To Be Sold

To Be SoldAn overview of the trans-Atlantic slave trade from 1501 to 1866

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ContentsPreface 4

Introduction 6

The Triangle of Trade 8

Wind & Ocean Currents 10

Coastal Regions of Africa 12

Empire & Slavery 14

Enslavement of Africans 16

Time Line of The Trade 18

African Side of The Trade 28

African Agency & Resistance 30

Embarkation & Disembarkation 34

Seasonality of the Slave Trade 50

The Middle Passage 54

Voyages 56

Children in The Slave Trade 70

Tracking A Voyage 72

Economics of Slavery 76

Control & Punishment 82

Ending of The Slave Trade 84

Eventual Abolition 86

The Trades Influence on Ethnic & Racial Identity 88

African Names Database 90

Final Statement 101

The majority of information and data contained in this book comes from an online database named Voyages, which is the product of an international re-search endeavor to create a single multi-source data set of trans-Atlantic slave voyages. The database contains information on almost 35,000 slaving voyages. Records of the voyages have been found in archives and libraries throughout the Atlantic world. They provide information about vessels, enslaved peoples, slave traders and owners, and trading routes. It offers researchers, students and the general public a chance to rediscover the reality of one of the largest forced movements of peoples in world history.

It is difficult to believe in the first decade of the twenty-first century that just over two centuries ago, for those Europeans who thought about the issue, the shipping of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic was morally indistinguish-able from shipping textiles, wheat, or even sugar. The reconstruction of a ma-jor part of this migration experience covers an era in which there was massive technological change (steamers were among the last slave ships), as well as very dramatic shifts in perceptions of good and evil. Just as important perhaps were the relations between the Western and non-Western worlds that the trade both reflected and encapsulated. Slaves constituted the most important reason for contact between Europeans and Africans for nearly two centuries. The ship-ment of slaves from Africa was related to the demographic disaster consequent to the meeting of Europeans and Amerindians, which greatly reduced the numbers of Amerindian laborers and raised the demand for labor drawn from elsewhere, particularly Africa. As Europeans colonized the Americas, a steady stream of European peoples migrated to the Americas between 1492 and the early nineteenth century. But what is often overlooked is that, before 1820, perhaps three times as many enslaved Africans crossed the Atlantic as Europe-ans. This was the largest transoceanic migration of a people until that day, and it provided the Americas with a crucial labor force for their own economic development. The slave trade is thus a vital part of the history of some millions of Africans and their descendants who helped shape the modern Americas cul-turally as well as in the material sense.

Preface

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This book is dedicated to the millions of humans who not only lost their lives, but were robbed of their dignity, livelihood, and cultural and personal identity through the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

IntroductionThe trans-Atlantic slave trade was the largest long-distance coerced movement of people in history and, prior to the mid-nineteenth cen-tury, formed the major demographic well-spring for the re-peopling of the Americas following the collapse of the Amerindian population. Cumu-latively, as late as 1820, nearly four Africans had crossed the Atlantic for every European, and, given the dif-ferences in the sex ratios between Eu-ropean and African migrant streams, about four out of every five females that traversed the Atlantic were from Africa. From the late fifteenth centu-ry, the Atlantic Ocean, once a formi-dable barrier that prevented regular interaction between those peoples inhabiting the four continents it touched, became a commercial high-way that integrated the histories of Africa, Europe, and the Americas for the first time. As the above figures suggest, slavery and the slave trade were the linchpins of this process. With the decline of the Amerin-dian population, labor from Africa formed the basis of the exploitation of the gold and agricultural resources

of the export sectors of the Ameri-cas, with sugar plantations absorbing well over two thirds of slaves carried across the Atlantic by the major Eu-ropean and Euro-American powers. For several centuries slaves were the most important reason for contact between Europeans and Africans.

What can explain this extraordinary migration, organized initially on a continent where the institution of slavery had declined or totally dis-appeared in the centuries prior to Columbian contact, and where, even when it had existed, slavery had never been confined to one group of peo-ple? To pose the question differently, why slavery, and why were the slaves carried across the Atlantic exclusively African? The short answer to the first of these two questions is that Euro-pean expansion to the Americas was to mainly tropical and semi-tropical areas. Several products that were ei-ther unknown to Europeans (like to-bacco), or occupied a luxury niche in pre-expansion European tastes (like gold or sugar), now fell within the ca-pacity of Europeans to produce more

abundantly. But while Europeans could control the production of such exotic goods, it became apparent in the first two centuries after Colum-bian contact that they chose not to supply the labor that would make such output possible. Free European migrants and indentured servants never traveled across the Atlantic in sufficient numbers to meet the la-bor needs of expanding plantations. Convicts and prisonersthe only Europeans who were ever forced to migratewere much fewer in num-bers again. Slavery or some form of coerced labor was the only possible option if European consumers were to gain access to more tropical pro-duce and precious metals.

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United States

Brazil/Portugal

Spain/Uruguay

Great BritainDenmark/Baltic

France

Netherlands

The North American mainland played a relatively minor role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Its ports sent out less than five percent of all known voyages, and its slave mar-kets absorbed less than four percent of all slaves carried off from Africa. An intra-American slave trade in slavesoriginating in the Caribbeansupplied additional slaves, however. This region was exceptional in the Americas in that a positive rate of natural population growth began relatively early, thus reducing the dependence of the re-gion on coerced migrants.

The Caribbean was one of the two major broad regional markets for slaves from Africa. Over the two centuries when the trade was at its height, the major locations for sugar pro-duction, and therefore the major slave markets, shifted from the eastern Caribbean to the west. Here, first Jamaica, then St. Domingue, and finally in the nineteenth century, Cuba, absorbed most the slaves brought into the region. As this implies, few islands developed self-sustaining populations at any point in the slave trade era. Caribbean ports also sent out more slaving expeditions to African than did the North American mainland ports.

Brazil was the center of the slave trade carried on under the Portuguese flag, both before and after Brazilian in-dependence in 1822, and Portugal was by far the largest of the national carriers. Brazil dominated the slave trade in the sense that Rio de Janeiro and Bahia sent out more slaving voy-ages than any port in Europe, and certainly many times more than did Lisbon. Over nearly three centuries between 1560 and 1850, Brazil was consistently the largest destination for slaves in the Americas. Almost all the slaves coming into the region came from just two coastal areas in Africa: the Bight of Benin and West-central Africa.

North America

Caribbean

Brazil

The Transatlantic Slave Trade consisted of three journeys:

1. The outward passage from Europe to Africa carrying manufactured goods.

2. The middle passage from Africa to the Americas or the Caribbean carrying African captives and other com-modities.

3. The homeward passage carrying sugar, tobacco, rum, rice, cotton and other goods back to Europe.

The Triangle of Trade

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Sub-Saharan Africa lost over twelve and a half million people to the trans-Atlantic slave trade alone between 1525 and 1867. Perhaps as many again were carried off to the slave markets across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean. Over forty percent of captives left from West-central Africa alone with most of the remainder leaving from the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra, and the Gold Coast. About one in eight died on board the slave vessel and many other died prior to departure and after arrival. Departures were channeled through a dozen or so major embarkation points such as Whydah, Bonny, Loango, Luanda, and Benguela, though many smaller ports also supplied slaves.

Europe was the starting point for about half of all trans-Atlantic slaving voyages. The traffic dominated the West African to Caribbean section of the slave trade. The major ports were at first located in the Iberian peninsula, but by the eighteenth century northern European ports had be-come dominant. After 1807, France and the Iberian ports sent out the great majority of European-based slaving voyages. The European consumers demand for sugar was the driving force behind 350 years of the trans-Atlantic slave trading.

Africa

Europe

In the age of sail, winds and ocean currents shaped the di-rection of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, effectively creat-ing two separate slave-trading systemsone in the north with voyages originating in Europe and North America, the other in the south with voyages originating in Brazil.

Wind & Ocean Currents of the Atlantic Basins

Ocean Current

Wind Current

North East Trades

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South East Trades

Gold Coast

Senegambia

Sierra Leone

Windward Coast Bight of Benin

Bight of Biafra

West Central Africa

Southeast Africa

The limits of the regions shown here are Senegambia, anywhere north of the Rio Nunez. Sierra Leone region comprises the Rio Nunez to just short of Cape Mount. The Windward Coast is defined as Cape Mount south-east to and including the Assini river. The Gold Coast runs east of here up to and including the Volta River. Bight of Benin covers the Rio Volta to Rio Nun, and the Bight of Biafra, east of the Nun to Cape Lopez inclusive. West-central Africa is defined as the rest of the western coast of the continent south of this point, and south-eastern Africa anywhere from and to the north and east of the Cape of Good Hope. West-Central Africa was the largest regional departure point for captives through most the slave trade era. Regions closer to the Americas and Europe generated a relatively small share of the total carried across the Atlantic. Voyage length was determined as much by wind and ocean currents shown in the pages before as by relative proximity of ports of embarkation and disembarkation.

