For five decades after 1807, Freetown in Sierra Leone – the African center of British efforts to suppress the slave trade – contained a floating population of former slaver crews looking to return to their Brazilian and Cuban home ports after the British had detained their vessel.Footnote ¹ In 1842, five sailors from a recently condemned slave ship stole a new 29-foot open boat just delivered from London for the use of the British officials of the Mixed Commission Courts. As the British Commissary judge related, the men “pulled up to the Rio Pongo where they either kidnapped or purchased five or six slaves, with whom … they started for Brazil and arrived there in safety.” No doubt a 29-foot boat was equipped with some sails, but the letter also specifies rowing. For this case and possibly other open launches in the database, perhaps slaves were forced to propel themselves to the Americas.Footnote ² At the other end of the spectrum of the transoceanic slave experience were twenty-three steam-powered slave ships in the voyages database, averaging 361 tons and disembarking a mean of 1,004 captives – slave trading in the industrial era. One of them is displayed as Figure 3.1. And then there are the clipper ships of 600 tons or more. The Orion (ID 4807) had, according to the arresting officer in 1857, “the finest slave deck I have ever seen being about 8 feet in height and clear fore and aft.”Footnote ³ In addition, blockades by the British squadron had forced it to leave the coast with only two-thirds of its intended captives on board.Footnote ⁴ Compare these with the iconic and highly misleading image of the Brooks (ID 80666; Figure 4.1) from 1788 and the very accurate paintings, by contrast, of the Marie-Séraphique (ID 30910; Figure 4.2, Figure 4.3) from two decades earlier, and it is hard to believe that all these vessels (Marie-Séraphique through to the Orion) were in the same transatlantic business in a short, eighty-five-year period. It is easy to recognize, or to learn to recognize, an East India man, a whaler, a Dutch fluit trading for grain in the Baltic, but not a slave ship, unless the midship barricado attached to the mainmast, as displayed in Figure 4.2, was in position.Footnote ⁵

Figure 4.1 Image of the Liverpool slave ship Brooks according to the “Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade: Description of a Slave Ship” (London, 1789). This was an abolitionist pamphlet showing the improbable distribution of captive Africans.

Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-44000.

Figure 4.2 The Marie-Séraphique (ID 30941) showing the barricado midships. The image is part of the video accessible on the home page of www.slavevoyages.org.

Reproduced with permission of Private collections, Nantes History Museum.

Figure 4.3 The slave deck of the Marie-Séraphique (ID 30941) during the transatlantic voyage as drawn by one of the ship’s officers. The image is part of the video accessible on the home page of www.slavevoyages.org.

Reproduced with permission of Private collections, Nantes History Museum.

In short, because the Atlantic slave trade ranged over 95 degrees of latitude and was shaped by so many environmental factors, regulatory regimes, and changes in technology over time, no less than seventy-four types of ship (mainly different rigs) can be identified in TSTD.Footnote ⁶ Generally, “sailing ships were fungible: they could operate in various trades and carry mixed cargoes,” and moreover were subject to many different ways of measuring tonnage; before the nineteenth century it is difficult to standardize tonnage measurement.Footnote ⁷ Certainly within a given type (or rig) ships also varied in size. Slavers leaving the North American mainland and the Caribbean before 1800 averaged just half the capacity of their counterparts leaving Europe and Brazil, and on the African coast, vessels trading in Upper Guinea were smaller than those buying slaves east and south of Cape Palmas.

As already stressed, almost every port worthy of the name in the Atlantic-facing world organized and dispatched a ship to Africa for slaves, but in the age of sail, shipbuilding centers and the skills that supported them were even more broadly distributed geographically than were ports and merchants participating in transoceanic trades. Sailing ships were cheap to construct relative to the costs of fitting out and the value of the cargoes they carried. In tropical waters before the adoption of copper-sheathing technology, a hull might survive nine or ten round trips. TSTD records the place of construction for the vessels used in 9,155 voyages. These locations ranged from Calcutta, India to Portobelo, Panama, to Quebec City and Mahone Bay in Canada to Point Askaig in the Western Isles of Scotland and Kronstadt in Russia. Seven hundred in this sample had been taken as prizes in wars, and most had never previously been employed in the slave trade. When looking for a vessel to send to Africa before 1800, investors could quickly adapt almost any ship under 400 tons for the purpose. Owners often built vessels specifically for a slaving venture, but these, too, were of a wide variety of rigs and sizes.Footnote ⁸ In a sense then, there was no such thing as a slave ship, except insofar as it was a ship that carried slaves, but analysis of the records of 36,000 slave voyages and the approximately 12,000 ships that made these voyages, nevertheless make possible new generalizations. These in turn allow us to understand more fully both the patterns of the transatlantic slave trading, and the enslaved experiences that historians have missed.

As argued earlier, the transatlantic traffic developed as an extension of the slave trade from Africa to Europe – often called the Old-World slave trade, but it also involved African commodities as well as human beings. Gold, ivory, and other African produce exports to Europe were carried along with captives first to the Americas as well as direct from Africa to Europe. Anthony Hopkins noted that “the Europeans who came to Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were interested in goods other than slaves … and this commerce continued even after the overseas slave trade was well underway.”Footnote ⁹ Commodities arriving from Atlantic ports prior to Columbian contact comprised sugar from Madeira (and later São Tomé) as well as mainland produce. For the early years the samples of voyages in the slave trade direct to Europe scattered through Ivana Elb’s work indicate a mean human cargo of less than 100.Footnote ¹⁰ Thus captives were carried on merchant vessels and, if sufficiently numerous and comprising a threatening mix of gender and age, they were no doubt manacled and chained, but in these early years many vessels probably carried more crew than slaves.

A similar pattern is apparent in the early transatlantic traffic. For the first quarter of the sixteenth century, the galleons that left Spanish ports for the Americas carried European merchandise, approved emigrants, and slaves, most, but not all, of the latter being of African descent. In a pattern adopted nearly three centuries later in the British intra-Caribbean trade, passengers were permitted – with royal approval – to bring two personal servants with them.Footnote ¹¹ Probably most vessels docking in the Spanish Americas disembarked some captives. When African slaves began to arrive in the Americas direct from Africa rather than Europe in 1520, the mix of slaves and commodities continued. The mean number of captives on board 131 vessels arriving in San Juan, Puerto Rico, between 1520 and 1546 was just sixteen, with only four carrying more than ninety captives. Ships collecting slaves from the offshore bulking centers of Arguim Island and Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands, not only freighted merchandise for the Americas but also picked up gold and perhaps sugar from Madeira, African spices, and ivory. Sixteen slaves carried on just one of the three legs of a voyage from Seville to Africa and the Americas and back, could not have been the main interest of investors. In the 1550s detailed records of two large transatlantic vessels suggest that each disembarked more than one hundred slaves in Hispaniola and Vera Cruz respectively. But on arrival they were also found to be carrying huge volumes of wine, olive oil, and a wide range of manufactured goods.Footnote ¹²

Even when the Iberians began to seek slaves south of Senegambia, first, at São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea, and then West Central Africa, commodities remained of central importance. Quite apart from African gold that at one stage made up 10 percent of global supplies, São Tomé was Europe’s major source of sugar in the mid sixteenth century. The ten slave voyages in TSTD that carried captives from that island to the Americas between 1526 and 1592 were likely carrying sugar from Africa as well as slaves. It is not possible to identify the point at which the value of slaves exceeded that of commodities on a “typical” transatlantic venture, but the main point is that slaves required space not only for themselves but also for provisions and water. European merchants obviously found transporting merchandise to the Americas, and African produce brought to Europe via the Americas, just as profitable as slaves. The value of captives may not have exceeded that of commodities until after 1550. What we can say is that in terms of space provided per captive, the very earliest transatlantic captives must have travelled under conditions better than their successors could have possibly imagined.

