raiding parties often resorted to violence. Ottobad Kueno was just a boy when he was captured while playing in a field with his friends. Originally from modernday Ghana, Ottovar was taken far away from his home to the coast to be sold.
Otterbar would later say:
“Some of us attempted to run away, but pistols and cutlesses were soon introduced. If we offered to stir, we should all lie dead on the spot.”
If the victims survived their death march, which not all did, they would then be placed into holding cells known as baracons. This was basically a prison where there was no privacy and snarling dogs would keep the terrified victims in line.
One by one, these victims would be taken out of the pen and then subjected to an inspection. Inspection was, as you can imagine, both dehumanizing and humiliating. Enslaved people would be stripped naked and have their bodies poked and prodded to assess their general health and musculature. Teeth were considered a major indication of health, so inspectors would examine the inside of victim’s mouths, not unlike one might examine a horse.
For women and girls, it was even worse. Facility was a big part of the examination and inspectors would use the latest pseudocience of the day to figure out the reproductive potential of enslaved women. This typically involved poking around their breasts, pelvis, and groin areas in a process that would have been both highly invasive and seriously traumatic.
As enslaved peoples were likely to be sold multiple times, these inspections would happen again and again throughout the victim’s life so that they could be easily identified. Victims were often branded with hot iron, the smell of their searing skin turning the stomachs of their fellow inmates. Such was the symbolic dehumanizing power of the barraun that Zora Neil Herzen used it as the title for her book on the life of Olua Leosula who was taken from Bante in Benin and sold into slavery in America.
Interestingly, the sale of Alula took place around 1860, more than 50 years after the importation of enslaved Africans was banned in the United States. But back to the trade itself. See, the middle passage typically involved a complex series of transactions. Captives might be sold several times before they even made their journey across the Atlantic.
They might then be sold again and again on the other side. Alluda Ecuano, for example, said he changed owners several times in Africa. He was then sold in Barbados and then sold again in the colony of Virginia. But most enslaved people would sooner or later find themselves being loaded onto an ocean crossing ship.
And this could happen in one of two ways. One method was the tight pack. This just meant pushing as many people as possible into the cargo hold. And often this hold would only be 5 ft high. So, not high enough for most people to stand comfortably, but at the same time, there would be so many people on board that lying down was impossible, too.
Around the edge of the space, there would be a wooden ledge upon which more enslaved people could be packed. The captain of one slave ship noted that the tight pack involved packing people in, quote:
“like books on a shelf.”
The other method was the loose pack. Enslaved people were herded loosely into a cargo hold below the deck and they probably have just enough room to lie down. This suggests that the loose pack was the better of the two options and perhaps it was. But there’s something we’ve got to bear in mind here and that is of course sanitation or to be more specific the lack of sanitation. Captives would have to relieve themselves wherever they stood, urinating, defecating, vomiting, and menrating onto the ground that they were standing or lying on.
With so many people packed into a tiny space, conditions rapidly deteriorated, becoming nothing short of disgusting. Even if a loose pack gave captives some space to lie down, they’d literally be lying in their own filth. All of that sewage and waste led to a foul stench and a heavy feted atmosphere. Candles brought down into the cargo holds would gutter and falter as there simply wasn’t enough oxygen to burn.
It was also said that a slave ship could be smelt before it even entered the harbor. Such was the level of filth on board. Needless to say, sickness spread quickly on these ships. Many of the captives would have had infectious diseases. Ailments like small pox quickly hopped from person to person in the conditions.
The British slave ship Hannibal was ravaged by small pox in 1693 and 1694. Of 700 captives, only 372 made it through the passage alive. 36 crew members also perished. Another British ship, the Lux Gelli, suffered a similar fate on the way to Jamaica in 1726. More than 203 enslaved Africans died of the pox. In 1781, Captain Luke Cullingwood demonstrated the dehumanizing horror of the slave trade when smallox ravaged his own ship, the Zong.
After losing more than 60 of his captives to the disease, Collingwood decided it would be better to lose them all and just claim his loss on the insurance rather than proceed without profit. He began forming parcels of victims, binding them together and then throwing them overboard. More than 130 victims were chained and thrown into the sea in this manner.
Historian Charles Milton describes how the women and children of the first parcel, quote:
“could be seen flailing in the sea before eventually weakening and drowning.”
Even in the context of the Atlantic slave trade, this is a particularly disturbing tale because it underlines the fact that these human beings were not treated as people at all, but instead treated like goods on a shipping manifest and figures on an insurance claim.
