See also Middle Passage and the Love of Liberty: Texts and Sources

THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

The fictional slave ship in "Ama" The Love of Liberty follows the route of the historical Middle Passage Showing prevailing winds map from: Van Dantzig, A, Het Nederlandse Aandeel in de Slawenhandel Fibula 1968 (in Dutch) credit:Koninklijke Biblioteek, Den Haag

• Astley, Thomas (ed) A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels Vol II London 1745
  • 398    Captain Thomas Phillips 1693.
    
    404    Mr. R presented to Phillips a young Tyger which was very tame who kept him in a wooden Cage aboard feeding him with guts of fowls and other garbage for he would eat nothing but flesh.  He was so very gentle that any of the white men might play with him through the cage with their hands but at the sight of blacks would be outrageous. P had likewise purchased two civet cats, which exactly resembled foxes, of the same size, but light grey in colour.  They were kept in wooden coops fed with flour and water boiled but smelled so strong that he never cared to come near them.  They bought several monkeys, baboons, parrots.  They met with an extra ordinary fierce tornado in which they broke their best bower and stream cable.  Next day in weighing up, the best bower-anchor, their sheet cable, which was new, of fifteen inches and never wet before, broke within three feet of the hause hold.
    
    On the Alampo coast (E of the mouth of the Volta) a canoe came off with three women and four children to sell but they asked very dear for them though they were not worth buying for they were mere skeletons and so weak being hunger starved that they could not stand.
    
    405    Whidaw.  It is a most wretched place to live in by reason of the neighbouring swamp whence proceed noisome stinks, and vast swarms of musquitos which are so intolerably troublesome that if a person does not take laudanum or some other opiate it is impossible to get any sleep.   This one night the author lay there, was the most uneasy that ever he felt; for he had not laid down above an hour in the factor's bed before he was so tormented by those little animals, that he was forced to get up again, dress himself, put gloves on his hands and tied a handkerchief over his face till daylight which yet could not secure him from their stings.
    
    413    Grampusses which are as big as small whales and much enamoured with ships for they will follow and wantonly play about them.
    
    Philips had a seton made in his neck on the fifth, to ease his headache, having often used blisters and other remedies to no purpose.
    
    414    At St. Thomas W. Indies put all Negro men in irons lest they should swim away. His Negros died so fast  ... 2 months 11 days to Bridgetown Barbados.  In which time there happened such sickness and mortality among his men and negros that of the first he buried 14 and of the last 320.  Great loss.   Captain delivered alive 373.  The distemper both whites and blacks chiefly died of was the white flux which was so violent and inveterate that no medicine would, in the least, check it, so they reckoned them dead men as soon as seized.
    
    415    The small pox is the other epidemic distemper which negros are incident to in this voyage.  All the assistance they would give the diseased was as much water as they would drink and some palm oil to anoint their sores.   Whites did not catch it though it be the very same malady in its effects and symptoms as in England beginning with a pain in the head and back, shivering, vomiting  fever, etc.  But what the small pox spared the flux swept off to their great regret after all their pains and care to give them their messes regularly and keep their lodging clean and sweet; what is worse, after enduring much misery and stench so long among a parcel of creatures nastier than swine.  No gold finders can suffer such noisome drudgery as they do who carry negroes having no respite from their affliction so long as any of their slaves are alive.  And yet by their mortality our voyages are ruined and we fret ourselves to death tho think that we should undergo such misery and take so much pains for so little purpose.
    
    Chap IV A voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies in the Swallow and Weymouth, Men of War, by John Atkins, Surgeon in the Royal Navy, 1721.
    (also Atkins, John, A voyage to Guinea, Brazil, etc, London, 1735, Reprinted, Arlington Hts., Ill, U S A, Metro Books, 1972)
    
    317    The Slaves when brought here have chains put on 3 or 4 linked together under care of their gromettos (negro servants) till opportunity for sale.  These slaves are placed under lodges, near the owners house for air, cleanliness and customers better viewing them.  Most of them were very dejected.  He took notice of one who was of a tall strong make and bold stern aspect.   This fellow seemed to disdain the other slaves for their readiness to be examined and scorned to look at the Buyers, refusing to rise or stretch out his limbs as his master commanded.  This got him an unmerciful whipping, with a cutting manatea strap, from his masters own hand.  Who had certainly killed him but for the loss he must have sustained by it.  The Negro bore it all with magnanimity, shrinking very little, but shed a tear or two which he endeavoured to hide as though ashamed of.  This person called Captain Tomba, was a leader of some country villages, which opposed them and their trade at the River Nunes, killing their friends there and firing their cottages.  That the sufferers by help of the slavers men, having surprised him at night, brought him thither, but that he had killed 2 of them in his defence before he was caught and bound.
    