The TSTD shows the average number of captives per vessel increasing after 1550 but given the extent of smuggling into the Spanish Americas, this data – drawn from the official record – is not very reliable. Fortunately, between 1575 and 1637 seventy very well documented cases of vessels exist that the colonial authorities suspected of bringing in more slaves than their captains declared were on board. The extensive investigations that followed revealed that on average the seventy vessels disembarked 278 captives (SD = 124.3) as opposed to the 167 that the captains claimed they had imported. After allowing for voyage mortality these ships would likely have embarked between 350 and 400 captives on the African coast. There is no statistically significant difference between the true average of 278 slaves disembarked by this sample and the mean of 263 that TSTD generates for the 10,163 British, French, Dutch, and Danish vessels carried to the Caribbean over the whole period of the slave trade.Footnote ¹³ The conclusion from these comparisons is that a transatlantic slave trade of a type that most scholars would recognize, and most of the enslaved had to endure, was fully established sometime between 1560 and 1590. By “type” is meant ships carrying several hundred slaves under intensely crowded conditions, the value of whom far exceeded that of all other commodities on board. Such a system had not existed previously. Thus, the question of a ship built for the primary purpose of slave trading did not arise for more than a century after Europeans began carrying slaves from Africa.

There is, however, a need to reexamine and regroup the 35,800 voyages that occurred after 1560. It has become standard practice to analyze the traffic in terms of the northern and southern gyres that essentially shaped the routes of transatlantic sailing ships.Footnote ¹⁴ While the gyres were indeed the most fundamental environmental factor, a close study of ship types, trading practices, shipboard rebellions, and voyage durations points to the emergence of a Portuguese system of acquiring and moving labor across the Atlantic that no other Europeans were ever able to emulate. The unusual investment structure supporting this system is explored in Chapter 2, but the Portuguese advantage extended beyond financing and into superior methods of shipping their human commodities.Footnote ¹⁵ Their system dominated the Atlantic world after 1807, partly because Portuguese nationals retained a critical organizing role beyond the point at which their main market in the Americas – Brazil – was closed to the transatlantic business. Clearly, the gyres determined the maritime routes, but there were more important political and cultural factors that ensured Portuguese dominance in Atlantic slaving in the more than four centuries after 1450 – a dominance that remained unchallenged except for the British interlude in the six or seven decades prior to abolition.Footnote ¹⁶

These same factors also ensured that African slaves and African slave traders experienced the slave trade very differently from their counterparts who engaged with and helped sustain the northwest European system of slave trading. As we have seen the French, British, Dutch, and Danes are best viewed not only as latecomers to the slave trade, but intruders, condemned to fall back on second-best options in the business. The fact that they were rarely able to adopt the preferred system of the Portuguese ensured that they faced inefficiencies and higher costs in accessing slaves, costs that were absorbed ultimately by their planters and consumers. The traditional view of how the slave trade of the Atlantic world evolved needs revision.

At the very outset of their slave-trading activities the Iberian slave traders (mainly Portuguese) traded from their ship, but soon established permanent factories, some like those at Mina and Axim dealing in gold. The early slave trade to Europe came to rely heavily on what Curtin called “bulking centers,” or assembly points for captives.Footnote ¹⁷ As the early direct trade in slaves from Africa to the Americas developed, the Spanish and Portuguese used several such stations. All were on islands under the full control of Iberians. Tenerife in the Canaries and Santiago in the Cape Verde islands were added to Arguim, with the first two being the most important down to the end of the sixteenth century. Thus, Tenerife and Santiago pulled in Africans from regions ranging from the Senegal River to what became Sierra Leone, and when the southern rivers emerged as the most important source in the region some transatlantic vessels collected their complement of slaves directly from Cacheu rather than Santiago. Luanda, founded in 1575 and later to become the single largest embarkation point for overseas markets in the whole of Africa, was also first settled on an island, initially supplying slaves to São Tomé.

Until 1720, Benguela dispatched all its slaves destined for the Americas to the “bulking center” of Luanda, before the volume of this traffic warranted Benguela’s direct trade connections with Brazilian ports.Footnote ¹⁸ Later in the century, as the St. Domingue rebellion and the ensuing international conflict erupted, French withdrawal from the Indian Ocean allowed Mozambique island to assume its major role in the transatlantic business. The three southern bases of Luanda, Benguela, and Mozambique became well-fortified Portuguese enclaves that together accounted for three-quarters of all captives carried off from Africa south of the Congo River. At each location, when enough captives were acquired, the Portuguese would embark the full complement of enslaved persons in a single embarkation. A Capuchin friar in Luanda, Laurent de Lucques, described the scene in 1708 as he boarded a slave vessel to Bahia:

Slave-ship captains could thereby receive all their captives much more quickly than in, say, the Bights of Benin and Biafra. The exceptionally large barracoons (or quintais) in Luanda and Benguela were noted by several observers.Footnote ²⁰ For Bissau and Cacheu, Antônio Carreira makes no reference to shipboard revolts, or measures taken to suppress them, but does reproduce a document cataloguing 100 deaths and escapes per year “antes do embarque” in the factories over the period 1768 to 1777, many of them the result of “uprisings.”Footnote ²¹ Hans Christian Monrad, a Danish pastor, who, like Laurent de Lucques, had also travelled on a Brazilian slave vessel during a four-year stay on the Gold Coast, 1804–1809, wrote that he knew “not a single example of the Portuguese ships being, as they say, overrun (the crew attacked and killed by the slaves.)”Footnote ²²

Portuguese ship trade, or the gradual accumulation of slaves on board the vessel over several weeks, became largely confined to the smaller coastal craft that connected the bases with the adjacent African mainland. In Angola, the bulking centers drew on land-based networks, rather than coastal seaborne and river traffic. Through warfare and treaties, the Portuguese were able to extend a degree of sovereignty, or at least influence, inland, and maintain a handful of forts and factories strategically located on trade routes. In all other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, European authority extended only as far as a cannon shot, and on most of the West African coast the cannon was located on a vessel. Even the famous Gold Coast forts amounted to no more than a large, anchored ship with a well-armed crew; there were few Mulattoes, and few European factories in their hinterlands. By contrast, Luanda had a population of 5,000 at the end of the eighteenth century, one-quarter of whom were Whites and Mulattoes. Though Benguela and Mozambique were half the size of Luanda, compared to the Gold Coast forts both comprised major communities under European jurisdiction that anchored trading routes extending into the interior.Footnote ²³

Moreover, as Mary Hicks has argued, there is a case to be made for the differences in Portuguese/African relations in the acquisition of slaves spilling over into captor-captive interactions on the voyage itself. As noted in Chapter 2, many members of the crew on Brazilian slave vessels were freedmen or former slaves, some of whom had a financial interest in the venture. Indeed, some crew were themselves enslaved.Footnote ²⁴ They frequently spoke the language of the enslaved, in sharp contrast to crews on northern European slavers. Notwithstanding the harsh conditions in the Goias and Minas Gerais gold regions – which he admitted – Monrad wrote that the enslaved:

He went on to contrast these conditions with those on Dutch, US, and British slave ships. There were no French vessels on the coast when he made his comments, but a few years earlier, the Le Havre vessel, Bosquet d’Or (ID 32803) sailed from Isles de Los to St. Marc, St. Domingue. On board was American Nathaniel Cutting, who observed in his journal:

Monrad’s encomium to Portuguese slave traders may be over-egged, but the interactions between crew and enslaved are consistent with what we know of the strong ties between Bahia and the Mina Coast and Rio de Janeiro and Luanda. The high proportion of slaves and former slaves among the crew of Brazilian slave ships, some of whom held a small equity interest in the voyage and others who could speak to captives in their own language must have reduced the terrors of the unknown. Divisions between Portuguese captors and their captives were likely never as sharp as Cutting and many others observed on board the slavers of other nations, but differences in interactions between crew and enslaved, certainly existed.Footnote ²⁷

In any event the skewed distribution of African resistance across national flags is startling. TSTD contains 572 incidents of violent resistance (including ninety-seven cases of attacks by Africans on shore). Only eleven out of the 572 involved vessels flying the Portuguese or Brazilian flag compared to 488 British, French, Dutch, and Danish slave ships.Footnote ²⁸ Many of the reports of violence are retrieved from newspaper reports and until late in the period Portugal and Brazil did not possess vibrant press cultures. Moreover, both British and Dutch slave traders were well aware of the need for interpreters so that Africans would have some awareness of the fact that, as a minimum, they were not to be cannibalized.Footnote ²⁹ Yet communication between crew and the enslaved on Portuguese slave voyages must have been greater than in any other branch of the slave trade, and it is plausible that a discrepancy such as this indicates that violent resistance on slave ships was much less common in the Luso-Atlantic.