The only upside to this story is that Luke Collingwood himself died only 3 days after landing in Jamaica. In a very small sense, justice was served. But pox wasn’t the only story that disease brings here either. When food and water was thrown into the hold to keep the captives alive, it quickly became contaminated with the fecal matter and urine that sloshed back and forwards on the floor.
As a result, dissentry was rife. Of course, this made the conditions below decks even worse, as victims couldn’t control their own bowel movements. Ship captains did little to prevent disantry during the voyage itself, but they certainly tried to hide it once they reached the other side. It was difficult to sell a captive suffering from dissentry.
So, the crews would take a length of rope and then insert it into the victim. Then, they plugged the hole with tar. Whoever then proceeded to purchase this poor human wouldn’t know they had dissentry until long after the transaction had been completed. Another problem was, this is at sea after all, scurvy.
And there was simply no way to keep food fresh and edible. So things like fresh fruit and other important nutrients simply weren’t available. Anything that could be used to prevent scurvy was then kept for crew, which meant that the enslaved people below deck were abandoned to the disease and fate. There’s a lot of talk about scurvy in maritime history, but little engagement with just what the disease is and how serious it is.
Some of the early symptoms include general fatigue and weariness, as well as feelings of depression, joint pain, and loss of appetite. But let’s be honest, the helpless victims in the cargo hold would have already been experiencing a lot of this. They probably wouldn’t even have noticed until the disease really took hold.
And then we see what happens in more advanced cases of scurvy. Bleeding gums and wounds that simply won’t heal. As you can imagine, in the extremely unsanitary conditions below deck, with chains and manacles that rubbed at the skin, creating wounds not to heal, it would be easy to catch a death sentence. Many people perished from completely preventable infections, coughing their last in the septic hell of the cargo hold of a slave ship.
It’s estimated that between 15 and 16% of all enslaved people transported across the middle passage died on the way. This is horrifying enough, but it’s even more disturbing when you consider the cramped space. When someone dropped dead, they stayed there until someone came down to fish them out. So dead people remained alongside the living for hours on end, sometimes days, accelerating the spread of disease and exacerbating the psychological horror of those left behind.
When they were finally plucked from the hold, corpses were unceremoniously thrown overboard. Marine predators learned to follow the slave ships, knowing that they could find an easy meal from the corpses in the ship’s wake. But death wasn’t really the aim of the slave traders. They’d of course much preferred to keep their victims alive so that they could be sold.
So when victims stopped eating either due to illness or trauma, they were force-fed. For this, slavers used the speculum orus. This was a pair of calipers that could be inserted painfully into the throat. A screw at the base of the instrument could then be tightened, forcing the mouth open. The throat would be horribly stretched and torn, but at least some sort of sustenance could be poured into the victim, keeping them alive for another few days.
While this was supposed to be a medical implement, it was actually pretty torturous. It’s telling that Thomas Clarkson includes it alongside disciplinary equipment in his 1808 book on the African slave trade. The equipment includes the wrist manors and leg shackles designed to prevent movement, which would chafe at the skin and leave great lesions on the limbs.
It also includes thumb screws, devices that would fit over the hand of the victim and be tightened until the bones within were crushed and splintered. This could be used as a method of torture to extract the name of conspirators and collaborators or simply as a deterrent for potential troublemakers.
It’s hardly surprising the ship captains used this kind of barbaric equipment. After all, they were engaged in a barbaric trade. But what is surprising is the obsession that some captains had with health and fitness. It was as if they believed that a bit of exercise would counteract all the dissentry, the smallox, and the psychological trauma.
Groups of captives would be hauled up on deck and forced to dance for an hour or even longer. And rather than an expression of joy and creativity, it was an expression of pure fear. They’d be whipped if they didn’t comply. It was also an exercise in humiliation. Crews would jeer at the enslaved people as they danced and jumped, their movements made slow and lumbering by weeks of malnutrition and beatings.
People aboard slave ships were no longer people. They were products. They were commodities that needed to be transported through the Middle Passage for sale. This barbaric dehumanization robbed enslaved peoples of their dignity, their agency, and even their humanity.
But there was still a way that they could fight back against the slave traders. They could hit their enslavers where it hurt the most, profits. But this, of course, meant making the ultimate sacrifice. As Royal Museum’s Green Grenidge curator Aaron Jaffer tells us, committing suicide could be an act of rebellion. The crews of slave ships were always anxious to prevent enslaved people from killing themselves because each person who managed to take their own life reduced the voyages profits.