Costal Regions of Africa

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Gold Coast

Senegambia

Sierra Leone

Windward Coast Bight of Benin

Bight of Biafra

West Central Africa

Southeast Africa

Atlantic Ocean

Africa

In the second half of the eighteenth century six imperial systems straddled the Atlantic each one sustained by a slave trade. The English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and Danish all operated behind trade barriers (termed mercantilists restrictions) and produced a range of plantation producesugar, rice, indigo, coffee, to-bacco, alcohol, and some precious metalsthough with sugar usually the most valuable. It is extraordinary that consumers pursuit of this limited range of exotic con-sumer goods, which collectively added so little to human welfare, could have generated for so long the horrors and misery of the Middle Passage and plantation slavery. Giv-en the dominance of Portuguese and British slave traders, it is not surprising that Brazil and the British Americas received the most Africans, though both nations became adept at supplying foreign slave systems as well. Through-out the slave trade, more than seven out of every ten slaves went to these regions. The French Americas imported about half the slaves that the British did, with the major-ity going to Saint-Domingue. The Spanish flag, which dominated in the earliest phase of the trade before retreat-ing in the face of competition, began to expand again in the late nineteenth century with the growth of the Cuban sugar economy.

Yet, in the next centurybetween 1750 and 1850every one of these empires had either disappeared or become severely truncated. A massive shift to freer trade meant that instead of six plantation empires controlled from Europe, there were now only three plantation complexes,

Empire & Slavery

A watercolor by Jean Baptiste Debret; pub-lished in Ana Maria de Moraes, O Brasil dos viajantes (Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro,

1994), image 451, p. 85.

Shows group of men carrying bags of coffee to a town market; the man in the lead is car-rying a coffee branch and what appears to be a thumb piano in his right hand. Such gangs often had a leader or boss and sang as they

worked.

Edmund Ollier, Cassells History of the United States (London, 187477), Vol. 2, p. 493.

Slaves Working on a Plantation. This appears to be an illustration taken from another, unidentified source, and is an artistic rendition. In the foreground, one man is cutting cane, another is weeding the fields with a hoe (the two activities do not occur concurrently in real-ity); a woman is kneeling tying the cane stalks into a bundle. A white overseer with a whip in hand is looking on while in the background another white is whipping an enslaved person. The location is not identified, but it is a tropical or semi-tropical scene, perhaps in the British or French West Indies.

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two of whichBrazil and the Unit-ed Stateswere independent, and the third, Cuba, was far wealthier and more dynamic than its European owner. Extreme specialization now saw the United States producing most of the worlds cotton, Cuba most of the worlds sugar, and Brazil with a similar dominance in coffee. Slaves thus might disembark in six separate jurisdictions in the Ameri-cas in the eighteenth century, but by 1850 they went overwhelmingly to only two areas, Brazil and Cuba, given that American cotton plant-ers drew on Africa for almost none of their labor needs, relying instead on natural population growth and a domestic slave trade. Indeed, overall the United States absorbed only 5 percent of the slaves arriving in the Americas. This massive reorganiza-tion of the traffic and the rapid natu-ral growth of the US slave popula-

tion had little immediate impact on the size of the slave trade. The Brit-ish, Americans, Danish, and Dutch dropped out of the slave trade, but the decade 1821 to 1830 still saw over 80,000 people a year leaving Africa in slave ships. Well over a mil-lion moreone tenth of the volume carried off in the slave trade erafol-lowed in the next twenty years.

A. W. Lawrence, Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa (Stanford Univ. Press,1964), plate 11a; original source unclear.

View of Elmina and another fort from the sea; European shipping in the foreground.

Kwesi J. Anquandah, Castles & Forts of Ghana (Ghana Museums & Monuments Board, 1999), p. 13

Shows central courtyard and surrounding walls/ramparts, guns pointing to sea, and European soldiers drilling in courtyard; Af-rican town to right.

But why were the slaves always Af-rican? One possible answer draws on the different values of societies around the Atlantic and, more par-ticularly, the way groups of people involved in creating a trans-Atlantic community saw themselves in rela-tion to othersin short, how they defined their identity. Ocean-going technology brought Europeans into large-scale face-to-face contact with peoples who were culturally and physically more different from them-selves than any others with whom they had interacted in the previ-ous millennium. In neither Africa nor Asia could Europeans initially threaten territorial control, with

The Enslavement of Africansthe single and limited exception of western Angola. African capacity to resist Europeans ensured that sugar plantations were established in the Americas rather than in Africa. But if Africans, aided by tropical patho-gens, were able to resist the potential invaders, some Africans were pre-pared to sell slaves to Europeans for use in the Americas. As this suggests, European domination of Amerindi-ans was complete. Indeed, from the European perspective it was much too complete. The epidemiological impact of the Old World destroyed not only native American societies, but also a potential labor supply.

Every society in history before 1900 provided at least an unthinking an-swer to the question of which groups are to be considered eligible for en-slavement, and normally they did not recruit heavily from their own community. A revolution in ocean-going technology gave Europeans the ability to get continuous access to re-mote peoples and move them against their will over very long distances. Strikingly, it was much cheaper to obtain slaves in Europe than to send a vessel to an epidemiologically coast in Africa without proper harbors and remote from European political, financial, and military power. That this option was never seriously con-

sidered suggests a European inability to enslave other Europeans. Except for a few social deviants, neither Af-ricans nor Europeans would enslave members of their own societies, but in the early modern period, Africans had a somewhat narrower conception of who was eligible for enslavement than had Europeans. It was this dif-ference in definitions of eligibility for enslavement which explains the dra-matic rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Slavery, which had disappeared from northwest Europe long before this point, exploded into a far greater significance and intensity than it had possessed at any point in human history. The major cause was a disso-

Alfred J. Swann, Fighting the slave-hunters in Central Africa, a record of twenty-six years of travel & adventures round the Great Lakes (London, 1910; reprinted London 1969), p. 51.

A method of securing slaves, the author, a lay missionary for the London Missionary Society, writes that when traveling a shorter pole is used, one end being held up by the preceding person. The neck is often broken if the slave falls when walking. In late 1882, shortly after arriving in Tanganyika, about 200 miles from the coast he witnessed a slave caravan whose captives were destined for the market at Zanzibar. He vividly describes the condition of the enslaved, and reports that many were chained together by the neck, while others had their necks fastened into the forks of poles about 6 feet long, the ends of which were supported by the men who preceded them

LIllustration (Paris), Vol. 14, 1849, p. 136.

Caravane dsclaves, illustration shows five enslaved men linked by poles in the so-called Goree, or Slave-Stick Goree; Arab slave trader in foreground.

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nance in African and European ideas of eligibility for enslavement at the root of which lies culture or societal norms, not easily tied to econom-ics. Without this dissonance, there would have been no African slavery in the Americas. The slave trade was thus a product of differing construc-tions of social identity and the ocean-going technology that brought At-lantic societies into sudden contact with each other.

The trans-Atlantic slave trade there-fore grew from a strong demand for labor in the Americas, driven by con-sumers of plantation produce and precious metals, initially in Europe. Because Amerindians died in large numbers, and insufficient numbers of Europeans were prepared to cross the Atlantic, the form that this de-mand took was shaped by concep-tions of social identity on four con-tinents, which ensured that the labor would comprise mainly slaves from Africa. But the central question of which peoples from Africa went to a given region of the Americas, and which group of Europeans or their descendants organized such a move-ment cannot be answered without an understanding of the wind and ocean currents of the North and South Atlantics. There are two sys-tems of wind and ocean currents in the North and South Atlantic that follow the pattern of giant wheels

one lies north of the equator turns clockwise, while its counterpart to the south turns counterclockwise. The northern wheel largely shaped the north European slave trade and was dominated by the English.

The southern wheel shaped the huge traffic to Brazil which for three cen-turies was almost the almost exclu-sive preserve of the largest slave trad-ers of all, the Portuguese. Despite their use of the Portuguese flag, slave traders using the southern wheel ran their business from ports in Brazil, not in Portugal. Winds and currents thus ensured two major slave trades

the first rooted in Europe, the sec-ond in Brazil. Winds and currents also ensured that Africans carried to Brazil came overwhelmingly from Angola, with south-east Africa and the Bight of Benin playing smaller roles, and that Africans carried to North America, including the Carib-bean, left from mainly West Africa, with the Bights of Biafra and Benin and the Gold Coast predominat-ing. Just as Brazil overlapped on the northern system by drawing on the Bight of Benin, the English, French, and Dutch carried some slaves from northern Angola into the Caribbean.Georg Schweinfurth, The Heart of Africa, (New York, 1874), vol. 2, p. 420.