There is no need here to reenter the old debates over attitudes toward race in the different European and African Atlantic worlds, but differences there were and still are.Footnote ³⁰ The Portuguese freed all slaves living in their own country over a decade before the well-known English Somerset case.Footnote ³¹ As important, the British, French, Dutch, and Danes had fewer equivalents to the lançados. The British came closest in Upper Guinea on the coast ranging from Rio Pongo to Galinhas in the later eighteenth century where families emerged bearing the names of minor Liverpool slave traders. Such families – the Ormonds, the Holmans, and the Frasers – might have owned plantations on both sides of the Atlantic, but they were intermediaries, not traders who brought captives from the interior. Can one imagine the English or Dutch presiding over the mixed society that quickly emerged in the Cape Verde Islands?Footnote ³² Moreover, this region was not a major source of slaves compared to the Bight of Biafra and Angola.Footnote ³³ Such descent groups could be quite large, but the extensive documentation of slave purchases by the northern Europeans on the West African coast points to the sellers of slaves being African, with fewer equivalents of lançados.Footnote ³⁴ Except for parts of the Gambia and Senegal Rivers, there were no European-controlled factories or trade routes in the African interior. It is extraordinary that the British and French not only carried off over 3 million captives from what is today Ghana, Benin, and Nigeria, but followed this with the imposition of a century of colonial rule. Yet they have left little genetic trace in the modern populations of these countries. Nor have the northwestern Europeans left anything comparable to the Afro-Brazilian presence in, say, Porto Novo – where commercial contact with Bahia began only in 1760.Footnote ³⁵ We would not expect to find many English, French, and Dutch names among families today in Bonny, Old Calabar, Cabinda, and Loango from which the French, Dutch, and English carried off millions of African captives. And to refer briefly to the larger canvas, why, after three centuries of colonial occupation, there are no Dutch speakers in modern Indonesia?

The Portuguese had perhaps the most completely exploitative colonial system in world history in place by the early seventeenth century. They had a wider range of interactions with Africans than any of the other European slave-trading powers. While “interaction” here could mean unsuccessful wars, with African polities it more often meant an uneasy trading relationship with Africans in the often-distant hinterlands of the major slave trading ports of Angola and Upper Guinea that the French, Dutch, and English could not match. The lançados were vital to the system. They were largely independent of the Portuguese state, and, for the most part, purchased captives rather than enslaved them. They helped ensure that from the late sixteenth century, the Portuguese method of converting African labor in the interior of the continent into sugar, coffee, and tobacco consumed in the Old World gave them an advantage that their competitors were not able to match. Their dominance of sugar before 1650 and coffee in the first half of the nineteenth century was equivalent to French domination of world sugar output before 1792 and the subsequent British predominance, thereafter.Footnote ³⁶ Between 1650 and 1800, the Portuguese system may have intermittently lost its preeminence in plantation produce, but the literature on this topic in the Atlantic world invariably ignores the role of gold and silver production. As argued in Chapter 2, Brazil from the late 1690s to 1760, and of course the Spanish down to 1800, had colonial bullion production that vastly exceeded that of the northwestern European possessions in the Americas.

Three distinct phases of the slave trade emerged. If the pre-1560 era of mixing the traffic in commodities and enslaved people slave trading constituted the first, and a second comprised the Portuguese-controlled links just described, then a third and quite different method emerged as other European nations entered the business from 1640. The English and Dutch had initially built (or in the Dutch case, taken control of) forts on the Gold Coast to facilitate trade in African produce rather than slaves, though gold exports never matched those of Brazil beginning in the late 1690s. Together with the French they gradually wrested some of the smaller Caribbean islands and South American mainland from Spanish control to establish their own plantation systems and slave trades. The African forts did eventually become assembly points for slaves, but the major source of slaves lay east and south of the Gold Coast extending to the mouth of the Congo. Except possibly for eighteenth-century Anomabu, Gold Coast forts were never able to play the role of Tenerife, Santiago, Luanda, Benguela, and, later, Mozambique. Apart from Ouidah (and even there, the kings of first, Ardra, and then, Dahomey, were always very much in control) no European power was able to establish a permanent foothold beyond coastal lodges. The Dutch attack on Luanda, temporarily successful in the 1640s, was a recognition of the advantages of system two over system three. If Dutch lançados (something of an oxymoron) had existed, the occupation might have endured. But as Phyllis Martin noted, “[t]he Dutch probably never realized the intricacies of the trade network which the Portuguese had established over 150 years until they had to operate it themselves.”Footnote ³⁷ With the Brazilian reconquest of Luanda, the massive British, Dutch, and French slave trades between Cape Palmas and the Congo River that developed after 1640 were, of necessity, based on ships, not islands, much less, small segments of mainland Africa.

Over a wide range of the coast the slave ship – which had hitherto been a means of transportation – was, with arrival of the northern Europeans, now adapted to additional roles. The ship ferried merchandise in one direction and slaves in another, but it also became a trading platform where wares could be displayed and clients entertained, as well, most importantly, as a floating stockade or barracoon. A vessel might now expect to spend many months accumulating slaves, often at more than one location. In Curtin’s phraseology, bulking costs were now transferred from the coastal hub to the vessel itself. The implications of this for the design and construction of slave vessels, for slave resistance, for the African experience of transportation to the Americas, and more broadly yet, for imperial rivalries and economic development in the Atlantic world were significant.

For several thousand cases in TSTD it is now possible to calculate the duration of different phases of a slave voyage. As we might expect, round-trip voyages from Brazil during the eighteenth century (when data first become available) were 21 percent shorter than those setting out from Europe and ultimately the Caribbean (n = 5,707). It is also clear that voyage length declined in the nineteenth century as part of the general pattern of transoceanic sailing times.Footnote ³⁸ But the key question in terms of shipping cost is how long the slaves were on board. The passage from Africa to the Americas accounts for much of the difference in round-trip times. Voyages from both the Bight of Benin and west central Africa to the Caribbean were 50 percent longer than those sailing to Brazil (n = 2,378). Nevertheless, the major factor in separating the Portuguese from the northern Europeans was what happened before the transoceanic passage began. In West African ports between 1640 and 1807, Dutch, French, and English vessels received their first captive eighty days after leaving home port on average. Accumulating a full complement of captives via trading from the ship took a further 140 days. Typically, therefore, the very first captive purchased would be on board the vessel for seven months, and severe crowding below decks usually began a month or so before departure when the captain began to pay higher prices for slaves to get off the coast as quickly as possible.Footnote ³⁹ There are many voyages in TSTD where captives spent a year aboard the slave vessel between first boarding and disembarkation.