    449    At .... they met with the Robert of Bristol, Captain Harding, who sailed from Sierra Leone before them, having purchased 30 slaves, where Tomba, about a week before, had combined with 3 or 4 of the stoutest of his countrymen to mutiny being assisted by a woman slave, who telling him one night that there were only five white men on deck, and they asleep, brought him a hammer at the same time to execute his treachery.  He could only engage one more besides the woman to follow him on deck, where finding three sailors on the forecastle, he presently despatched two with single strokes on the temples; the other rousing with the noise, his companions seized; and Tomba murdered him in the same manner.  But the last 2 of the 5 taking the alarm stood upon their guard and their defence soon awakened the Master underneath who running up took a hand spike and felling Tomba with it secured them all in irons.  Their punishment.  Capt Harding weighing the stoutness and worth of the two slaves, did, as in other countries, they do by rogues of dignity, whip and scarify them only; while 3 other abettors (but not actors, nor of strength for it) he sentenced to cruel deaths making them first eat the heart and liver of one of them he killed.  The woman he hoisted by the thumbs, whipped and slashed her with knives before the other slaves, till she died.

from: Clarkson, Thomas, The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade, London 1808 The slave ship 'Brookes' built for 421 slaves; packed with 700.           A.   handcuffs CDE thumbscrew FGHI speculum oris B foot shackles Den Haag, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 249 H 21

• Eltis, David, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson and Herbert S. Klein (eds.), The Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1527-1867:  A Database Prepared at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University (Cambridge University  Press)
  • In 1993 the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a consolidated database on the Atlantic slave trade.  This project recently was completed, and in early July 1998 Cambridge University Press . . .  publish(ed) a CD-ROM database of 27,233 transatlantic slave voyages which sailed from Europe, Africa, or the Americas from 1527 to 1867.  There are 22 maps of Atlantic regions which will interface with the data, guiding the users' search criteria. Included with the disk . . . (is) a printed introduction which details the procedures used by the editors in compiling the data-set and outlines the 226 variables, or pieces of information, which each voyage could contain.
    
    A complete listing of sources consulted is also included.  Cambridge estimates that the CD-ROM package will cost between $100 and $200. The project had three phases. The first stage established the fields of information, or variables, for a consolidated file and integrated numerous computerized data-sets of Atlantic slave voyages that historians have compiled over the past twenty-five years.  These sets included:
    
    Herbert S.Klein on the slave trade to Havana (1790-1820), Rio de Janeiro (1795-1819, 1825-30), and Virginia (1727-1769), and the Angola slave trade (1723-1771);
    
    Svend E. Green-Pedersen on the Danish slave trade(1698-1789);
    
    David Eltis on the Atlantic slave trade (1811-1867);
    
    Johannes Postma on the Dutch slave trade (1675-1802),
    
    Maurice Schofield, David Richardson and Katherine Beedham on the Liverpool slave trade (1744-1786),
    
    and Stephen D. Behrendt on the British slave trade (1780-1807).  
    
    The second stage computerized published sets of slave voyages compiled by Jean Mettas (Dagets (ed.), Repertoire des expeditions negrieres francaises au XVIIIe siecle, 2 vols.), Jay Coughtry (The Notorious Triangle:  Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700-1807), Enriqueta Vila Vilar, "Hispanoamerica y el Comercio de esclavos.." Elena F S de Studer, "Trata de Negros en el Rio de la Plata, and David Richardson (Bristol, African and the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade to America, 4 vols.).  The third stage computerized unpublished slave voyage information collected, mostly, on the British and Bahian (Brazil) slave trades by Eltis, Richardson, Behrendt, James A. Rawley, and Shawn Miller.  This latter set of voyages is new in the sense that the voyages have not appeared in any other published compilation. These account for about half of the data presented in the consolidated set of 27,233 slave voyages. Further, examination of unused shipping sources has added new information to about one-third of the voyages already available in existing data sets.
    
    The editors believe that the present set contains the large majority of British (1650s-1807), French (1700s-1830s) and Dutch (1680s-1802) slave voyages during these respective periods.  The Portuguese trade (based largely in Brazil) is responsible for the largest gaps, and the seventeenth century French traffic, the later eighteenth century United States slave trade, and the nineteenth century Spanish slaving ventures (based largely in the Caribbean) also are incompletely represented.  Much work also needs to be done on the first century-and-a-half of the trade (1520s-1670s).
    
    Nonetheless, the Du Bois Institute set provides samples large enough to present the major trends over time in the history of the transatlantic slave trade. The variables include a range of voyage information which may be grouped into three categories:  
    
    1) information about the vessel (tonnage, place and year of construction, armament, place and year of registration, and owners);
    
    2) information about the voyage (captains=92 names, dates of departure and arrival from the places of trade); and
    
    3) information about slaves (numbers purchased and embarked on the Coast, numbers died on the Coast and Middle Passage, numbers disembarked in the Americas, numbers of males and females, adults and children).  
    
    Most voyages contain only part of this information, though for at least one-half of the 27,233 voyages the sources report vessel name, captains, one or more owners, tonnage, numbers of slaves on board, dates of departure and arrival in the Americas, places of trade in Africa and the Americas, and voyage fate.  There are data on the age and gender categories of slaves for about 3,800 voyages though no information on the names of individual Africans.
    
    The editors consulted a wide range of published and unpublished material in constructing this consolidated database.  The structure of the data-set includes sixteen "source" variables to indicate to the user from where information for individual slave voyages was drawn.   Data from published works are given one single source reference (the book or article), whereas unpublished voyage data include complete archival citations.  Some eighteenth-century British slave voyages, for example, are reported in customs accounts, ship registers, muster rolls, newspapers, and travel literature.  Full or abbreviated references are given.  The listing of abbreviations and full source references, included in the CD-ROM package, is organized by trading nation or port and subdivided by class or document type.
    