Head and face of unnamed captured East African woman; shows remnant of coffle rope around her neck. Married women among the Babuckur, according to Schweinfurth, pierce the rims of their ears and both their lips, and insert bits of grass stalk about an inch long in the holesThe portrait is that of a Babuckur slave bound by a leather rope

Faits relatifs a la traite des noirs. Comit pour labolition de la traite des noirs; Paris, 1826), p. 15.

The metal collar and chain used by slavers to attach enslaved captives to one another. when Africans are captured in the interior, this chain can hold them until they are em-barked on the slave ships.

1830 Anglo-Brazilian anti-slave trade treaty

1756 Seven years war begins

1850 Brazil suppresses slave trade

1525 First voyage direct from Africa to the Americas

The Rise & Fall of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade from 15011866

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100,000

1791 St. Dominque revolution begins

1867 Last voyage arrives in the Americas

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1756 Seven years war begins


1525 First voyage direct from Africa to the Americas

The Rise & Fall of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade from 15011866

1791 St. Dominque revolution begins

1867 Last voyage arrives in the Americas

Brazil/Portugal 15011856

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1695 Gold discovered in Minas Gerais, Brazil

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Spain/Uruguay 15011866

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1808 Abolition of British and US slave trades takes effect


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1776 American Revolutionary War begins


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Netherlands 15611829

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Denmark/Baltic 16411807

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New societies, new peoples, and new communities usually originate in acts of migration. Someone or ones decide to move from one place to another. They choose a new destination and sever their ties with their traditional community or society as they set out in search of new opportunities, new challenges, new lives, and new life worlds. Most societies in human history have a migration narrative in their stories of origin. All communities in American society trace their origins in the United States to one or more migration experiences. America, after all, is a nation of immigrants.

But until recently, people of African descent have not been counted as part of Americas migratory tradition. The transatlantic slave trade has created an enduring image of black men and women as transported commodities, and is usually considered the most defining element in the construction of the African Diaspora. This is the story that has not been told.

On the African side, the sheer human and environmental diversity of the continent makes it difficult to examine the trade from Africa as a whole. The slave trade did not expand, nor, indeed, decline, in all areas of Africa at the same time. Rather, a series of marked expansions (and de-clines) in individual regions contributed to a more grad-ual composite trend for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole. Each region that exported slaves experienced a marked upswing in the amount of slaves it supplied for the trans-Atlantic trade and, from that point, the normal pattern was for a region to continue to export large numbers of slaves for a century or more. The three regions that pro-vided the fewest slavesSenegambia, Sierra Leone, the Windward Coastreached these higher levels for much shorter periods.

By the third quarter of the eighteenth century, all regions had undergone an intense expansion of slave exports. A cargo of slaves could be sought at particular points along the entire Western African coast. As the Brazilian coffee and sugar boom got under way near the end of the eigh-teenth century, slavers rounded the Cape of Good Hope and traveled as far as southeast Africa to fill their vessels holds. But while the slave trade pervaded much of the Af-rican coast, its focus was no less concentrated in particular African regions than it was among European carriers. West Central Africa, the long stretch of coast south of Cape Lo-pez and stretching to Benguela, sent more slaves than any other part of Africa every quarter century with the excep-tion of a fifty-year period between 1676 and 1725. From

The African Side of the Trade

William Allen, A Narrative of the Expedition sent by Her Majestys Government to the River Niger, in 1841 (London, 1848), vol. 1, p. 293

The Court of the King of Iddah. Shows king in center, under umbrella; slit-gong drum in lower left. Iddah/Idah, a port on the Niger river, south of the Niger-Benue confluence in present-day south central Nigeria, was the largest and the most important town in the Kingdom of Eggarah [Igara/Igala]. It was a major trading area for slaves taken to the Niger Delta and the Bight of Biafra. In this illustration, the king is seen on a throne, formed of a bamboo frame, covered with mats and carpets.He was almost smothered by his garments, and surrounded by attendants, who were fanning him vehemently.The principal courtiers were seated close round the throne, with their backs towards it, excepting a large party [of Muslims]these sat facing the king

Pieter van der Aa, La Galerie Agrable du Monde (Leide, 1729); taken from D. O. Dapper, Description de lAfriqueTraduite du Flamand (Amsterdam,1686; 1st ed., 1668), p. 296.

Manner of eating and drinking among the blacks, shows men and women, house, pot-tery and other containers, weapons, corn grinding stone.

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1751 to 1850, this region supplied nearly half of the entire African labor force in the Americas; in the half century af-ter 1800, West Central Africa sent more slaves than all of the other African regions combined. Overall, the center of gravity of the volume of the trade was located in West Central Africa by 1600. It then shifted northward slowly until about 1730, before gradually returning to its start-ing point by the mid-nineteenth century.

Further, slaves left from relatively few ports of embarka-tion within each African region, even though their origins and ethnicity could be highly diverse. Although Whydah, on the Slave Coast, was once considered the busiest Afri-can slaving port on the continent, it now appears that it was surpassed by Luanda, in West Central Africa, and by Bonny, in the Bight of Biafra. Luanda alone dispatched some 1.3 million slaves, and these three most active ports together accounted for 2.2 million slave departures. The trade from each of these ports assumed a unique charac-ter and followed very different temporal profiles. Luanda actively participated in the slave trade from as early as the 1570s, when the Portuguese established a foothold there, through the nineteenth century. Whydah supplied slaves over a shorter period, for about two centuries, and was a dominant port for only thirty years prior to 1727. Bonny, probably the second largest point of embarka-tion in Africa, sent four out of every five of all the slaves it ever exported in just the eighty years between 1760 and 1840. It is not surprising, therefore, that some systematic links between Africa and the Americas can be perceived.

As research on the issue of trans-Atlantic connections has progressed, it has become clear that the distribu-tion of Africans in the New World is no more random than the distribu-tion of Europeans. Eighty percent of the slaves who went to southeast Bra-zil were taken from West Central Af-rica. Bahia traded in similar propor-tions with the Bight of Benin. Cuba represents the other extreme: no African region supplied more than 28 percent of the slave population in this region. Most American import regions fell between these examples, drawing on a mix of coastal regions that diversified as the trade from Af-rica grew to incorporate new peoples.

William Allen, Picturesque views on the riv-er Niger, sketched during Landers last visit in 1832-33, by Commander William Allen (London, 1840), facing p. 16

The morning call; shows a local queen and her entourage calling on British visitors. Views of village with conical roofed houses; various male onlookers, some carrying spears. The king of this small kingdom afforded Al-len and his companions lodging. The kings wife/Queen did the very polite thing, by calling on us attended by her handmaidens. Her hands and feet were deeply tinged with henna, and her lovely eyes with antimony. Her hairthickly plastered with indigowas enveloped in a sort of turban, and a country cloth encircled her waist with many graceful folds.

P. David Boilat, Esquisses Sengelaises (Paris, 1853)

Thido. A Thiedo was a Wolof soldier. He is pictured here seated on rocks near the town of Bakel, seen in the background. He is wearing a turban, with a gold bracelet on one wrist, anklets, and a bead necklace and amu-lets (gris-gris) around his neck. The glass bottle contains brandy (eau de vie) given to him by a trader

If demand for slave-grown produce, social identity, and the Atlantic envi-ronment were three key factors shap-ing the traffic, the agency of Africans comprised a fourth major influence, but one which has received less atten-tion from historians. The merchants who traded slaves on the coast to Eu-ropean ship captainsfor example the Vili traders north of the Congo, the Efik in the Bight of Biafraand behind them the groups that sup-plied the slaves, such as the Kingdom of Dahomey, the Aro network, and further south, the Imbangala, all had strict conceptions of what made an individual eligible for enslavement. Among such criteria were construc-tions of gender, definitions of crimi-nal behavior, and conventions for dealing with prisoners of war. The make up of slaves purchased on the Atlantic coast thus reflected whom Africans were prepared to sell as much as whom Euro-American plan-tation owners wanted to buy. But the victims of the slave trade also had a major impact on the trade. Probably about one in ten slaving voyages ex-perienced major rebellions, of which the attempts to control increased the costs of a slave voyage to the point where far fewer slaves entered the traffic than would have been the case without resistance. In addition, ves-sels from some regions on the coast appear to have been more prone to experience slave uprisings than those from other regions. The rebellion-prone areas were precisely those regions, broadly comprising Upper Guinea (Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the Windward Coast) which had the least participation in the slave trade. The strong inference is that Eu-ropean slave traders avoided this part of the African coast except in those years when demand for slaves, and their prices, were particularly high.