By contrast, most vessels bound for Brazil had slaves on board for just a few days more than the duration of the crossing – less than two months overall. Despite this, Portuguese and northern European ships spent similar amounts of time on the African coast; but the Portuguese vessels were frequently empty during this time or had very few slaves on board. The competition between captains in places such as Luanda was over the order of embarkation, not about who should claim the last few captives that would make up a full complement. It might seem that for the captive there was little to choose between a stockade and the confined hold of a sailing vessel. Both were unhealthy environments that made extensive use of shackles and offered few opportunities for escape. Given that the slave-ship captain had the power to refuse captives who were not in prime condition, it could be argued that shore-based imprisonment was more lethal. Yet, as discussed below, a slave deck was without parallel in the annals of inhumanity; a tightly restricted space with some gratings for light, occupied for months by hundreds of people so that no part of the deck was visible. As the Antigua agent wrote to Bristol owner James Rogers, “[e]very commendation is due to Cpt. Rogers [no relation] for his assiduity and cleverness in bringing off so many people, in so small a vessel.” The cutter sloop Fly (ID 17969) was just 27 tons and had disembarked fifty-three people.Footnote ⁴⁰ Can any environment created by humans in global history have offered harmful pathogens a better opportunity to multiply and kill than this one? As noted below such conditions were never replicated in any other transoceanic movements of people whether convicts, troops, indentured servants, Asian contract workers, or modern illegal migrants. In the northern European based-trade the closest land-based parallel to the Portuguese system was the holding cell of a Gold Coast fort, which relatively few of those entering the transatlantic slave trade experienced, though we do have instances of the Danes, for example, boarding a complete complement of enslaved people from a fort just prior to departure.Footnote ⁴¹

The differences between the Portuguese and the rest had major implications for costs. A ship that was expected to imprison captives for months instead of weeks required additional fortifications, crew, and armament. We have surprisingly little information on the design of slave vessels before 1670, but for the long eighteenth century the sources provide relatively abundant data and several pictorial illustrations. For vessels trading in West Africa in the second half of the eighteenth century when the transatlantic traffic reached its apogee, the slave deck contained two key features designed to control resistance. First, the spiked barricado, a huge timber barrier straddling midships, dominated the slave ship sailing from northern Europe. If it was not already in place from a previous voyage, then the ship’s carpenter would build it on the way to Africa. Typically, it was topped with swivel guns and pierced with peashot-loaded cannon, all pointing directly at the men as their space in front of the barrier filled up during loading.Footnote ⁴² The barricado’s chief purpose, as surgeon Alexander Falconbridge and Captain John Newton pointed out, was to stymie revolts, but it also served to separate the men from the women and child captives.Footnote ⁴³ A second security feature comprised two chains running fore and aft along the main deck to which the men were always shackled in fair-weather daytime hours. At night, captives would be forced below – the men unshackled, but only two at one time allowed through the hatchway, whereupon they would be immediately reshackled. By far the best and most measured descriptions of the life of the enslaved at sea can be found in the recent books by Nicholas Radburn and Jane Webster.Footnote ⁴⁴ Here, we are essentially adding some additional reflections on how experiences on Portuguese slave vessels differed from what these scholars describe. Fear of revolts was such that when sailors succumbed to disease, their bodies were committed to the deep at night when the men slaves were below deck and would not realize the diminishing numbers of their jailers.Footnote ⁴⁵

Women and children by contrast, were held on the quarterdeck during daylight hours, and below deck at night, but in both cases once at sea, normally without restraint of any kind, but always divided from the men by the barricado. Women did take advantage of their relative freedom. Slave vessels that left open waters and ventured up rivers, accounting for perhaps 14 percent of the total traffic, faced particular problems heading downstream, a process that could take days. Slaves were normally held below deck at this stage, but small groups were brought up for feeding, The Gezegend Suikerriet was one of the few Dutch voyages to sail up the Gambia. It also had a captain on his first command. On its return downstream in late 1746 enslaved women brought up at feeding time attacked the sailors with billets of firewood and attempted to jump overboard,Footnote ⁴⁶ which explains why vessels leaving riverine embarkation points would normally put women in chains. A similar incident on a 1714 voyage where two-thirds of the captives were female in the Cross River near what is today the Nigerian-Cameroon border, elicited the following poignant entry in the journal of an anonymous crew member:

When below deck, women were adjacent to the officer’s quarters and cook’s workspace. Thus, firewood was not the only weaponry available. The arms’ chest was normally in the captain’s cabin and there are instances of women gaining access when the armorer forgot to lock the chest. There are records of three rebellions occurring when the women successfully passed along guns, swords, kitchen knives and an axe to the men’s deck. Henry Schroeder, himself a boy on the Hudibras (ID 81890) on his first voyage in 1787, found Africans of his own age able to pass weapons through the barricado to the men.Footnote ⁴⁸

Women spent more time above deck than did men. The famous Akan drum from Virginia in the British Museum that formed one of the items featured in the BBC Radio 4/British Museum series “A History of the World in 100 Objects” is often cited as a device used by slave traders to “dance the slaves” (in other words force captives to exercise).Footnote ⁴⁹ This may have been the prime purpose of the drum, but for women on the quarterdeck there was a voluntary function associated with the instrument. An entry in the diary of Captain Ferentz of the Fredensborg (ID 35181) five days after departure states “female slaves entertain themselves by dancing their ‘negro dances’ on the quarterdeck.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This would have been quite unimaginable in the men’s areas beyond the barricado both above and below deck where shackling was the norm. Confinement to a slave vessel did not mean complete disruption of the roles of African women. Food preparation, food consumption in groups of five to ten, and birthing (parturition) also occurred. On the Eliza, described below with 168 captives, three women gave birth but only one child survived.

Not depicted is the sexual molestation to which the crew subjected the enslaved. In 1840 the Jesus Maria (ID 2071) was adjudicated at the Havana Court of Mixed Commission. Only five of the 246 on board were adults. Court officials recorded the graphic testimony of eight girls aged 11 to 15 whom the crew had raped and beaten. The captain had distinguished himself by covering the nose and mouth of a 13-year-old Sherbro girl named “Mania” “to keep her from screaming.”Footnote ⁵¹ On this ship like many others of the period, there were children everywhere above and below the quarterdeck throughout the voyage, though in only a few cases can we link mother and child. The most detailed and dependable guide to the child component of the Africans carried off to the Americas are the registers of British Vice Admiralty and Mixed Commission Courts in the four decades after 1807 (see Chapter 7 for details) that spell out ages and, very occasionally, relationships. The newly born would not normally survive on a slave vessel, nor would they be counted. Data taken from the registers of Liberated Africans show that only 115 of those listed were infants – aged 1 or below – but no less than 27 percent of captives were classed as children. As discussed below, this ratio was higher than recorded in previous centuries.

In some respects, the space on and below the quarterdeck was more restricted than on the men’s side of the barricado.Footnote ⁵² Crew and children slept here and, especially upon leaving Africa, space was severely confined. The Eliza (ID 81194) left Galinhas in southern Sierra Leone in 1805 with nearly five tons of rice, beans, and palm oil in addition to 823 billets of firewood (each billet approximately 3 foot 4 inches long and 7.5 inches round), all stored below the quarterdeck. Unusually, the Eliza’s captain kept a record of daily consumption of provisions during the sixty-three-day voyage, as well as slave mortality. His data allows an assessment of the rate of consumption and an estimate of daily nutritional intake. After allowing for deaths at sea, the barque had on board an average of 168 captives over the course of the voyage, of whom 157 reached Demerara. Africans consumed just over 3 tons of rice and 1.25 tons of beans plus 100 gallons of palm oil. Assuming that the rice was dehulled but not otherwise refined – ergo brown rice – and that cooking doubled its volume, then we have a per capita consumption figure of 0.64 pounds of rice and .026 pounds of beans per day. Even allowing for occasional shark flesh and traces of palm oil, this two-meal-a-day diet would not have provided much beyond 1,100 calories every 24 hours. People around the Atlantic world were of shorter stature two centuries ago than they are today. The average height of men leaving the Sierra Leone region, 1808–1848, was 64.5 inches and of women, 60.4 inches.Footnote ⁵³ Moreover, one-quarter of those on board were children with somewhat lower nutritional requirements, and despite dancing, compulsory or not, the adults could hardly be described as anything other than sedentary. But even after considering such factors, the provisions on the Eliza appear carefully calibrated to keep people alive at minimum expense.Footnote ⁵⁴ Modern nutritionists claim that an adult can survive on a daily intake of 1,500 calories. We need more than one case, but the frequently observed skeletal figures that emerged from the holds of slave vessels in the Americas were more likely succumbing to amoebic and bacillary dysentery-induced dehydration rather than starvation.