    From an introductory map of the Atlantic world, users will be able to specify regions of trade, such as France or the Gold Coast or Brazil, or trading sites such as Liverpool or Bonny or Charleston.  Users then will be able to select a range of years for analysis, examining, for example, the destinations of Africans embarked in the Gambia River. Or, one could select Jamaica and look at monthly or annual slave imports from the Bight of Biafra.  For all search criteria, users will need to keep in mind that the Du Bois Institute data-set includes a sample of voyages in the transatlantic slave trade.  This set is thus not a resource to evaluate the aggregate volume of the trade, though refinement of participation levels by national carriers may be possible.  For some slave markets in the Americas, links with Africa can be established with more precision.  As most African locations are restricted to coastal trading outlets, specific information on slave provenance zones cannot be evaluated directly from the set.  The editors have also included imputed values to account for missing information on tonnage, slave loading levels, or age and gender ratios.  These values were calculated from information in the set (and thus available to us at the time); future researchers may wish to revise these estimated values.
    
    One of the main goals of the five-year project was to help researchers determine the migration patterns in this case, forced migration patterns of Africans throughout the Americas.  Until the 1820s more than twice as many people of African descent crossed the Atlantic Ocean than did Europeans. There were many African "diasporas" over many years, and information contained in the Du Bois Institute database will help users assess these migration flows.  Similarly, the consolidated set will help scholars analyze African regional histories, rather than the history of "Africa" with little differentiation between African peoples.   Graph and chart options included in the CD-ROM package will help illustrate these patterns.

   

• David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S.
  Klein, _The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM_.
  Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. (User
  guide, xi + 89 pp.) $195, ISBN: 0-521-62910-1.
  
  Reviewed for EH.NET by Lorena S. Walsh, Department of Historical
  Research, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. <ptrlor@erols.com> Published by EH.NET (October 2000)
  • The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database_ is a monumental achievement
    that brings together in a single multisource data set the results of
    over thirty years of international research undertaken by many
    individual scholars working in English, Portuguese, Danish, French,
    Spanish, and Dutch on the largest transoceanic migration of any
    people prior to the outpouring of Europeans to the New World in the
    nineteenth century. The authors entertain "grand hopes" for this
    extraordinary resource, sponsored by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at
    Harvard University with additional support from the National
    Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Ford
    Foundation, and taking seven years to complete. It will, they
    contend, not only "enable historians to develop new insights into the
    history of peoples of African descent and the forces that determined
    their forced migration," but will also "greatly facilitate the study
    of cultural, demographic, and economic change in the Atlantic world
    from the late sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries" (p. 2). Are
    the hopes of the authors, the sponsors, and of Cambridge University
    Press justified? Or is the publication of this database more likely
    simply to facilitate an expansion of the esoteric and sometimes
    contentious numbers games that have frequently characterized slave
    trade studies? My sense is that the project is indeed likely to
    stimulate new research not just on the slave trade narrowly
    conceived, but also on a range of broader economic, demographic, and
    cultural issues on both sides of the Atlantic.
    
    The database includes records of 27,233 trans-Atlantic slave ship
    voyages made between 1595 and 1866, accounting for between two-thirds
    and three-quarters of all trans-Atlantic slave voyages sailing after
    1600. (Independent estimates of the volume of the trans-Atlantic
    slave trade after 1600 yield a "scholarly consensus" figure of 11.4
    million departures from Africa and 10 million arrivals in the
    Americas. This suggests a total of between 34,482 and 35,561 slaving
    voyages in this period.) The authors standardized existing data sets
    compiled by individual researchers, collated voyages that appeared in
    several different data sets, and added new information from
    previously unexplored sources. Extraordinary care was used in the
    initial compilation and in subsequent editing of the database; the
    portion that I have used (and rechecked against original primary
    sources) is exceptionally accurate. Coverage of the British trade is
    fullest (the authors estimate that 90 percent of all voyages are
    included) and the eighteenth-century French and Dutch trades are also
    largely complete. Bigger gaps exist for the Portuguese,
    seventeenth-century French, and nineteenth-century Spanish, Danish,
    and North American trades. However the authors contend that the set
    "provides samples large enough to present the major trends over time"
    (p. 5).
    
    Each entry in the database consists of a single slaving voyage, for
    which up to 226 pieces of information may be available. These include
    162 data variables incorporating information collected from the
    sources such as dates at which the ship left from or arrived at
    various destinations during the voyage; ports of origin, slave
    purchase, and delivery; number of slaves embarked and disembarked,
    their demographic composition and mortality levels; details of ship
    construction, registration, armament, and crew size; names of
    captains and owners; the outcome of the voyage; and archival sources.
    An additional 64 imputed variables are calculated or imputed from the
    data to compensate for missing information and to facilitate analysis
    by consolidating or regrouping variables that have unwieldy numbers
    of individual codes. These include consolidation of geographic
    locations into regional and continental categories, and grouping of
    voyages into different temporal categories (year the voyage
    originated, year in which slaves were embarked, and year of
    disembarkation, and for the last also into periods of 5, 25, and 100
    years). Outcomes of voyages (successful completion, wreck, capture,
    or insurrection somewhere en route, etc.) are reclassified in three
    ways from the perspective of slaves, captors, and owners. Other
    inferred variables group locations into major trading regions,
    estimate the numbers embarked or disembarked where full information
    is not available, and regroup data on age, sex, and mortality. How
    the estimations were made is clearly documented (the SPSS program
    that creates the imputed variables is included on the CD-ROM), so
    users can easily substitute different groupings or estimations.
    