African Agency & ResistanceWhen the first navigators reached the coast of Mauritania in 1441 and Senegal in 1444, they organized sys-tematic abductions, and met with hostility and reprisals. Although they continued kidnapping, they also started to buy people. But that policy also met with opposition. Ex-plorer Alvise CaDamosto, who was attacked by 150 men on the River Gambia in 1454, wrote than when he tried to talk to them,

they replied that they had had news of our coming and of our trade with the Negroes of Senega [Senegal River], who, if they sought our friendship could not but be bad men, for they

firmly believed that we Christians ate human flesh, and that we only bought Negroes to eat them; that for their part they did not want our friendship on any terms, but sought to slaughter us all, and to make a gift of our possessions to their lord.

But armed struggle was neither the only nor always the best strat-egy. Long-term approaches were also needed to protect people from the slave trade. Earthworks were built to thwart small-scale raids and kid-napping; some rivers were diverted so that they would not bring ships near settlements. Africans surround-ed their main towns by thick walls,

Verney Lovett Cameron, Across Africa (New York, 1877), p. 309.

Warua slave-driver and slave, shows a captive African woman, with a mask over her head walking in front of a Warua male, with a spear. The image is not described in the text, but it ap-pears the mask is attached to some sort of line which winds around the waist of the slave driver and then attaches to the wrist of the captive female. Based on observations made in November, 1874, among the Warua, a group in Tanganyika.

twelve feet high; they built ramparts and fortresses with deep ditches and planted venomous and thorny trees and bushes all around.

Communities deserted their vulner-able settings to relocate in hard-to-find, easy-to-defend places such as hills, mountains, underground tun-nels, marshes, caves, forests, or be-hind high sand dunes. Some hamlets regrouped to defend themselves more easily. In southern Benin, people built small towns on stilts at the edge or in the middle of lakes. This innova-tion gave them a clear view of ap-proaching raiders and allowed them enough time to take the appropriate measures.

Africans established work teams for protection, left the paths to their villages overgrown, stationed armed groups at vulnerable points, and cov-ered their roofs with noisy leaves to detect would-be kidnappers. They used their habitat as a safeguard by re-configuring the layout, size, and architecture of their houses, villages, and capital cities. They built their towns in mazes to confuse and disori-ent attackers. Houses were connected one with another; they abutted for-ests and the sea to make escape easier. Some communities adopted the most brutal tactics: they indiscriminately killed anyone who ventured close to their territory so as to discourage any incursion.

31

N

EW

S

As the slave trade expanded, resistance to it grew as well, and the need for shackles, guns, ropes, chains, iron balls, and whips tells an eloquent story of continuous and vio-lent struggle from the hinterland to the high seas.

Wherever possible, such as in Saint-Louis and Gore (Senegal), James (Gambia), and Bance (Sierra Leone), the Europeans barracoons were located on islands, which made escapes and attacks more difficult. The heavily forti-fied forts and barracoons attest to the Europeans distrust and apprehension. They had to protect themselves, as Jean-Baptiste Durand of the Compagnie du Sngal ex-plained, from the foreign vessels and from the Negroes living in the country.

These precautions notwithstanding, in the eighteenth century, Fort Saint-Joseph on the Senegal River was at-tacked and all commerce was interrupted for six years. Several conspiracies and actual revolts by captives erupted on Gore Island and resulted in the death of the governor and several soldiers. In addition, the crews of quite a few slave ships were killed on the River Gambia; in Sierra Le-one, people sacked the captives quarters of the infamous trader John Ormond. Similar incidents occurred in other parts of the African coast. Written records document how Africans on shore attacked more than a hundred ships.

Some Western slavers maintained occult centers in their barracoons, staffed by men they paid to work on the captives, sometimes with medicinal plants. The objective

Albert Laporte, Rcits de vieux marins (Paris, 1883), p. 267. (Copy in Library Company of Philadelphia)

Both images

Rvolte sur un batiment ngrier (Revolt on a slave ship). Based on the account of an old sailor who had participated in the Atlantic slave trade; this illustration, however, is not based on observations, but on artistic imagination. The sailor describes how one night he was asleep when he heard a big noise on the bridge; he went up only to discover the slaves had started a revolt. A slave revolt is terrible because one cannot fire on them, since each man is worth at least 1,000 francs. One has to resort to other methods of force. The crew finds refuge on the upper deck to escape the screaming mass of slaves who broke through their chains and evaded the deck barrier by throwing any-thing they could get their hands on at our heads. The carnage was horrible. Even though the enemy was beaten, the victory didnt seem to belong to us yet, and the danger became even greater in front of the resistance of the slaves and our exhaustion

was to kill any spirit of rebellion, to tame the detainees, and make them accept their fate. The existence of these centers shows the extent of the precautions taken by slavers to prevent rebellions on land and dur-ing the Middle Passage: shackles and guns controlled the body, while the spirit was broken.

But revolts on slave ships, although extremely difficult to organize and conduct, were numerous. About 420 revolts have been documented in slavers papers, and they do not rep-resent the totality. It is estimated that 100,000 Africans died in uprisings on the coast or during the Middle Passage. The fear of revolts resulted in additional costs for the slavers: larger crews, heavy weapons, and bar-ricades. About 18 percent of the costs of the Middle Passage were incurred due to measures to thwart uprisings, and the captives who rose up saved, according to estimates, one million Africans from deportation by driving up the slavers expenses.

Rate of Resistance by Slaves

100

75

50

25

0

% P

erce

ntag

e

1514 1566 1755 1865

33

N

EW

S

In January 1804, an event that had enormous repercussions shook the world of the enslaved and their owners. The black revolutionaries, who had been fighting since 1791, crushed Napoleons 43,000 man army.

In December 1803, in full debacle, the 8,000 French soldiers left on the island (most of the others had been killed in combat and 20,000 had died of yellow fever), boarded their ships, and sailed away. Within twelve years, black Haitians had fought against and defeated not only the French colonists but also the French, Span-ish, and British armies.

To erase the symbolic traces of the old order, the victors changed the name of the island from Saint-Domingue back to Haiti (mountainous land), its original name given by the Ar-awak Indians. Haiti had become the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere and the worlds first black-led republic. The impact of this victory of poorly armed men and women,who had fought for and

gained their freedom back in 1793against the best army in Europe sent to re-enslave them, sent shock waves throughout the Americas.

Paradoxically, at the same time as it influenced enslaved people to rise up, the Haitian Revolution also stimu-lated the transatlantic slave trade. The withdrawal from international markets of the island, which had pro-duced half the worlds coffee and as much sugar as Brazil, Cuba, and Ja-maica combined, gave an impetus to these colonies as well as to Louisiana to introduce more Africansand for Louisiana, more African Americans from the Upper South as wellin or-der to offset the production shortfall.

Throughout the Americas, slave up-risings had been more closely associ-ated with the presence of large con-centrations of men and women born in Africa and newly arrived, and the events in Saint-Domingue were read as a cautionary tale against the slave trade that continuously introduced these revolt-prone Africans. There-fore, when South Carolina reopened

the slave trade in 1803, the decision was deemed appalling. The specter of Haiti was used by some Americans to bolster the abolition of the slave trade at the earliest possible date, 1808.

Anon., Saint-Domingue, ou histoire de ses revolutions(Paris, 1815), facing title page. (Copy in Library Company of Philadelphia)

Revolte gnrale des Negres. Massacre des Blancs [General revolt of the Blacks. Massacre of the Whites]. Shows, from a decidedly pro-colonial perspective, whites fleeing Cap Francais in Saint Domingue, as the slave rebellion of 1793 intensified; many of these whites fled to the United States and elsewhere in the Caribbean.

The black revolutionaries, who had been fighting since 1791, crushed Napoleons 43,000 man army.

Revolution in Saint Dominque

Senegambia

Sierra Leone

Windward Coast

Gold CoastBight of Benin

Bight of Biafra

South-east Africa, Indian Ocean islands

unspecified USA

Cuba

JamaicaSt. Dominque

St. KittsAntiguaGuadaloupe

GrenadaTrinidad/Tobago

Spanish Central America

Rio de la Plata

Africa

Barbados

Dutch colonies

Martinique

British Caribbean

Amazonia

Pernambuco

other Brazil

Carolinas/Georgia

Gulf states

Northern U.S.