One major difference in the voyage experience of men as opposed to women and children emerges sharply from the 230 French, British, and Dutch voyages in TSTD, where the data is sufficient to compare voyage mortality across the age–sex groupings. Men were almost three times more likely to die than women during the voyage, and 60 percent more likely than children. Such differences are more suggestive of the losing side of a savage war than of a mode of transportation. With 36.3 percent of men dying during a crossing and a mean duration of just two months, the men’s deck of a slave ship was a virtual charnel house, especially as this data takes no account of deaths in the immediate aftermath of disembarkation. Given that shipboard mortality was the single most important factor determining the profitability of a slave-trading venture, it is extraordinary that over 350 years northwestern European enslavers could not find another solution to the problem of retaining control of a transatlantic voyage.Footnote ⁵⁵ Mortality on transoceanic voyages generally declined over these centuries across the world as ship design and navigational aids improved. Convict voyages to Australia beginning in 1787 saw deaths on board fall dramatically after rates of 10 percent or more recorded in the first decade of transportation. At the height of the Irish famine, average annual rates on voyages to Quebec rarely exceeded 5 percent. In the slave trade, however, the 6,430 voyages for which mortality data has survived indicate that, after some improvement in the seventeenth century, onboard slave deaths as a proportion of those embarked remained the same between 1700 and 1864 – the years in which 80 percent of the slave trade occurred. This, despite a significant reduction in voyage duration after 1800, discussed more fully below, and the higher value of men compared to women and children.

In the broader Atlantic picture, resistance was crucial in ending the slave trade, but the resistance came from several sources. The first was from those imprisoned on the vessel. The measures taken on board to control enslaved people raised the costs of transportation – and therefore the price of an enslaved person in the Americas. Because transportation formed a wedge between slave prices on either side of the Atlantic, measures to control captives on slave ships also lowered slave prices on the African coast, and this in turn reduced the number of Africans pulled into the transatlantic slave trade.Footnote ⁵⁶ It is safe to assume that other things being equal the supply of slaves varied directly with price. Because of its influence on costs and therefore prices, shipboard resistance has been estimated to have prevented the departure of 1 million Africans to the Americas.Footnote ⁵⁷ A second factor was the St. Domingue Revolution and subsequent rebellions of captives in the Americas explored more fully in Chapter 6. These, too, raised the costs of producing plantation products, reduced the amount consumed, and ultimately reduced the numbers of people pulled into the traffic. But resistance also came from other sources. Third, was the massive half-century-long naval campaign to suppress the slave trade that destroyed 1,600 slaving vessels and “liberated” (however qualified the resulting “freedom”) more than 200,000 Africans found on board. This, too, increased the costs of carrying slaves across the Atlantic.Footnote ⁵⁸ The total cost to the British of this naval campaign plus subsidies and bribes to foreign slave powers to ban the traffic was £12.4 million pounds between 1816 and 1865 (in constant pounds 1821=100) – somewhat less than the £20 million that they paid out in compensation to slave owners when slavery was abolished.Footnote ⁵⁹ Finally, behind the naval campaign was an abolitionist movement that spread around the Atlantic world during the nineteenth century and helped eliminate the demand for slave labor. The interaction of these factors and their relative importance is discussed in Chapter 6. The underlying point in this discussion – ignored by almost all historians – is that resistance did not have to destroy the slave ship or overthrow the slave system to be effective. Higher costs anywhere in the pipeline that converted labor in Africa to the contents of the sugar bowls of Europe always meant fewer Africans carried off from Africa – in the above examples, millions fewer.

One of the widely cited findings to emerge from the first appearance of the TSTD on a 1999 CD-ROM, was that African resistance to the slave trade as expressed through onboard slave revolts displayed a strong regional bias. Rebellions, in short, were much more likely to occur on vessels leaving from Upper Guinea – the coast ranging from modern Senegal to the western limits of Côte d’Ivoire – than from the more southerly regions of sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, compared to these other regions, Upper Guinea was not a major source of captives, supplying fewer than 12 percent of total embarkations over a period of 350 years.Footnote ⁶⁰ The twenty-five years of research since 1999 that have both lengthened and thickened the TSTD have simply reinforced this finding. While Upper Guinea may have supplied only 12 percent of all captives carried off, more than 40 percent of the vessels experiencing revolts came from that same area. In addition, we now know that uprisings on Hispaniola in the 1530s involved Muslim Wolof slaves, all embarked in Upper Guinea, whom slave traders were for a time banned from introducing into Spanish America.Footnote ⁶¹

Were Europeans avoiding what to them were troublesome sources of slaves and thus tolerating longer and more costly voyages to the south and east to reduce the incidence of rebellion? Were enslaved Africans therefore helping to shape the distribution of the transatlantic slave trade? There can be no doubt that Africans influenced the size and direction of the traffic. But the association between revolts on the one hand and the coastal origins (or religions) of slaves on the other, probably has a more mundane explanation.

As Marcus Rediker has noted, “the greater the number of people in the plot, the greater the chance of success, but at the same time, the greater the chance that someone would snitch.” In short, there was a collective action problem, where, because of the high risk and the horrendous consequences of failure, individual captives had an incentive not to participate in a revolt. It turns out that insurrection was more likely on vessels containing smaller numbers of slaves, spending more time on the coast, and carrying a higher ratio of males. These were all characteristic of slaving ventures to Upper Guinea markets, which lacked the supply networks that allowed relatively quick turnaround times in places further south.Footnote ⁶² Particularly striking is the relative absence of rebellions in that portion of the slave trade that operated between Bissau and Cacheu to Amazonia after 1750 – a branch of the trade conducted entirely under the Portuguese flag. Though both locations were in Upper Guinea, the Portuguese had a significant land-based presence there. As we have seen there is evidence of runaways and rebellion in the barracoons of both places, but not a single voyage leaving this port is recorded as experiencing a revolt. Rebellions were never successful, if by success we mean that those imprisoned escaped back to Africa or at least to freedom.Footnote ⁶³ For successful in this sense we must turn to the intra-American traffic. Rebels in three cases – the San Juan Nepomuceno in 1800–1801, the Amistad in 1839, and the Creole in 1841 – really did escape.Footnote ⁶⁴ Ships in this traffic lacked barricados, had smaller crews, slave numbers that averaged fewer than 40, and typically carried a larger proportion of males than vessels in the transatlantic traffic.Footnote ⁶⁵ In other words they shared a lot of the characteristics of transatlantic vessels off the Upper Guinea coast. Shipboard resistance may have had a major influence on the transatlantic slave trade, but the determinants of rebellions had little to do with social structures, religion, or values of the societies from which captives were drawn. The desire to escape captivity was a constant and we need only look for the circumstances that created opportunities.

Resistance of enslaved people on Portuguese and Brazilian slave ships was expressed differently. As already noted, it was more likely to be manifested in the holding centers on the African coast than on the slave ship itself because that is where the enslaved spent most of the time between capture in Africa and sale in Brazil. On South Atlantic routes to Brazil a barrier such as the barricado is never mentioned in the sources. We have three images of a Portuguese slave ship between 1743 and 1830 when the Portuguese traffic was still legal. Two paintings hung in Brazilian churches because the owner of the vessel believed a miracle had ensured the success of his venture are of the Nossa Senhora de Nazaré e S Antônio (ID 8148), and the Nossa Senhora do Rozario do Castello (not yet identified). Both had a full complement of slaves on board yet show no sign of this large defensive work, although it must certainly have existed below decks to separate men from women.Footnote ⁶⁶ Robert Walsh’s drawing of the Bahian slaver, Veloz (ID 1126), made just prior to the 1830 ending of the legal trade to Brazil, also shows no barricado, but it does have a cannon, presumably loaded with peashot, pointing at the slave deck. The shorter voyages around the South Atlantic gyre, together with the practice of embarking captives just prior to departure, made it unnecessary.Footnote ⁶⁷