    The usefulness of the database for refining conventional slave trade
    studies is obvious, but it is the broader applications that go well
    beyond core issues such as the volume and demographic structure of
    the trade, Middle Passage mortality, and shipping productivity --
    indeed far beyond the slave trade itself -- that are the most
    exciting. On the African side, data on slave exports from specific
    coastal outlets afford insights into the slave and commodity trades
    of particular African subregions and even single ports, and into
    African agency through resistance to the trade as evidenced in ship
    insurrections, as well as broader economic and demographic results.
    The authors contend that "the large role of Africans in the Atlantic
    world" is "perhaps the single most important preliminary feature to
    emerge from these new data" (p. 35). As the largest data base on any
    transoceanic trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it
    facilitates research into European long-distance shipping activities,
    including investigations of changing shipping technologies and, from
    records of ports of origin, ship owners, and captains, connections
    between the slave and other colonial trades. For the Americas, new
    information on the numbers and demographic composition of forced
    migrants brought to particular destinations suggests a need to
    reassess current understanding of at least some local population
    histories. Even more importantly, the data set makes available more
    precise information on which parts of Africa supplied the different
    parts of the slaveholding Americas. Expanded evidence on the African
    origins of forced migrants will allow scholars to explore the impact
    of African heritage on New World societies, and to better assess
    patterns of cultural retention and adaptation. Most of the papers and
    articles initially derived from the data set (listed on pp. 55-56)
    deal with traditional slave trade topics. However David Eltis's _The
    Rise of African Slavery in the Americas_ (Cambridge University Press,
    2000) -- which builds on the database -- provides a striking example
    of how such quantitative measures can be utilized in combination with
    qualitative materials to address broader comparative economic and
    cultural issues including topics such as gender, ethnicity, and value
    systems.
    
    Unlike many digitized data sets available through sources such as
    ICPSR that require some level of technical expertise to manipulate,
    the data on individual voyages can be readily accessed, queried, and
    rearranged, some basic analyses obtained, and the results graphed,
    viewed on interactive maps, and printed out simply by clicking on
    pull-down menus. Selected subsets can be saved for subsequent
    reference or downloaded into SPSS data files for modification and
    more refined analysis according to individual needs or preferences.
    Thus the database has importance for several different audiences.
    Scholars interested in quantitative aspects of the trans-Atlantic
    slave trade are but the most obvious group. It is also a readily
    accessible reference work that ought to be available to
    non-specialist as well as specialist users of college and museum
    libraries. Finally, it is a marvelous teaching resource, both for
    supplementing other course materials and from which students with
    varying levels of technical expertise can develop a wide range of
    research projects.
    
    A closing caveat is perhaps in order since my enthusiastic
    endorsement of _The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database_ is
    definitely not that of a disinterested reader or casual user. Invited
    to present a paper exploring a subset of the database pertaining to
    the Chesapeake region for a conference held at Williamsburg in 1998,
    I at first imagined that this would entail little more than a cursory
    review of some revised numbers. That supposedly limited foray has
    since expanded into a multi-year research project incorporating
    additional information on Chesapeake slaving voyages; tracing
    connections between the slave, indentured servant, and tobacco
    trades; exploring social, demographic, and cultural implications for
    the region; and developing museum interpretations underscoring
    trans-Atlantic interconnections. My experience is surely not unique.
    An example of a related project is Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, ed.,
    _Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy,
    1699-1860: Computerized Information from Original Manuscript Sources_
    (Louisiana State University Press, 2000).
    
    Until recently compilations of slave trade statistics have seemed to
    reduce one of the darkest episodes in world history into a set of
    abstract and bloodless figures. This commendable collaborative effort
    now offers scholars not only an authoritative source for developing
    better statistics, but also an extraordinary resource from which to
    begin translating those esoteric numbers back into a more humanized
    history.
    
    (System requirements: The following configuration is recommended to
    run the CD-ROM: Windows 95, 98, or NT operating system; 166 MHz
    Pentium processor; 32 MD RAM; 800 x 600 monitor resolution x 65,536
    colors (16 bits); 6x speed CD-ROM drive; 84 MD available hard disk
    space.)
    
    Lorena S. Walsh is the author of _From Calabar to Carter's Grove: The
    History of a Virginia Slave Community_ (University of Virginia Press,
    1997), and of "The Chesapeake Slave Trade: Regional Patterns, African
    Origins, and Some Implications," _William and Mary Quarterly_,
    forthcoming, January 2001.
    
    Copyright (c) 2000 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be
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    EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net; Telephone: 513-529-2850;
    Fax: 513-529-3308). Published by EH.Net (October 2000). All EH.Net
    reviews are archived at http://eh.net/bookreviews/

   

  •  
• Lee, Mrs. R. (Mrs. T. Edward Bowdich), Stories of Strange Lands, London, 1835
  • 335 Without exception, this was the most awful storm I ever witnessed; it was of short duration, but the sharp broken thunder conveyed an idea that mighty rocks were rent asunder.  The flash of lightning, which struck three men flat on the ground, and injured our mast, lasting so long that I could have deliberately threaded my needle while it illuminated the cabin. I was anxiously awaiting the return of the boat's crew from a distant excursion, though they were in fact safer than we were, with all our ironwork and masts. The most perfect darkness enveloped us, just at sunset, and my cousin crept close up to me though be had been born in the land of thunder-storms; but, in a few minutes after, every object was as distinctly visible as if it bad been day, the light seemed to be white from its intensity, and the thunder for the time took away the sense of hearing. A dead silence succeeded, and the steward, who first recovered himself, procuring a light, called for assistance to the men on deck.. We were too happy to find them alive, and, prescribing for them at hazard, we sent them to bed, and in two days they were perfectly recovered. The boat's crew escaped, with no other inconvenience than a drenching, for they put into a small creek, where they landed. Had they not done so, it is probable that the deluge of rain which followed would have swamped their frail conveyance.
    