Chesapeake

French Caribbean

Danish West Indies

Other Spanish Americas

Europe

West Central Africa and St. Helena

South-east Brazil

1100,000 slaves =1mm>100,000 slaves =100,000th of total in mmPoint of embarkationPoint of disembarkationOwnership of ports by flag

Bahia

35

N

EW

S


12,521,33610,702,656Disembarkation

755,513

388,771

336,868

1,2093211,999,060

1,594,560

542,668

1,862

778,541

1,019,596773,543

134,148138,038

72,872

128,68844,002267,499

1,550,355

67,246

155,569

493,162

444,728

216,911

360,617

142,231

853,833

54,041

210,477

21,785

26,955

127,668

56,890

108,998

179,626

8,860

5,694,574

2,263,914

Embarkation

1,818,680 deaths

Senegambia

Sierra Leone

Windward Coast


Bight of Biafra


Cuba

JamaicaSt. Dominque

Guadaloupe


Bahia

Rio de la Plata

Africa

Barbados

Dutch colonies

Martinique

British Caribbean

Amazonia

Pernambuco

other Brazil

Carolinas/Georgia

Gulf statesFrench Caribbean


Europe


South-east Brazil

1100,000 slaves =1mm

37

N

EW

S

5,848,2655,099,816Disembarkation Embarkation

221,612

16,907

9,24868,394

1,009,212

156,167

348,185

6,185

2,436491

436

106,860

1,545,006

10,532

69,206

533

500

342

4,950

141,744

824,312

50,048

95

2871,293

71,905

2,636

4,018,540

2,259,987

748,449 deaths

Senegambia

Sierra Leone

Windward CoastGold Coast

Bight of Benin

Bight of Biafra


South-east Africa Indian Ocean islands

other North America

Cuba

JamaicaSt. Dominque

AntiguaGuadaloupe



Bahia

South-east Brazil

Rio de la Plata

Africa

Other British Caribbean

Gulf coast


Danish West Indies


39

N

EW

S

122,088

85,432

10,5586,705

132,018

188,288

432,789

83,646

350

600,000

171558

1,059167

1,100196119,154

767

266

7,545

66,391

3,269

1,501

82,152

277

1,061,524884,923Disembarkation Embarkation

176,601 deaths

Senegambia

Sierra Leone

Windward Coast


Bight of Biafra


unspecified USA

Cuba

JamaicaSt. Dominque

St. KittsAntiguaGuadaloupe



Bahia

Rio de la Plata

Africa

Barbados

Dutch colonies

Martinique

British Caribbean

Amazonia

Pernambuco

Carolinas/Georgia

Gulf states

Northern U.S.

Chesapeake

French Caribbean

Danish West Indies


Europe


South-east Brazil


41

N

EW

S

226,637

163,393

200,907

718,127358,853

1,030,582

31,663

984

48,058

994,5255,607

129,278124,96432,608

122,68438,53222,402

2,082

27,970

841

457,704

32,446

40,968

340,607

457

719

137,422

3,528

2,134

120,842

11,803

25,594

7,303

3,438

534,280

546


526,117 deaths

Senegambia

Sierra Leone


Bight of Benin

Bight of Biafra

Cuba

JamaicaSt. Dominque

St. Kitts

Guadaloupe



Bahia

Rio de la Plata

Africa

Barbados

Dutch colonies

British Caribbean

Pernambuco

other Brazil

Northern U.S.

Chesapeake

French Caribbean

Danish West Indies


Europe


South-east Brazil


43

N

EW

S

554,336475,240Disembarkation

67,246

Embarkation

9,205

2,276

79,102103,375

126,913

28,677

607

2,100625

273

1,924

2301,94414,763

210

3,210

1,805

391,922

594

25,739

570

1,116

96

4,336

5,161

5,283

2,004

204,788

1,183

79,096 deaths

Senegambia

Sierra Leone


Bight of Benin

Bight of Biafra


unspecified USA

Cuba

JamaicaSt. Dominque

St. KittsAntigua

Guadaloupe



Bahia

Rio de la Plata

Africa

Barbados

Dutch colonies

Martinique

British Caribbean

other Brazil

Carolinas/Georgia

Gulf states

Northern U.S.

Chesapeake

French Caribbean

Danish West Indies


Europe



45

N

EW

S

43,791

56,494

13,375126,259

4,402

7,037

24,504

528

43,640

15,182381

3,0767,6131,461

2,592286

447

406

9,840

2,476

31,378

9,574

2,807

2,911

768

71,698

7,871

23,705

6,730

1,593

2,799

974

119

29,464

305,326252,603Disembarkation Embarkation

52,723 deaths

Senegambia

Sierra Leone


Bight of Benin

Bight of Biafra


Cuba

JamaicaSt. Dominque

St. KittsAntigua

Guadaloupe



Bahia

Rio de la Plata

Africa

Barbados

Dutch colonies

Martinique

British Caribbean

Pernambuco

other Brazil

Carolinas/Georgia

Gulf statesFrench Caribbean

Danish West Indies


Europe


South-east Brazil


47

N

EW

S

124,247

61,048

23,681115,574

348,897

182,284

53,383

68,793

4,648763,016

1,5214,402

36,278

2,0833,04510,423

1,883

6,763

13,382

736

5,189

166,746

3,265

3,063

2,524

814

8,06337,865

7,782

6,965

664

472,288

1,932


216,437 deaths

Senegambia

Sierra Leone


Bight of Biafra


Cuba

JamaicaSt. Dominque


Rio de la Plata

Africa

Barbados

Dutch colonies

Martinique

other Brazil

Carolinas/Georgia

Gulf states

Danish West Indies




49

N

EW

S

7,933

3,221

70,88723,765

1,525

1,286

11,258

5332,865

692

1,052

162

956

4,998

197

130

448

535

67,385

515

2,425

111,04191,734Disembarkation Embarkation

19,306 deaths

The Voyages Database reveals that in all markets on the African coast, more slaves were embarked on board ship during some months than others. Similarly, in all mar-kets in the Americas, more Africans, year after year, were disembarked during certain months. Why were there sea-sonal patterns? Focusing on the agricultural histories of African and American societies helps to explain monthly fluctuations in the supply of and demand for enslaved Africans. Whether soils supported subsistence or cash crops, each stage in the agricultural calendarclearing land, planting, weeding, harvestingrequires different numbers of farmers, different labor inputs. On both sides of the Atlantic, seasonal crop cycles created seasonal demands for agriculturalists. The trans-Atlantic slave trade reconciled supply and demand for agricultural labor when captains transferred farmers from in crop seasons in Africa to in crop seasons in the Americas.

Seasonality in the Slave Trade

Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg, Mississippi-Fahrten [Travels on the lower Mississippi, 18791880] (Leipzig, 1881).

Men and women in the field; baskets loaded with picked cotton.

In shifting captives between Old and New World ecological zones, captains created systematic trans-Atlantic patterns when African and American crop cycles differed by the time needed to sail the Middle Pas-sage. In Africa, the numbers of slaves embarked on board ships usually increased during the harvest and in the immediate post-harvest months. During these times fewer and fewer farmers were needed and food stocks began increasing. African merchants purchased slaves whose agricultural labor became temporarily redundant, and they bought seasonal provisions to keep their captives alive. In turn, New World plantation crop produc-

Albert Sack, A narrative of a voyage to Surinam; of a residence there during 1805, 1806, and 1807 (London, 1810), following p. 100.

Shows a black man, wearing a hat, planting seeds (cotton?) by drop-ping them through a tube; a dibble for making holes dangles from his right wrist. The text describes various labor saving devices that could be used by slaves, and it is unclear if this device was actually observed or a device suggested by the author.

tion required greater numbers of slaves to cut, gather, and process cane, berries, or leaves. Slaving captains at-tempted to trade in season in both Africa and the Americas by identify-ing American markets whose cash crop harvests seasons took place 1-3 months after harvest cycles in Africa. Those captains who linked Old and New World food-production cycles sailed along regular trans-Atlantic pathways and synchronized agricul-tural calendars.

51

N

EW

S

In examining seasonality in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, it is important to focus on agricultural history because the majority of people in the Atlantic world lived on farms, producing crops and raising livestock. During the era of the slave trade, 15141866, most sub-Saharan Af-ricans from rural communities, forced across the Atlan-tic, continued their farming lives by working New World lands. They grew some familiar provisions, including crops imported from Africa, like Guinea corn (millet) or West African rice. However, many saw crops such as sugar, tobacco, coffee, indigo, cacao, or cotton, for the first time.

Though historians lack data on precolonial African de-mography, it is reasonable to suggest that most Africans forced overseas were farmers or pastoralist. Men and women, adults and children, helped to produce yearly supplies of millet, sorghum, rice, maize, yams, cassava, plantains, or other crops. The ratio of men, women, and children working on farms varied by crops and region, but all villagers worked together clearing land, planting, weeding, and storing crops to produce sufficient amounts of food to enable communities to survive through the out-of-crop hungry seasons. Smaller numbers of enslaved Africans transported across the Atlantic were craftsmen or professionals; as African towns grew in size in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so too did the num-bers of urban residents who were enslaved.