As already discussed, there was one area where the Portuguese slave trade overlapped with that of the French, British, and Dutch – and that was the Bight of Benin. During the whole period of the slave trade, the Portuguese obtained more than 1 million slaves there, about 18 percent of all the Africans they carried off to the Americas. Here, the Portuguese came closest to the ship-based slave trade of their northern competitors and, not surprisingly, they began to face the same problems. According to TSTD, before 1760 this Portuguese Mina trade was confined to just three locations – the Dutch castle of Elmina, Epe, and Ouidah – locations with rapid turnaround times, especially for Brazilian vessels offering preferred trade goods in the form of gold and tobacco rolls.Footnote ⁶⁸ In addition, in the early decades of the eighteenth century Portuguese slave ships carrying gold to the Mina Coast would often buy the complete slave cargo of English ships, thus compensating for their relative lack of factories in the region and reducing the time that slaves spent on board.Footnote ⁶⁹ Nevertheless, immediately before Brazilian gold began to arrive on the coast, say between 1670, when Bahian slave vessels first begin to show up in West Africa, and 1700, the Portuguese – like their northwestern European competitors – were without significant coastal bases in the region and were forced to trade from the ship in the same way as their competitors. Interestingly, they lost four ships to slave rebellions in four years in the Ouidah road, presumably while they were assembling their full complement of captives.Footnote ⁷⁰ The first permanent Portuguese fort at Whydah dates from 1721. Moreover, this is the one branch of the traffic where an illustration of a Portuguese slave ship complete with a northwestern European style barricado has survived.Footnote ⁷¹ Thus, for these few years a fragment, at least, of Portuguese slave trading was ship-based.Footnote ⁷²

As well as a regional bias in resistance, a second major finding to emerge from the CD-ROM version of TSTD was the strong temporal pattern in shipboard rebellions and attacks from the African shore. More than one-quarter of the total number of people carried off from Africa embarked after British and US abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Yet fewer than 5 percent of the 565 resistance incidents recorded in the current TSTD occurred in this same period.Footnote ⁷³ Part of the explanation for this extraordinary decline is simply the southward shift in the center of gravity of the nineteenth-century traffic.Footnote ⁷⁴ Upper Guinea outlets to the Atlantic, along with those on the Gold Coast, were among the first to withdraw from the business – either because of British naval pressure, or, according to some scholars, an independent Islamic and African-based abolitionist impulse.Footnote ⁷⁵ By 1830, almost the whole transatlantic slave trade drew on the African coast stretching from Dahomey east and south through to the Makonde region of what is now northern Mozambique. But by this stage over this vast region the community of slave traders had embraced the Portuguese system.

The nineteenth century brought major changes to the way slaves were carried off from Africa. The French transatlantic slave trade closed with the outbreak of war with England in 1793 and Dutch involvement, already in decline since the 1770s, followed suit with the French invasion of 1795. The Danes, British, and US had made participation of their own citizens illegal by 1807, and the legislative measures of all three countries did have a major impact. While the French rejoined the trade in 1813 for a further eighteen years, harassment from first the British and then the French authorities meant that the northern European practice of trading from the ship gradually disappeared. In the era of illegal slave trading the presence of slaves on board a vessel was usually incriminating. Slaves were therefore increasingly held on shore until the vessel was ready to depart – the system described above that the Portuguese had established in the sixteenth century. Thus, in the final half-century of the traffic, slaves were spending much less time on the vessel.

Table 4.2 compares the average number of captives found on board slave ships captured off Africa with the average carried off by vessels that escaped capture. In the early phase of suppression, the detained slave ships contained relatively few captives. At this point captains in West Africa were still trading in the northwestern European style by putting people in the slave hold as they purchased them. At the point of detention, many vessels were only partly loaded. Over the next few decades, the number on board captured vessels rose steadily as traders held their captives in shore-based establishments until all were ready to board. In other words, an increasing share of the vessels that the British captured contained a full complement of slaves on board because of the widespread adoption of the Portuguese system. The fact that column 1 never quite matched column 3 on Table 4.2 is explained by several detentions taking place just as the slaves were in the process of embarking. In the resulting confusion traders were able to abort embarkation or land some of the captives prior to capture.

But the major explanation for the apparent decline in resistance lies with an unrecognized and unexpected impact of British naval tactics. The first anti-slave trade patrol began in 1808 but comprised just two warships that cruised only as far south as the southern limit of what is today Sierra Leone. From 1810, however, the Admiralty increased the size of the squadron and extended the patrol range to north of the equator, partly in response to their misinterpretation of a clause in the 1810 Anglo-Portuguese Treaty.Footnote ⁷⁶ Where the British detained just five slave vessels north of the line in 1809, they took twenty-nine in 1810 and over the next quarter-century averaged eighteen detentions per year, despite the fact that for most of this period, only Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch vessels with slaves on board were liable to capture.Footnote ⁷⁷ These initiatives could not prevent the volume of the transatlantic traffic reaching its highest annual level ever in 1829, but it did induce slave traders to spend less time on the West African coast. Compared to the long eighteenth century (1701–1809), the number of days spent on the coast in the following quarter-century (1810–1834) declined by one-quarter. In effect, African sellers of slaves or land-based European slave traders were holding enslaved people in barracoons onshore for longer periods of time and were thereby absorbing the risks of rebellion (and escape) that had previously been borne by the owners, captains, and crew of the slave ship.

Given that vessels would land an agent, unload merchandise, and then put out to sea again before returning to collect enslaved persons, a good part of time on the coast was now spent not at anchor, but in cruising without slaves (and sometimes without slave-trading equipment) while the vessel’s intended “payload” was assembled onshore. The opportunities to stage a shipboard rebellion were now restricted to just the length of the middle passage. But this, too, was sharply cut from sixty-eight days between 1701 and 1809 to just forty between 1835 and 1866, as copper sheathing on the hull, improved design, iron fittings replacing wood, and even steam propulsion all came into use. As we might expect, advances in maritime technology applied to legal and illegal activity alike.Footnote ⁷⁸ If slave ships in the nineteenth century spent far less time sitting on the coast accumulating a full complement of captives than their eighteenth-century predecessors, then the collective action problem identified by Rediker and other scholars moved from the slave deck to the stockade. In effect, the British navy helped reduce the incidence of shipboard rebellions by limiting the opportunities for them to occur. West African slave traders had adopted the Portuguese system in response to British naval pressure after 1809.

The trend in sex and age ratios also contributed to a decline in the incidence of revolts. TSTD contains 4,273 voyages with some information on the proportion of men and children carried during the last two centuries of transatlantic slave trading. Prior to serious attempts to suppress the traffic, men had typically comprised half of those on board. After 1809, this ratio declined to 42 percent by mid-century. More important was the sharp increase in the share of children, from 16 percent before abolition to 32.5 percent from 1810 to the Anglo-Spanish Treaty of 1835, and then a further jump to 42.2 percent in the last three decades of the business. Several voyages carried only children in this era.Footnote ⁷⁹ The only eighteenth-century parallel to such a pattern was the small and specialized traffic in children to serve as house slaves, that operated down to mid-century from the Gambia and the southern rivers of Senegambia to Lisbon. The causes of the nineteenth-century decline in average age remain unclear. Perhaps slave traders were attempting to make their ventures more secure, or possibly, as with non-human commodities, more efficient transoceanic transportation allowed the movement of lower-cost items – in this case, from a slave merchant’s perspective – children. Either way, opportunities for revolt were far fewer after 1809 than before.