    356 The two former of these islands (St. Thomas - Sao Tome; and Princes - Principe) belong to the Portuguese; and, I fear, as long as they do so, will continue to be harbours for slaves.  They are conveniently situated within reach of all the mouths of the rivers which fall into the Bight of Benin, and a little to the south; small vessels shoot across from them like birds, go further up the rivers than English vessels can follow, and, watching their opportunity, they return and deposit their cargoes, scudding off again while our cruisers are at a distance.  When the slaves amount to a sufficient number, they are shipped at these intervals, for the Brazils, the Havannah, &c &c. The climate, both of Prince's and St. Thomas's, is said to be exquisite; both are represented as being highly fertile, and watered with delicious springs, in which water cresses frequently grow.
    
    Annabona rises like a huge cone from the sea; and tradition says that it was first peopled by some slaves, who, having murdered their captors, ran the vessel in there, and, breaking her to pieces, settled in what was before a desert speck in the waste of waters.

   

• Reynolds, Edward, Human Cargoes: Enslavement and the Middle Passage in Tibbles, Anthony (ed.), Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity, HMSO, 1994
  • 32    Slaves were brought upon deck at mid-morning and those who had died during the night were thrown into the ocean . . . any slaves found to be attempting to starve themselves were severely whipped.  . . According to a ship's surgeon, "Upon the negroes refusing to take sustenance I have seen coals of fire, glowing hot, put on a shovel and placed so near their lips as to scorch and burn them."  . . . At other times, the speculum orum, a mouth opener, was used to force-feed the slaves. . . . mortality rate was reduced to about six per cent towards the end of the eighteenth century through efforts to achieve better living conditions on ships.

   

• Walvin, James, Black Ivory: A History of British slavery Fontana 1992 (quotations and notes)
  • 16    Zong   ex Liverpool   1781.  6 Sept. from West Africa to Jamaica. 470 slaves. 12 weeks later, nearing destination. 60 Africans and 7 of 17-man crew already lost. A great many of the remaining slaves were sick of some severe disorders and likely not to live long.  If the slaves died a natural death it would be a loss to the owners of the ship.  If they were thrown alive into the sea, it would be the loss of the underwriters.  (When the slaves are killed or thrown into the sea in order to quell an insurrection on their part, the insurers must answer)  Zong's captain called officers together.  Suggested jettisoning the sick slaves.  It would not be so cruel to throw the poor wretches into the sea, as to suffer them to linger out a few days, under the disorders with which they were afflicted. Captain said ship was running short of water.  Before all the sick slaves were thrown overboard there fell a plentiful rain which continued a day or two and enabled them to collect six casks of water, which was a full allowance for 11 days, or for 23 days at half allowance. 131 slaves drowned.  420 gall water on board when they arrived.  Some of the crew objected but captain insisted.  54 first day, then 42, 26 on third day.  Act done in the sight of many of the unhappy slaves who were upon the deck at the time.  Apprehending a similar fate and dreading of being fettered, ten more of them in despair jumped overboard and were likewise drowned.  One of the jettisoned slaves managed to catch a rope and climbed back safely on board.  In court case in London, slave owners were represented by solicitor general.  To bring a criminal prosecution would be madness: the Blacks were property.  The question after all is, was it voluntary or an act of necessity.  This is a case of chattels or goods.  Cuguano said: Our lives are accounted of no value, we are hunted as the prey of the desert and doomed to destruction as the beasts that perish.
    
    21    1785 Bristol vessel. Revolt in which 12 slaves died on the African coast. Temporary calm.  More serious revolt suppressed only by firing on the slaves.  Between shootings, woundings, drowning and illness, ship lost 55 slaves.  To kill a slave or group of slaves was an economic misfortune but it did not constitute a human outrage.
    
    30    Iron, copper and brass bars were used as currency, silks from India, refined metalware and textiles form England, the best of European drinks. . . Firearms. Africans quickly became accustomed to staring at the guns mounted on the ships and trained on their canoes and settlements, or carried by sailors on the coast. . . Rum and tobacco fed to slaves on board.
    
    35     Slave ships offered storage space for slowly accumulating cargo.
    
    37    Each slave landed in the Americas with his or her own unique memory of enslavement.  The trauma of enslavement - the initial moment of capture - was but the first of an apparently endless succession of blows, some deadly but all of them painful, humiliating and unforgettable.
    
    38    A 'snow' of some 140 tons a very old and crazy vessel hardly fit to lie in a dock. Only one of the ship's twelve sails was unfurled, the topsail. Testing the sails and equipment. Ship echoed to the sound of the ship's carpenter repairing the planking and plates while the crew stored the provisions and prepared the cordage.  Loaded a sheep and a quarter of beef.  Gales moderated.  Weather remained poor, 'dirty' to use the captain's parlance.  Ship tacked in vain before running for shelter.  Accompanied by flying fish and a large turtle.  Approaching West Africa gunner organized the ammunition and guns, carpenter made the necessary alterations to 'the woman's room' to the holds and the ship's yaul (the small six-oared boat necessary for ferrying people and goods to and from the shore.)  Ship's guns brought up and run out.  After leaving coast captain (Newton) writes to his wife innumerable changes and difficulties which without a superior protection no man could escape or surmount are by the goodness of God happily over.  I am going to walk the deck and think of you and according to my constant custom recommend you to the care and protection of God.   His cargo - ranks of miserable Africans destined they knew not where, were firmly secured in their chains below.  Captains saw nothing wrong, contradictory or unchristian in their chosen trade.
    