For those eleven million African peoples who survived the Middle Passage, the majority would labor on planta-tion lands producing provisions and cash crops. As in Af-rica, ratios of men, women, and children working in the fields varied by crops and region, and the hungry months occurred before the years harvest. About 5.25 million African migrants worked in sugar cane, and perhaps 1.5 million toiled on tobacco, coffee, rice, indigo, cotton, and cacao estates. Another 1.5 million people worked in livestock pens, or on plantations producing millet, maize, wheat, cassava, or forestry products. An estimated one million enslaved Africans worked in silver and gold mining, but mostly before 1750. Brazilian gold, impor-tant particularly in 16901750, drew in perhaps 500,000 African workers. Household work or ranching occupied the lives of 750,0001,000,000 African men, women and children.

Harpers Weekly (April 24, 1875), p. 344.

Field gang of men and women covering the seed; white overseer on horseback; tin pan on stake on right is to scare crows from eat-ing the seed. Crows consider cotton seed a great delicacy, and the common method of keeping them awayis suspending a tin pan between high stakes, which is beaten by a stone swinging on a cord.

Ballous Pictorial (Boston, Jan. 23, 1858), vol. 14, p. 49.

Men, women, and children in the field. Accompanies an article, Cot-ton Picking in Georgia (p. 49): The spirited engravingis from a graphic sketch made expressly for usand represents a party of field hands in Georgia picking cotton in the fall.

Bight of Biafra

North America

Caribbean

Caribbean: 614 Voyages

North America: 151 Voyages

53

N

EW

S

5,000

10,000

15,000

20,000

25,000

30,000

Emba

rked

Sla

ves

Jan. Feb. March April May June July Aug. Sept. Oct. Nov. Dec.

Month

Seasonality of Slave Exports from 16631770 by Month

Caribbean: 614 Voyages

North America: 151 Voyages

Sugar, tobacco, coffee, and rice were the major New World cash crops. In the tropical Americas, sugar (with its by-products rum and molasses) was the principal plantation com-modity. Planting occurred during rainy months, JuneOctober in most of the West Indies, and the cane grows over a 1418 month pe-riod. Saccharine matter reaches its greatest content during the ripening period when stalks dry. In the West Indies, dry seasons usually occur from January to May, though there are micro climates in the larger and mountainous islands, such as Haiti (before 1804, French St. Domingue), Dominica, and Jamaica. The best ecosystems for tobacco were located in the Chesapeake Low country and Bahia, where high summer humidity keeps growing leaves moist and drier fall air allows them to dry and be cut. In the late 1700s, coffee groves became important in well-draining, shaded mountain ecosystems, the six-month fruit cycles ending during dry-season berry picking. Wet rice proved profitable in humid, low-lying areas prone to flooding, as in

upon physical strength. Some crops required long work-weeks to transplant shoots from seedbeds to fields. On both sides of the Atlantic, farmers worked intensively during dry season cane, fruit, berry, leaf, or cereal harvests.

African crops require varying numbers of farmer-hours during land clearing, planting (crop establishment), weeding, and harvesting/threshing. Sorghum and millet, often inter-cropped, demanded intense labor during the summer rains when the cereals were planted and weeded. Threshing the cereals demanded fewer worker-hours. In the coastal West African rice region, from July to early October villagers cut mangrove trees, built dikes, and transplanted rice to paddies. Labor demand intensity is highest during the October/early November harvest. Rice is the most labor-consuming African crop. Men and women plant maize each year; along the Gold Coast and in the Bight of Benin the spring and fall equinoxes marked the beginning of the planting weeks. Weeding was the most labor-intensive activity in maize cultivation, but, as with other crops, children helped weed plants and eradicate pests. Growing yams in the Biafran hinterland requires the greatest labor inputs during the clearing/planting ( JanuaryApril) and harvesting (AugustOcto-ber) seasons, and the fewest hours of crop work during spring/summer weeding.

New World merchant-planters demand for workers in-creased during dry seasons north and south of the equator, when crops ripened, dried, and needed to be harvested. Sugar was the most important slave-produced crop, the one with the longest crop cycle, and the one that placed the greatest short-term demands on workers. Hours worked in cane-holing, trenching, and cutting tripled those hours worked by modern factory hands. Intensive tobacco work occurred when men and women transplant-ed tobacco stalks to the fields and they cut and stripped tobacco leaves. In the rice-growing Carolina/Georgia Low country, Surinam and Maranho, labor intensity increased when workers sowed seed, hoed wet fields, and harvested and processed rice. Planters throughout the Plantation Americas hired seasonal workers (hired slaves) to help harvest and process cash crops.

Album Pintoresco de la Isla de Cuba (Havana, 1851), plate 27

Vista de una Vega de Tabaco, shows a tobacco farm with slaves working in the field, horse-mounted overseer; thatched roof rectangular house in background.

the coastal Carolinas, Georgia, Suri-nam, and northeast Brazil. On South American rice fields, slaves cleared land during the AugustNovember dry season, planted in winter rains, and harvested between March and May. The Carolina rice and indigo cycles began in February and ended in November. Though a crop associ-ated strongly with plantation slavery, cotton did not dominate many areas until the 1800s, and comparatively few African-born slaves worked on cotton plantations.

Agricultural production requires dif-ferent numbers of farmer-hours, la-bor inputs, at various stages in plants growth cycles. Labor intensity differs by the type of crop and the ecosys-tem in which the plant lives. Crops planted annually in shifting agricul-tural communities required heavy la-bor inputs clearing land and sowing seed. In regions prone to unexpected drought, all available people hurried to sow during the seasons first rains. After the planting season, families weeded and controlled insect and bird pestswork less dependent

55

N

EW

S

In many markets in the Atlantic world monthly cycles of slave exports and imports, documented in the Voyages Database, link to dry season crop harvests. African and European dealers on the African coast purchased provi-sions and slaves. Some markets, such as those along the Senegal and Gambia Rivers, had distinct provisioning-slaving seasons. Ecological conditions set agricultural cal-endars and the dates when workers gathered and stored foodstuffs. African middlemen pegged their slave-trading seasons to in-crop months, and some agricultural workers, sold into the overseas slave trade, may have been forced to consume the foods they produced. By moving captives between harvests on the Atlantic littoral, slaving ship captains created regular pathways, such as those between yam-growing Bight of Biafra and the sugar islands of the Caribbean, or those between millet-rice Upper Guinea region and North American rice and tobacco lands. In ex-amining slave trading routes, historians need to consider agricultural calendars on both sides of the Atlantic.

Though there were monthly cycles of slave exports and imports, year-round shipments took place in all markets during the 350 year history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In the most seasonal African slaving regionSen-egambiaabout fifteen percent of all enslaved Africans departed the coast in the out-of-crop, rainy, SeptemberNovember quarter. Even in the most seasonal market in the Atlantic slaving worldthe northern plantations of Virginia and Maryland (3639 N)small numbers of forced migrants arrived in the winter, when no crops were grown. In the large Bight of BiafraJamaica migra-tion stream, forty percent of enslaved Africans arrived on the island during the JuneNovember out-of-crop season. And many would have sailed from Bonny, Old Calabar or New Calabar from April to July when yam stocks were low or depleted. Variability in the Middle Passage voyage time, due to contrary winds, caused some captains to ar-rive out of season; one assumes that there also was vari-ability in the time taken to march captives towards the African coast.

It is important to examine these unseasonal slave trades. In Africa, they remind us that the slave trade was a preda-tory activity. Warfare between African states often took place after the principal grain harvest and during the dry season, but conflicts could erupt at any time, and during every day of the year raiders could attack communities or kidnap people. Seasonal rainfall and crop-growing con-straints did not completely limit the plunder of people.

Captains who traded towards the end of in-crop seasons in Africa, such as Robert Doegood, risked purchasing greater numbers of mal-nourished men, women and children. Doegood traded at New Calabar when yam supplies were low; his logbook reveals that eighty Africans died on the Middle Passage (of 348 people) and four more in harbor at Barbados. Historians should exam-ine more closely the links between provisioning-slaving seasons and mortality. In the Americas, investors were willing to purchase enslaved labor from any African region dur-ing any day of the yearthe labor of enslaved Africans maintained the

Colonial System. Trading during out of crop seasons, on both sides of the Atlantic, increased the chances that irregular, non-systematic migration patterns occurreda true diaspora or scattering of African peoples in the Americas.