So men and women would refuse to eat. They’d hold food in their mouths, then spit it out at the last moment rather than swallow it. When the crews got wires to this, they’d flog them or force feed them using the speculum orus that we saw earlier on. Other desperate captives simply threw themselves overboard, but the ship crews always worked hard to counteract this.
They installed netting which would catch the escape before they hit the water. One man wrote about how the nets stopped him in his tracks, quote:
“Could I have got over the nettings, I would have jumped over the side, but I could not.”
Of course, such was the abject misery aboard slave ships that suicide often wasn’t an act of rebellion at all, but merely one of miserable necessity.
As Dr. Jaffer tells us, many were unable to cope with the long and traumatic journey which regularly involved beatings, murder, and some hoped that death would take them back to Africa. But for those who did choose self-elimination as a final grim act of rebellion, it was better to take as many of their enslavers down with them as they possibly could.
Let’s not forget there were plenty of weapons on board these ships, and enslaved Africans could draw upon knives and swords as well as firearms. They just needed to get their hands on them. Then they could take out their fury on their captives, even if the odds were stacked against them. Eric Robert Taylor’s book, If We Must Die, gives us a number of accounts from insurrections on board slave ships.
In 1750, the King David was sailing from Old Calabar in Bafra to St. Kits when the ship’s captain, named Holland, encountered an unusual man on the slave deck. The man could speak English well and became something of a favorite of the captain. The unnamed man then used his position of trust to learn more about the ship and its crew.
And when illness weakened the slave traffickers, he seized his chance. At 5:00 a.m. on May the 8th, 1750, the enslaved people on board the King David rose up in revolt. Captain Holland was among the first to die, followed by five others. The rebels took control of the ship, but they were now sailing into uncertainty.
It seems they attempted to land at the deser off of Guadalupe, but when the French authorities learned of their arrival, they raised the alarm. For two weeks, the rebels evaded capture aboard the King David until a sloop caught up with them. The enslaved people who had survived the insurrection were simply reinsslaved, and the grim cycle continued.
This was the tragic, futile outcome of most rebellions. Most, but not all. To make sure this grim cycle didn’t continue, captives had to resort to desperate measures, which brings us to the final story. On January 24th, 1773, the New Britannia was sailing down the Gambian River. The region of Senagambia, comprising the modern-day countries of the Gambia and Senagal, was one of the key locations in the West African slave trade.
The region was home to a complex mix of different tribes and ethnic groups. Raiding parties would focus on specific groups, take prisoners, and then send them across the Atlantic. The Bijago seemed like an ideal target for these raiding parties. They were one of the smallest groups in the area and lacked the military strength and strategic alliances of some of their neighbors.
But the Baga had developed something of a reputation. Rather than submit to the whims of their captives, their people would prefer to take their own lives. This final act of self-sacrifice, they hoped, would not only set themselves free, but would also protect their descendants from future attacks. The strategy did not work. They were still targeted by raiding parties.
And so, in January of 1773, they decided on a slightly different approach. As they were led in chains to the boats, local children reached out to them. They gave them tools, things like files, which could be used to break their chains. As the ship sailed away down river, the captives got to work. They freed themselves from their shackles.
Then they shattered the wooden wall of the prison. And now they had their eyes on the guards. It’s likely that they fought for more than an hour and it was a pretty bitter struggle. While the rebels were armed with tools and knives, the crew were armed with the firearms of the late 18th century.
But there were only 13 slave traffickers and there were 222 captives for a while. Anyway, it seems the rebels had the upper hand. No one’s quite sure how many died in the battle. Witnesses from the riverbank believe that there were many deaths on both sides, but no one from the thick of the fighting lived to tell the tale.
After an hour of bloody struggle, the rebels lit the New Britannia’s magazine a flame. It didn’t burn for long. An almighty explosion ripped across the ship, killing everyone on board. Perhaps the rebels wanted to make a statement with their dramatic and resonant suicide. Or maybe they simply thought that they were doomed either way.
Setting fire to the magazine and killing themselves and their captives probably seemed like the best option they had left. And with this action, they had broken the cycle. They wouldn’t be reinsslaved like their brothers and sisters aboard the King David two decades before. They had won their freedom just in the most tragic of ways.