    40   . . . made a timely discovery today that the slaves were forming a plot for insurrection.  Surprised two of them attempting to get off their irons....Put the boys in irons and slightly in the thumbscrews to urge them to a full confession.  Crewman came ill out of the longboat, of a fever, declining ever since, departed this life.  Buried a man slave died of a flux another of the gravel and stoppage of urine. . . this morning buried a woman slave, know not what she died of for she has not been properly alive since she first came on board. . . Slave traders violent, cruel inhuman trade, no soft-heartedness. Notoriously unattractive occupation.
    
    42    Young slave, freed from his chains because of his ulcerous condition, managed to pass a marlin spike through the deck gratings to the slaves below.  In an hour 20 slaves have broken their chains and loosened the bulkheads of their hold.    Captain: by divine assistance we were able to overawe them.  Captain suspected that some of the slaves had tried to poison the water but  found that they had simply put native fetishes or charms into the water, which they had the credulity to suppose must inevitably kill all who drank of it.
    
    43    Approaching America, slaves were paraded on deck in batches and shaved, then washed a day later with fresh water.  With the slaves topside, their holds were cleaned out.  Slaves were exercised, though always in small manageable groups.
    
    44     Imagine to yourself an immense body of water behind you, higher than a house, and a chasm of equal depth just before you. . . in the twinkling of an eye the ship descends into the pit which is gasping to receive her, and with equal swiftness ascends to the top on the other side before the mountain can overtake her.  And this is repeated as often as you can deliberately count four. (Newton)
    
    Slaves delivered to the coast already ill-treated and terrified...Delivered by; canoes, securely bound, ill-fed, exposed to the elements as they lay trussed up in the water-logged bottom of the canoes.  Once bought by Europeans, the men are immediately fastened together, two by two, by handcuffs on their wrists and by irons riveted on their legs.  Sent down between decks.  Women put into separate quarters, without irons.  Small boys in another.  All closely cramped.   They are frequently stored so close, as to admit of no other posture than lying their sides.  Neither will the height between the decks, unless directly under the grating, permit them the indulgence of an erect posture, especially where there are platforms.  Platforms were deep shelves half way between the decks, dropped down from the side of the ship towards the centre, creating an extra layer of storage for the slaves.  Africans were packed into the platforms, just as they were onto the decks, a mere two or three feet below.
    
    45    Improved ships: 500-600 negroes.  Space between decks planed very smooth and painted.  Provided with wind sails and ventilators.
    
    46 No profit in sick or dead slaves.  Ships weighed between 200 and 300 tons. 500-660 slaves.  Before late 1780s British slavers calculated on carrying two slaves per ton.  In 1788 British parliament  - vessels up to 207 tons limited to five slaves per three tons.  One slave per ton above that weight.
    
    47 From fore to aft, from the nose of the ship to the rudder, the Africans were arranged in tightly packed rows  which seem to owe more to geometry than human accommodation.  Cross-section : impression of claustrophobia.  Shoulder to shoulder along the length of the ship, head to toe or head to head.   Headroom of five feet, halved by the shelves . . . cramped for want of room, in irons both hands and feet, two together. Difficult to turn or move, to attempt either to rise or lie down, without hurting themselves or each other....Motion of the ship, especially her keeling or stoop to one side, when under sail.  As they lie athwart or across the ship, adds to the discomfort of their lodgings, especially those who lie on the leeward, or leaning side of the vessel.  Dire is the tossing, deep the groans.  Large numbers of the slaves were sick and most terrified.
    
    48     Dysentery, the bloody flux.  Coping with calls of nature in crowded conditions, chained in twos and more, any movement of the rolling ship must inevitably produce collisions with the other slaves.  Appalling, stinking reality of life below the decks. Atlantic storm or heavy weather.  Immediate demands of the ship disrupted routines of exercising, cleaning and feeding the slaves, tending the sick, removing and disposing of the dead.   Smell overpowering.  Air between decks hot and fetid.  At anchor, ship became a brew of intolerable heat and stenches. Loathsome.  Pestilential.  Galling of the chains.  Insupportable.  Filth in the necessary tubs.  Three or four large buckets of a conical form, 2ft in dia at the bottom and only 1 ft at the top and in depth about 28 inches for shitting.  To reach them slaves tumble over their companions, in consequence of being shackled.  Continual quarrels.  Bruised.  Collisions, fights, curses.  Too sick or disheartened to run the gauntlet.  No strength to move.  Ease themselves as they lie.: source of broils and disturbances. . . Lavatory buckets overflowing. .  .Slaves defecating where they lay.  Quarters in a stable-like quagmire.  In wet and blowing weather portholes and grating secured.
    
    50    Covered with blood and mucus due to flux.   Slaughterhouse.  Heat stench foul air. Noisome and noxious effluvia.   Capricious and unpredictable terrors of the deep. Slave ships carried beans, bread, cheese, beef, flour from Europe, bought food in Africa. Fierce discipline over belligerent and difficult crew.
    