William Clark, Ten Views In the Island of Antigua, in Which are Represented the Process of Sugar Making....From Drawings Made by William Clark, During a Residence of Three Years in the West Indies (London,1823).

A Mill Yard, on Gambles Estate. Shows a windmill with its sails into the wind; canes being brought in ox carts, slaves heading cane loads into the mill rollers and stacking cane stalks. A black driver is shown at the base of the windmill, and the white owner/manager is overseeing the scene.

Whatever the route taken, condi-tions on board reflected the outsider status of those held below deck. No European, whether convict, in-dentured servant, or destitute free migrant, was ever subjected to the environment which greeted the typical African slave upon embarka-tion. The sexes were separated, kept naked, packed close together, and the men were chained for long peri-

ods. No less than 26 percent of those on board were classed as children, a ratio that no other pre-twentieth century migration could come close to matching. Except for the illegal period of the trade when conditions at times became even worse, slave traders typically packed two slaves per ton. While a few voyages sail-ing from Upper Guinea could make a passage to the Americas in three weeks, the average duration from all regions of Africa was just over two months. Most of the space

The Middle Passageon a slave ship was absorbed by casks of water. Crowded vessels sailing to the Caribbean from West Africa first had to sail south before turning north-west and passing through the doldrums. In the nineteenth century, improvements in sailing technology eventually cut the time in half, but mortality remained high in this pe-riod because of the illegal nature of the business.

Throughout the slave trade era, filthy conditions ensured endemic gastro-intestinal diseases, and a range of epidemic pathogens that, together with periodic breakouts of violent re-sistance, meant that between 12 and 13 percent of those embarked did not survive the voyage. Modal mor-tality fell well below mean mortal-ity as catastrophes on a relatively few voyages drove up average shipboard deaths. Crew mortality as a percent-age of those going on board, matched slave mortality over the course of the

Carl B. Wadstrom, An Essay on Colonization, particularly applied to the Western coast of Africa... in Two Parts (London, 1794, 1795)

Plan and Sections of a Slave Ship, this detailed and famous draw-ing shows cross-sections of the ship, and how Africans were stowed in the holds. The inset drawing depicts a revolt aboard a slave ship, showing the crew shooting insurrectionists.

57

N

EW

S

Artists reconstruction of spoon position in which slaves were kept in the hold of the French slaving vessel.

Jean Boudriot, Traite et Navire Negrier lAurore, 1784

voyage, but as slaves were there for a shorter period of time than the crew, mortality rates for slaves (over time) were the more severe. The eigh-teenth-century world was violent and life-expectancy was short every-where given that the global mortality revolution was still over the horizon, but the human misery quotient gen-erated by the forced movement of millions of people in slave ships can-not have been matched by any other human activity.

It was not just the slaves who suf-fered. The sailors experienced ter-rible conditions and were often employed through coercion. Sail-ors knew and hated the slave trade, so, at port towns, recruiters and tav-ern owners would get sailors very drunk (and indebted), and then of-fer to relieve their debt if they signed contracts with slave ships. If they did not, they would be imprisoned. Sailors in prison had a hard time getting jobs outside of the slave ship indus-try, since most other maritime indus-tries would not hire jail-birds, so they were forced to go to the slave ships anyway

The sexes were separated, kept naked, packed close together, and the men were chained for long periods.

Mainland North America

Caribbean

Spanish American Mainland

It took on average 60.2 days to sail the Middle Passage

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Brazil

Africa

= 5 Days

Europe

24,589 voyagesThe trans-Atlantic slave trade brings to mind images of haphazard, disorganized plunder that randomly scat-tered about eleven million African people throughout the Americas. When one examines information con-tained in the Voyages Database, however, one detects patterns in this forced diaspora. Many vessels sailing under Portuguese flag, for example, transported en-slaved Africans from West-Central Africa to Brazil; many Dutch ships sailed from the Gold Coast to Su-rinam. Colonial power and mercantilism provide one reason to explain these trans-Atlantic routes made by slaving vessels. Portugal controlled coastal territories in Angola, such as the ports Luanda and Benguela, and shipped enslaved Africans from these sites across the South Atlantic to their colonial cities in Brazil. The Dutch controlled the Gold Coast fort Elmina and or-dered their captains to proceed with slaves to their South American colony Surinam. Portuguese and Dutch laws restricted their slave trades to national carriers.

1100201300

701 800

2,7012,800

1,5011,600

Voyages

61

N

EW

S

581 voyages1100201300

701 800

2,7012,800

1,5011,600

Voyages

63

N

EW

S

10,103 voyages1100201300

701 800

2,7012,800

1,5011,600

Voyages

7,991 voyages1100201300

701 800

2,7012,800

1,5011,600

Voyages

65

N

EW

S

1,273 voyages1100201300

701 800

2,7012,800

1,5011,600

Voyages

907 voyages1100201300

701 800

2,7012,800

1,5011,600

Voyages

67

N

EW

S

3,014 voyages1100201300

701 800

2,7012,800

1,5011,600

Voyages

175 voyages1100201300

701 800

2,7012,800

1,5011,600

Voyages

69

N

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S

Robert Walsh, Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829 (Boston and New York, 1831), vol. 2, facing title page.

Sections of a slave ship; shows the areas allotted for human cargo as well as non-human cargo.

William Fox, A Brief History of the Wesleyan Missions on the West Coast of Africa (London, 1851), facing p. 116.

Shows crowded top deck of slave ship, ships crew firing guns on slaves; some Africans diving overboard.

0%

25%

50%

75%

Like adults, children were unwilling participants within the slave trade that had a variety of sources. Children commonly found themselves enslaved as prisoners of war-fare. When men were killed in battle, women, children, and the elderly became especially vulnerable. Those who were not killed or ransomed were sold into slavery. Com-mercial caravans frequently followed military expeditions, and waited patiently to exchange textiles and goods for captives. In some areas of West Africa, kidnapping was a popular method of acquiring children. Children were snatched while working in the fields, walking on the out-skirts of town, or innocently playing outside away from their parents view. So that communities could make ends meet during times of famine, families sometimes sold their children into slavery. Many children also found themselves as pawns or bargaining chips, sold into slav-ery to repay debts or crimes committed by their parents or relatives.

Traders generally defined children as anyone below 44 in height, and those deemed as children were allowed to run unfettered on deck with the women. Those travel-ing on deck occasionally received special treatment and attention from the captain and crew, who gave them their old clothes, taught them games, or even how to sail. Some children, held tightly in the comforting arms of the women, cried throughout the night. Taller children, were placed in the hold with adults where they experienced horrible, unsanitary conditions. Whatever their size, cry-ing or failing to eat or sleep resulted in harsh punishment.

Although children received some preferential treatment, most children suffered experiences similar if not equal to the adults traveling alongside them. This preferential treatment and travel outside of the hold gave children a better chance of survival, but it did not shield them from corporal punishment, malnourishment, and illness. Dur-ing the Middle Passage across the Atlantic that lasted anywhere from one month to three, children experienced high mortality rates. Many succumbed to the illnesses that accompanied every slaving voyage across the Atlantic, especially yaws and intestinal worms. Sometimes ill chil-dren were thrown overboard in the hope that their disease would not spread to the rest of the slave cargo.

Until the 18th century most trading companies had little or no desire to purchase children from the coast of Africa, and encouraged their captains not to buy them. Children were a bad risk, and many planters and traders who pur-chased them lost money on their investment. Because children (especially the young and infants) were vulner-able to disease, the cost of transporting them lowered overall profits margins. Furthermore, African children would not be able to perform hard labor or produce any offspring until they came of age. As a result, unless a plant-

er or merchant requested a special or-der, children were extremely hard to sell in West Indian markets.

By the middle of the 18th century, however, planters economically de-pendent on the slave trade came to depend on children and youth. As the abolitionist movement increasingly threatened their slave supply, plant-ers adopted the strategy of importing younger slaves who would live longer.

As a result, youth became an attrac-tive asset on the auction blocks of the slave markets. Ironically, abolition-ist sentiment changed 18thcentury definitions of risk, investment, and profit. As the plantocracy purchased more breeding women and children in order to save their economic in-terests, traders modified their ideas of profit and risk and ideas of child worth changed throughout the Atlantic World.