The word “barracoons” (shore-based stockades) appears infrequently in the English and French records before 1810; just as the word “barricado” disappears after 1809. Paintings and sketches of captured slave ships constituted a sub-genre of maritime art in the aftermath of abolition. Not one of these illustrations – usually executed by a naval officer present at the time of detention – show a barricado. The 1835 Anglo-Spanish Convention was the single most important slave trade treaty of the post-abolition era in terms of interfering with the traffic as opposed to making it formally illegal. It allowed for the detention of vessels on the grounds of equipment rather than slaves on board. Article X specified that the presence of any one of nine items was sufficient grounds for condemnation. These included shackles, open gratings, an excess of water barrels, bulkheads, or spare planks, but the purpose of the “spare planks” was described as “for[the] laying down of … a slave deck,” not a barricado.Footnote ⁸⁰ All nine items specified would have been familiar to crews and captives from the very beginning of the traffic, but nowhere in this period is there reference to what had been the main defensive work of West African slave vessels prior to abolition. Adult males of course remained in chains, within the field of fire of armament when above deck. William Doherty, a liberated Yoruba taken from a Portuguese slave ship in the mid 1840s recalled “[e]ach morning they were called up & fed on dry gari & salt beef, with one measure of water, five men fed at once one bucket of gari. After they had eaten, they were allowed to stay up & catch the breeze for one or two hours … then they were put down in the hold which was so full they had to fit in close together.”Footnote ⁸¹ But as the time spent bringing captives on board and crossing the Atlantic fell, along with the average age of captives, West African slave traders dispensed with the barricado. Paradoxically, in contrast to the pattern in the plantation Americas, abolitionist pressures were apparently associated with a decline in African resistance, on ships at least, rather than an increase.Footnote ⁸²

Shorter voyages and fewer slave rebellions gave the Portuguese an advantage over their northern competitors, not least because they resulted in lower shipboard mortality, with implications for profits. In addition, Portuguese slave ships were much less susceptible to capture. The eighteenth-century wars that severely disrupted the slave trade of the northern powers at regular intervals were rarely fought in the South Atlantic – where the Portuguese predominated. Between 1660 and 1807, TSTD contains records of 5,535 Portuguese slaving ventures. Only forty-seven of these terminated in capture by a pirate, or by another European power – usually the Dutch – yielding an extraordinarily low capture ratio of less than 1 percent. By contrast, further north frequent wars ensured that the French and English lost 7 percent of their ventures to enemy capture over the same period.Footnote ⁸³

As one might expect from these findings, the crews of Portuguese slavers were smaller than average, and, as Table 4.3 shows, they carried more slaves per crew member than did their French, English, and Dutch counterparts between 1750 and 1810 (the only years for which comparative crew data are available). Nothing approaching the rich accounting data available for the Dutch Middelburg Company, the London-based Royal African Company, and some Liverpool and Bristol slave traders, has survived for Portuguese and Brazilian slavers. We cannot therefore make direct cost comparisons across national flags, much less create a comparative price series for slaves, but all the physical (as opposed to financial) productivity data – voyage length, shipboard rebellions, capture ratios, and crew sizes – suggests that the many private slave-trading merchants in Brazilian ports (and at least one of the several Portuguese monopoly trading companies) were able to deliver captives to planters in Brazil at a lower cost than could northwestern Europeans to their own Caribbean colonies.Footnote ⁸⁴

The British and Dutch were the most successful of the northern nations, with the former as we have seen taking over from the Portuguese intermittently as the leading transatlantic slave-trading nation for much of the eighteenth century. But the British never succeeded in displacing the Portuguese in Upper Guinea, the Bight of Benin, and Angola. The secret to the partial British and Dutch success was strong economic growth in Europe, their growing maritime power, and their associated ability to make the metals and some of the textiles that Africans wanted. The northwestern Europeans were able to tap into Brazilian exports of tobacco rolls and gold by trading with Portuguese ships on the West African coast to create the right assorted cargo. There may have been few traders of English-, Dutch- and French-African descent within Africa, but these northwestern European nations tended to develop close friendships and business relationship with key Africans living on the African littoral. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the British and Dutch used their naval and economic powers to attempt to break into Iberian domination of the Americas and of the slave trade. In the end, they had to make do with the temperate Americas (plus Jamaica and some of the lesser Antilles) for their markets. Their trafficking on the African coast always remained based on ships rather than bulking centers.

By the nineteenth century, the British at last achieved the power to seriously penetrate the Portuguese slave-trading system, but apparently no longer had the will to do so. Indeed, they spent most of that century trying to suppress the traffic. In a counterfactual world, one can easily imagine a pro-slave trade Anglo-Portuguese Treaty as the British fleet carried off the Bragança royal family from Lisbon in November 1807. Such a treaty would not only have allowed British goods into Brazil but would likely have seen English investors based in Liverpool and London become the dominant slave traders supplying nineteenth-century Bahia and Rio de Janeiro with captives – perhaps moving part of their operations to Brazil. After all, French and London-based English slave traders had been trying to ship slaves to both ports in the previous century.Footnote ⁸⁵ If, as Manolo Florentino and João Fragoso have argued, Brazilian slave owners and slave traders squandered their gains pursuing the “aristocratic idea,” an influx of British investors and capital just as the slave-enabled coffee revolution was gathering speed would surely have set Brazil on to a radically different path of development as well as improving the fortunes of the British.Footnote ⁸⁶

But this was an economic opportunity lost, given that 1807 was also the year that the transatlantic slave trade became illegal for British subjects. The actual Anglo-Portuguese Treaty (in 1810) that followed on from the flight of the royal family to Rio de Janeiro contained an anti-slave trade clause. The relationship between capitalism and slavery once more appears complicated. The northern Europeans were latecomers to Atlantic slavery; it was their manufacturing capabilities, financial intermediaries and state support that allowed them to take a few islands from the Spanish, break into the Atlantic slave trade, and develop a West African alternative, albeit temporary, to the Portuguese enslaved procurement system.Footnote ⁸⁷ But it did not have to be temporary. Access to Brazilian ports in the nineteenth century could have provided a bonanza for British slave traders.

Did the differences between the Portuguese and the rest matter? They should matter for historians interested in the African experience. More than 7 million Africans embarked on slave ships between 1701 and 1809, and almost half as many again from 1810 through to the end of the trade. A large literature exists on crowding, mortality, and the horrors of the middle passage, most of it derived from first, the extensive investigations of a committee of the British Privy Council in the late 1780s, second, the narratives of the crews of anti-slave trade cruisers, and third, the massive seven volumes of evidence collected by the British Parliamentary Select Committees on the trade, between 1847 and 1850.Footnote ⁸⁸ This literature presents a single middle passage experience comprising physical violence, shortage of water and food, pestilential disease, periodic cataclysmic revolts, wastage of lives of all on board, and circulating sharks awaiting the next corpse to be dropped overboard. Above all, the image of the Brooks slave ship is still viewed as a reflection of reality rather than, as a comparison of Figure 4.1 and Figure 4.2 shows, an exaggerated, highly schematic, yet very successful attempt to attract public attention. Scholars and public alike have failed to recognize how captive experiences varied markedly over time and space. In short, despite the extensive (and mainly abolitionist) sources, many aspects of the typical lived experience of a slave transported to the Americas are not yet represented in the now extensive scholarship.

The slave experience on Portuguese vessels was not only different, but in the nineteenth century, very different yet again. Alonso de Sandoval collected information from hundreds of Africans in early seventeenth-century Cartagena and wrote what is probably the best ethnological treatise on early modern Africa. Scholars have taken his work to mean that adult males were held below deck throughout the voyage, which an abundance of later evidence makes extremely unlikely.Footnote ⁸⁹ We have argued here that a key feature on all slave ships and probably the shore-based holding areas were long chains running across the space of imprisonment to which captives were shackled. Obviously, Africans spent a significantly shorter period of shipboard time in such conditions in the Portuguese trade, but no Portuguese slave ship has ever attracted the attention generated by their British and French counterparts.

For the abolitionist era historians have more images of Portuguese slavers on which to draw. But this was the period when, as our opening paragraphs suggests, the range of types of ships used in the traffic was at is greatest. The best-known image in Brazil is a lithograph of the hold of a slave ship created by Johan Moritz Rugendas in the early 1820s.Footnote ⁹⁰ Unfortunately, there is no firm evidence that the engraver had ever set foot on a slave ship and his work could not have been executed from life. Numerous paintings hanging in maritime museums, often show a slaver accompanied by its naval captor, but at least we know the artists were present when the events they depicted occurred.

Three such illustrations allow us a closer examination of changes in slave accommodation during the nineteenth century. They are Figure 4.4, Isla de Cuba (1859, ID 4961), Figure 4.5, the Albanez (1845, ID 3483) and Figure 4.6, the Diligente (1838, ID 2588).

Figure 4.4 Contemporary image of the Isla de Cuba (ID 4961) showing planks stacked either side of the hold ready to be used for a slave deck.

Reproduced with permission of the British National Archives, Kew.

Figure 4.5 Albanez (ID 3483). Detained in 1845 with 600 captives, fewer than half of whom are shown in the image.