    51    want of provisions as beef oyle malaguetta. 150 gall malt liquor, 15 bushels salt, 11.5 hogsheads vinegar, 300  lbs. tobacco, 10 gross pipes.  4 puncheons old beef, 3 cwt 10 lbs. flour 12 cwt biscuits, 40 quarters of beans.  Bought in Africa: 50 chests of corn, 40 lbs of malaguetta pepper, 20 gall of palm oil, 2 bushels of salt, 20 gall of rum for each hundred slaves.  Slaves usually fed twice a day.  Diet of horse beans, boiled to a pulp, boiled yams or rice, small qty of beef or pork (occasionally).  Latter taken from provisions laid in for the sailors.  Sauce of palm oil, mixed with flour water and pepper - called slabber sauce.    Yams for Ibos or Bight negroes, rice or corn for slaves from Gold Coast.  Slaves from the Gold Coast would eat anything put before them.  Hated English beans.  Unless they were narrowly watched when fed upon the deck they will throw them overboard or in each others face when they quarrel.
    
    52    Routines.  8 am and 4 pm small bucket of  food was handed over to groups of 10 slaves.  Each given his spoon for the voyage.  Quickly lost. Slaves feed themselves with their hands.  Good weather - slaves herded on deck for their food.  Bad weather fed below in cramped and filthy quarters. Constant friction over food, especially when put on short allowance.  Very scanty portion. Many sick or desperately ill.  Cooperation? Strong help the weak?  Greedy take advantage of their weaker shipmates.  Noble selflessness. Heartless greed.  Many gave up the struggle and refused to eat.  Force fed to keep them alive.
    
    53    Slavers built up a reasonable knowledge of African herbal treatments, nursing customs, favourite foods and recipes.  Africans clung to their own priests and fetish men.  Took some local herbs infused in brandy and gave as a cordial to the sick. Another herb, resembling Camomil, used for emollient fomentation and cataplasms. Local bay leaf used in the hot bath with wonderful success.  Surgeon on board. Loathsome profession.  Financial or personal misfortune.  Charlatans.  Drunken incompetents.  Some industrious and capable.  Encouraged by reward - head money - paid for healthy arrivals.
    
    54    Carefully examined new slaves intimately and often publicly.  At sea transferred very sick to separate quarters, just as crowded.  Finds several dead. . . sometimes fastened to a live slave.  Dead thrown overboard.  Surgeon tried to supervise regular cleaning of overnight filth.  Dysentery epidemic or storm overwhelmed the surgeon.  Proportionately more crew died than slaves.  Large number of slaves died within two years of arrival.  Very feeble and weak on arrival, with such a contraction of nerves from confinement in irons that they were scarce able to walk.
    
    55    Exercise on deck twice a day. 2 crew used cloths to rub them perfectly dry in hot weather.  Another to give a little cordial.  Surgeon or his mate attends to wash their mouths with vinegar or lime juice to prevent scurvy.  Slaves washed or refreshed themselves.  Sailors sometimes forced them to exercise by dancing and to sing.  Songs are melancholy lamentations.  Diversions:  beads for women, pipes for men.  Crew attempt to keep slaves in good humour.  Deeply, often catatonically depressed. Unhinged by their experience.  Equiano tried to talk to one to cheer him up, to no avail, he was left abandoned to despair.  Multitude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow. Surgeons believed melancholy to be a cause of death.
    
    56    Refusal to eat, move or help themselves in any way.  Suicide.  Flung themselves into the ocean, diving off the main deck, slipping through the portholes, leaping from the small boat carrying them from the shore.  Some went mad and had to be restrained. Sailors accustomed to a harsh and brutal life.  Kept in order by the most draconian of punishments.  Crew members put in irons.
    
    57     Slave women were an easy target for the sailors, demoralized, defenceless, exposed to the passing whims of the white sailors.  Sterner captains tried to keep the men from the women.  On some ships common sailor was allowed to have intercourse with such of the black women whose consent they can procure.  Officers permitted to indulge their passions among them at pleasure, and sometimes are guilty of such brutal excesses as disgrace human nature.  Sailors could dole out blows, ridicule and whippings with virtual impunity.
    
    58    Moans of pain, shrieks of the insane. Corpses thrown to the accompanying sharks.
    
    198    Equiano on lack of a common language
    
    199    Sexual Relationships
    
    212     Extended family.  Adoption of new arrivals
    
    213    Collective strength

   

•  Bruce L. Mouser, ed. _A Slaving Voyage to Africa and Jamaica: The Log of the Sandown, 1793-1794_.

  •  Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2002. xxii + 156 pp.  Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-253-34077-2.

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  •  H-NET BOOK REVIEW Published by H-Atlantic@h-net.msu.edu (January 2003)

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  •  Trevor Burnard <Trevor.Burnard@brunel.ac.uk, Reader in early American History, Brunel University, West London

  •  

  •  In early April 1793, the experienced British slave ship captain Samuel Gamble took his ship, _Sandown_, owned by an investment syndicate of London brokers and consigned to Joseph and Angus Kennedy, merchants in Kingston, Jamaica, to Upper Guinea in West Africa to buy Africans for transhipment to Jamaica where they would become slaves.  He decided to keep a journal, or log, of his activities, from the loading of the ship in late January 1793 in Greenwich until the the voyage ended at roughly the same place on 11 October 1794.  The log fortuitously has been preserved and is owned by the Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum, London. Bruce Mouser, emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and an expert on the history of Sierra Leone as well as an experienced editor of primary material relating to that area in the period of the Atlantic slave trade, has produced a modern, heavily annotated, version of this log that enables Gamble's observations to become more widely known. I have not examined the original manuscript and thus cannot verify that the edition offered to the public matches the original.  But the care with which Mouser has annotated the text invites confidence that this edition meets the highest scholarly standards.