Children in the Slave Trade

Year [16311863]

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20.8% of slaves crossing the Atlantic were children

Year [16311863]

Zeldina 1857

Voyage Outcome: Condemned by British Vice-Admiralty CourtOutcome for Slaves: Disembarked in the AmericasOutcome for Owner: Goal thwarted by Human AgencyAfrican Resistance:

Voyage Outcome

Vessel Name: ZeldinaRig: SchoonerTonnage: 67

Ship

Voyage Began: New YorkPlace of Slave Purchase: Cabinda, West Central AfricaPlace of Slave Landing: Kingston, JamaicaDate Arrived With Slaves: April 12, 1857

Voyage Itinerary

Date Arrived With Slaves: April 12, 1857Days of Middle Passage: 48

Voyage Dates

Captains Name: UnknownNumber of Crew Members: 10

Captain & Crew

Total Slaves Embarked: 500Total Slaves Disembarked: 362Slave Deaths: 138Percentage Died: 27.6%Percentage Men: 91.1%Percentage Women: 8.9%Percentage Children: 0%

Slave Numbers

[Voyage 4229]

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These images show the slaver Zeldina anchored at Port Royal in 1857, and three rescued slaves. It is a reproduction of one of the images sent with a letter from Kingston, Jamaica, dated May 11th, 1857, to The Illustrated London News, the source of this image. The newspaper published the letter and the pictures provided by the letter. The schooner

Zeldina embarked slaves at Cabinda, but she was blown off her way to Cuba and captured by the British naval force in April, 1857.

Arabella 1731

Voyage Outcome: Completed as intendedOutcome for Slaves: Disembarked in the AmericasOutcome for Owner: Delivered slaves for original ownersAfrican Resistance:

Voyage Outcome

Vessel Name: ArabellaFlag: Great BritainTonnage: 90Owners: Henry & William Hunt

Ship

Voyage Began: London, EnglandPlace of Slave Purchase: Gambia, SenegambiaPlace of Slave Landing: Annapolis, Maryland

Voyage Itinerary

Date Arrived With Slaves: 1731Date Voyage Began: January 16, 1731Date Trade Began in Africa: February 11, 1731Date Vessel Departed Africa: April 18, 1731

Voyage Dates

Captains Name: Stephen PikeNumber of Crew Members: 20

Captain & Crew

Total Slaves Embarked: 169Total Slaves Disembarked: 150Slave Deaths: 19

Slave Numbers

[Voyage 75094]

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Before the nineteenth century most people in the world lived under some type of dependency of which slavery was just one form. The story of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo provides insight into a world where slavery was just another social relationship. Ayuba was a Fulbe Muslim known as Job Ben Solomon to Europeans. In 1731, he traveled from Bondu to the Gambia River to sell two slaves at his fathers request. He tried to sell the slaves to a Captain Pike but they could not agree on a price, so Ayuba sold the slaves for cows to another African trader. Ironically, on the way home Ayuba was captured by raiders and sold to the same captain with whom he had recently haggled.

Captain Pike carried Ayuba off to Maryland, one of the British colonies on the North American mainland, where he spent about a year as a slave before returning to Africa via England.

In the Americas, Ayuba shared the experiences of many enslaved Africans, and like many of his fellow Africans he attempted to run away. Ayuba was a slave at the tobacco plantations of Kent Island, Maryland. He had probably never worked under a labor regime that approached what was the norm on Ameri-can plantations. During one of his attempts to escape, he met Thomas Bluett, an Englishmen, who, impressed by Ayubas Muslim education, helped him gain his liberty and return to Africa. An important lesson to be drawn from Ayubas life is that slavery was widely accepted in the mid-eighteenth century among both Europeans and Africans.

The Economics of SlaverySlavery is fundamentally an economic phenomenon. Market prices for slaves reflect their substantial economic value. On arrival on the coast, after many days of travel, the slaves were penned up in the baracoon, where they were prepared for sale. They were washed and their bod-ies were shaved and oiled to give them a good appearance. The European buyer who arrived in his slave trading ship would examine each slave before he agreed upon a price. The African slave dealers often demanded payment in cowrie shells, their own currency, and certain European goods which included iron bars, brass basins, and good

quality cloth. In the 1690s, a slave was bought for goods equivalent to about 4 English pounds. About a hundred years later, as some records show, a British slave trader paid for each male slave 96 yards of cloth, 52 handkerchiefs, 1 large brass pan, 2 muskets, 25 kegs of gunpowder, 100 flints, 2 bags of shot, 20 knives, 4 iron pots, 4 hats, 4 caps, 4 cutlasses, 6 bunches of beads and 14 gallons

of brandy. Scholars have gathered slave prices from a variety of sources, including censuses, probate records, plantation and slave-trader accounts, and proceedings of slave auctions. These data sets reveal that prime field hands went for four to six hundred dollars in the U.S. in 1800, thirteen to fifteen hundred dollars in 1850, and up to three thousand dollars just before Fort Sumter fell. Even control-ling for inflation, the prices of U.S. slaves rose significantly in the six de-cades before South Carolina seceded from the Union. By 1860, Southern-ers owned close to $4 billion worth of slaves. Slavery remained a thriving business on the eve of the Civil War: Fogel and Engerman (1974) project-ed that by 1890 slave prices would have increased on average more than

50 percent over their 1860 levels. The prices paid for slaves reflected two economic factors: the characteris-tics of the slave and the conditions of the market. Important individual features included age, sex, childbear-ing capacity (for females), physical condition, temperament, and skill level. In addition, the supply of slaves, demand for products produced by slaves, and seasonal factors helped determine market conditions and therefore prices

Prices for both male and female slaves tended to follow similar life-cycle patterns. In the U.S. South, in-fant slaves sold for a positive price because masters expected them to live long enough to make the initial costs of raising them worthwhile. Prices rose through puberty as pro-ductivity and experience increased. In nineteenth-century New Orleans, for example, prices peaked at about age 22 for females and age 25 for males. Girls cost more than boys up

The Illustrated London News (Feb. 16, 1861), vol. 38, p. 139.

Shows a man and woman (with child in arms) on auction block, surrounded by white men.The auction rooms for the sale of Negroes are situated in the main streets, and are generally the ground floors of the building; the entrance-door opens straight into the street, and the sale room is similar to any other auction roomplacards, advertisements, and notices as to the business carried on are dispensed with, the only indications of the trade being a small red flag hanging from the front door post, and a piece of paper upon which is writtenthis simple announcementNegroes for sale at auction

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to their mid-teens. The genders then switched places in terms of value. In the Old South, boys aged 14 sold for 71 percent of the price of 27 year old men, whereas girls aged 14 sold for 65 percent of the price of 27 year old men. Af-ter the peak age, prices declined slowly for a time, then fell off rapidly as the aging process caused productivity to fall. Compared to full-grown men, women were worth 80 to 90 percent as much. One characteristic in particular set some females apart: their ability to bear children. Fertile females commanded a premium. The mother-child link also proved important for pricing in a different way: peo-ple sometimes paid more for intact families.

Skills, physical traits, mental capabilities, and other quali-ties also helped determine a slaves price. Skilled workers sold for premiums of 4055 percent whereas crippled and chronically ill slaves sold for deep discounts. Slaves who proved troublesomerunaways, thieves, lay abouts, drunks, slow learners, and the likealso sold for lower prices. Taller slaves cost more, perhaps because height acts as a proxy for healthiness. In New Orleans, light-skinned females (who enjoyed greater popularity as concubines) sold for a 5 percent premium. Prices for slaves fluctu-ated with market conditions as well as with individual

tively high. Prices had to be relatively low for them to be willing to travel to New Orleans during harvest time.

One additional demand factor loomed large in determining slave prices: the expectation of continued legal slavery. As the American Civil War progressed, prices dropped dra-matically because people could not be sure that slavery would survive. In New Orleans, prime male slaves sold on average for $1381 in 1861 and for $1116 in 1862. Burgeoning inflation meant that real prices fell consider-ably more. By wars end, slaves sold for a small fraction of their 1860 price.

Slavery never generated super profits, because people always had the option of putting their money elsewhere. Nevertheless, investment in slaves of-fered a rate of returnabout 10 per-centthat was comparable to returns on other assets. Slave owners were not the only ones to reap rewards, howev-er. So too did cotton consumers who enjoyed low prices and Northern en-trepreneurs who helped finance plan-tation operations.

characteristics. U.S. slave prices fell around 1800 as the Haitian revolu-tion sparked the movement of slaves into the Southern states. Less than a decade later, slave prices climbed when the international slave trade was banned, cutting off legal exter-nal supplies. Interestingly enough, among those who supported the closing of the trans-Atlantic slave trade were several Southern slave owners. Why this apparent anomaly? Because the resulting reduction in supply drove up the prices of slaves already living in the U.S. and, hence, their masters wealth. U.S. slaves had high enough fertility rates and low enough mortality rates to reproduce themselves, so Southern slave owners did not worry about having too few slaves to go around.

Demand helped determine prices as well. The demand for slaves derived in part from the demand for the com-modities and services that slaves pro-vided. Changes in slave occupations and variability in prices for slave-produced goods therefore created movements in

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