Reproduced with permission of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

Figure 4.6 Image of the Diligente (ID 2588), showing approximately half the number of captives on board at the time of detention. The other half are below deck and can be glimpsed through the open hatches.

Reproduced with permission of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

While it would be impossible to visually capture this variety in shipping practices, analyzing three images does give some sense of differences to the conditions shown in the Brooks and Marie-Séraphique images.Footnote ⁹¹ Slave vessels had never been large by transoceanic sailing ship standards. But in the quarter-century after 1820 the average standardized tonnage of a slave ship declined by 23 percent. Slave traders not only abandoned the barricado, some even abandoned slave decks after treaties allowing detentions based on the presence of slave trading equipment such as planks and extra water casks came into effect.

Figure 4.4 shows a plan of the hold of the Isla de Cuba (ID 4961) of 1859, which displays the barrels of water and provisions that occupied most of the space in a slave ship. Here the slave deck is in the form of planks stacked either side of the hold lying ready to be laid.Footnote ⁹² Attempting to escape a conviction for slave trading, the captain argued in a US court that the planks were intended for sale on the African coast rather than for use as a slave deck, and that the barrels of water were for ballast only.Footnote ⁹³ A similarly sketched plan of the hold of the ironically named Legítimo Africano (ID 3049), detained in 1835 – not shown here – shows a 50-ton vessel without a slave deck (or the planks to make one) and built for speed. Yet it carried 190 people in an area of 400 square feet and with a deck height of just 1 foot 8 inches. How was this possible? Instead of a deck, the captain had formed a makeshift platform by filling the spaces between the casks with bags of provisions. The key element that made this possible was that all but one of the 190 people on board were children. Such a pattern meant a dramatic reduction in security costs.Footnote ⁹⁴ The British found an identical below-deck environment on the 45-ton Jesus Maria (ID 2071) with 246 Africans on board, of whom only five were adults – all, unsurprisingly, women.Footnote ⁹⁵ Naval officers reported at least a dozen such cases after 1835 describing sand ballast or firewood filling the spaces between casks, or sometimes simply “hides laid on the tops of leaguers.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Scholars have addressed the issue of children in the slave trade by focusing on shifting cultural patterns within Africa, especially the large regional and ethnic variations in child ratios within Africa. However, the jump in the proportion of children carried from all regions in the nineteenth century was most likely a slave-trader response to naval activity.Footnote ⁹⁷

The painting of the slave hold of the Albanez (ID 3483) in Figure 4.5 shortly after its detention in the Congo River in 1845 captures how Africans may have been transported in vessels lacking a fixed slave deck. The painter, Francis Meynell, is probably sitting on the forward stairs looking aft and Africans can be seen on the casks. Frequently reproduced, the image is certainly authentic, and, in this respect, it matches the drawing of the Marie-Séraphique. The painting is not intended as a depiction of conditions in the middle passage because the apprehending cruiser, HMS Albatross, had taken on board many of the captives prior to the long voyage to adjudication in Freetown. Thus, the viewer sees the real belowdecks of a slaver, but only some of the captives. Even so, the image evocatively captures the chaos of a dimly lit slave deck. Africans are spread uncomfortably across the tops of barrels, some on mats, some on the bare wooden hoops; one captive sits on a latrine in the foreground, wrapping himself with his arms, perhaps a dysentery victim. Above the barrels, slaves perch and lie on wooden beams, some with their legs dangling over the ledge. Many more captives are crammed together on platforms running along the vessel’s side, one of the only commonalities with the Marie-Seraphique. Light pours in from the ceiling but only illuminates the captives in the center of the image. The fact that it is daylight gives some sense of how the Africans would have experienced the middle passage: packed below deck in whatever space they could find.Footnote ⁹⁸

While the Albanez and Isla de Cuba give some sense of the holds of illegal slavers, the recently unearthed painting of the Diligente (Figure 4.6) reveals the sheer mass of humanity that slave traders crammed onto their vessels. The Diligente (ID 2588) was a 174-ton brig depicted leaning in slightly toward the painter. It carried 475 Africans – survivors of 520 embarked at Lagos. Detained on its way to Cuba in 1838, the Diligente provides, at first glance, the most accurate depiction of the fair-weather daytime experience of captives for any period; not even the image of the Marie-Seraphique (Figure 4.3) provides such a view. But things are not quite what they seem. The deck shows fewer than half the number of captives that we can document as disembarking a few days after the detention. Furthermore, the seven blue-jacketed figures can only be the prize crew from HMS Pearl, not the original slave-ship crew. Thus, the artist’s viewpoint is probably on the quarterdeck of HMS Pearl as the naval vessel conducts its prize to Nassau in the Bahamas – the capture having taken place in the Caribbean, not off the African coast. The missing two hundred or so Africans are probably below deck; some of them can be seen in the open hatch beside the mainmast. But here, as with all the other Portuguese vessels mentioned in this section, there is no sign of a barricado. There is no illustration of, nor indeed any documentary reference to, such a structure in the illegal era, something that makes sense given the need to conceal the vessel’s intentions from the British navy. Crewmen likely enforced the separation of male and female slaves through restraints and violence or, alternatively, kept captives below deck for the voyage. To derive a perspective of crowding on the Diligente we need to imagine double the number of figures depicted in the painting, crammed below deck. As already noted, the belowdeck numbers can actually be glimpsed through two open hatches fore and aft of the mainmast that the painter has depicted.

Three illustrations cannot encapsulate the experience of captives in the nineteenth-century slave trade, but they can indicate change in that experience over time. The illegal phase of the trade as represented in the voluminous reports of British naval officers communicates a sense of the Wild West when, especially after the 1835 equipment clause, almost anything was possible. Apart from the open launches discussed earlier, slave traders used other strategies to economize on small spaces that fundamentally altered the African experience of the middle passage. In 1842, a 29-ton vessel bound from Ambriz to Brazil took off 127 captives – more than half of them children. The height between water casks and the underside of the main deck was just 1 foot 2 inches, and “one half of the slaves were obliged always to be on deck where they were so confined that every foot of the deck was occupied, while the reminder below were squeezed to excess.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Such variation in shipping practices does not permit easy distillation of the average experience, but scholars and the general public alike need to look beyond the Brooks.

In summary, European and Africa interaction on the coast generated three broad categories of slave experiences over 370 years. The first typically involved vessels carrying fewer than 100 captives and shipping, in addition, considerable produce to Europe from Upper Guinea, or, if going to the Americas, European merchandise and migrants. Confined mainly to the first half of the sixteenth century, the transatlantic voyages might have obtained their captives from the Iberian peninsula, or they might set out from Iberian ports and collect captives from the Canaries or Cape Verde Islands en route. In such cases the slave experience would have included an additional voyage of several hundred miles from the mainland to these offshore islands – as well as detention in barracoons. The vessels involved were caravels or galleons little different from their counterparts that plied the Atlantic and Pacific without slaves on board. The second category evolved from the first. The main difference being that as demand for slaves increased, the vessel became a recognizable slave ship, complete with dedicated slave deck, and often permanent shackles for the men. This system continued throughout the slave trade era, though it became increasingly a defining characteristic of the South Atlantic slave trade. In the nineteenth century, the slave deck might be abandoned. The third category, associated with the northwestern European incursion into the business, comprised the same dense crowding, but a more heavily fortified vessel, larger numbers of crew, long periods spent on the ship both before and after leaving Africa, and greatly increased risk of slave revolts. We cannot be sure of the start date, but it was probably in effect for just 160 years, and it is likely that fewer than half the 12.5 million captives carried off from Africa experienced it.

This third category is certainly the best known of these experiences – partly because of the images of the Brooks and now the Marie-Séraphique. but in the end perhaps even accurate contemporary depictions must give way to 3D visualizations. The surviving plans of L’Aurore, published in 1984 by Jean Boudriot and the contemporary illustrations of the Marie-Séraphique are both incorporated into videos available on the home page of www.slavevoyages.org that begin to show what is possible in recreating the shipboard experience of the enslaved.Footnote ¹⁰⁰