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  •  Professor Mouser should be congratulated on his labors in bringing this very impressive text before our notice.  The log is of intrinsic interest for several reasons and will be fascinating to several different constituencies.  The primary audience is Africanists, especially specialists in West Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gamble describes succinctly but vividly the structure of the Atlantic slave trade in the Rio Nunez region of present day Sierra Leone, outlining the role that private traders such as Dr. James Walker and David Lawrence played as middlemen, facilitating trade between African sellers and European buyers.  Anyone interested in understanding the structure of slave commerce as it was practiced on the windward coast will find this edition, along with its extensive and helpful annotations, extremely useful.  Nearly two-thirds of the text deals with Gamble's difficulties in Africa.  They demonstrate how complicated and difficult the Atlantic slave trade was in Africa.  Gamble was an experienced and seemingly efficient slave captain but he faced enormous difficulties in procuring slaves and in keeping his ship and its crew in proper shape.  As Mouser explains, ship captains had to get the timing of both arrival and departure exactly right in order to maximise profits.  Gamble was off in both respects.  He arrived too early (mid-June) to be able to meet the peak of the slave buying season and his early arrival meant that his crew was exposed to the end of the rainy season and the very real likelihood of catching fever. Mouser details the deaths of numerous seamen, lamenting on September 4 that his crew "are become quite Peevish, fraxious, ill natur'd and Childish [...] am at a loss to know what to do with them."  His early arrival did not help him in getting his cargo on board such that he could arrive in Jamaica in good time when the sugar harvest began and when planters were most likely to buy slaves.  Ideally, he should have left West Africa in November but the necessity of replacing dead crew with new people, his own illness, and difficulties in dealing with both European traders as well as African intermediaries meant that his many journeys inland and around the coast to facilitate the purchase of slaves had little effect.  By mid- to late-November, should have been able to secure a full complement of slaves. On November 2, 1793, however, the _Sandown_ held just five slaves with "No Slaves coming down owing to a dispute in the Interior part of the Country."  By mid-December, Gamble had bought 40 slaves but he was still far short of his full complement of 220 slaves. He only reached that number on March 26, 1794, meaning that he was likely to arrive in the British West Indies far too late for optimum sales. Gamble's travails shows how precarious was the difference between success and failure in the trade, serving as a useful corrective to simplistic accounts that assume the trade to be a simple and lucrative way of denuding West Africa of people and profits.

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  •  Africanists will be interested in other features of the text besides its elucidation of business success and failure in the slave trade.  The remarks that Gamble made concerning the coast of Africa and the appearance of the interior are valuable first-hand testimony about an area of the world little commented upon in this period.  More significant, perhaps, are Gamble's occasional commentary upon the people that he meets.  He thought little of Africa--a "country at variance with Mankind" and full of disagreeable wild beasts, enormous snakes and an abundance of annoying insects.  The animals of Africa indeed made such a racket that "there's little if any sleep to be got so that a European richly deserves what he gains."  He was even less impressed with Africans, whom he describes at first encounter in the Cape Verde islands as "rogueishly inclin'd from their Infancy."  Africans in the Sierra Leone interior were even worse: "filthy and beastly as ugly" with "Miserable" houses; moreover, they were jealous, indolent and "capable of depraved barbarity."  "A Philosopher," he concludes "would here find an ample field to display his genius which may justly be term'd a Natural History of the Human Species in their Savage state."  Gamble's distaste for Africans and easy capacity to compare them to animals reflect standard European thinking but his expressions of distaste are sufficiently detailed and forceful as to make his words arresting.  His words are given more force when counter-posed with his equally contemptuous attitude to the Irish peasants that he encountered in Cork.  He asserted that the Irish live worse than Africans did in Africa, especially Irish women who were "us'd to a degree of barbarity carrying the manure on their backs to the land, while as of[ten] great idle fellows are looking on at their ease."  Teachers will find it useful to expose students to Gamble's prejudices to both Africans and the Irish, in order to show that it was not only Africans that Englishmen compared to animals: Gamble noted that in Cork "People[,] Hogs[,] and Dogs all live in the same place" and were probably fed "out of the same vessels."

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  •  Scholars interested in the organisation of the slave trade, particularly as regards the crossing itself and the sale of Africans in the New World, will also find Gamble's log interesting, although the information about these activities is less full than that on slavery and society in Sierra Leone.  Gamble had no more luck transporting Africans to sell in the Caribbean than he did in procuring slaves.  Soon after his ship left he faced a slave insurrection where ten slaves died.  Sadly, he tells us little about how the insurrection developed and how it was put down.  But the fact that it did occur illustrates the danger of trading in slaves and why slave captains heavily armed their ships.  Insurrection was less detrimental to the success of the mission than disease and crossing the Atlantic.  Gamble barely did either.  He lost thirty-four slaves to disease, as well as several crewmen.  His water kegs leaked, forcing him to put his crew on three-quarters rations.  Not surprisingly, when he put into Barbados to get fresh supplies, sixteen of his crew absconded, losing all their pay in the process.  Gamble's log gives evidence of just how appalling conditions were on slave ships and why only the most desperate men signed up to serve as seamen on slavers.  By the time he limped into Kingston on May 13, he had only 6 crew and fewer than 200 slaves.

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  •  Gamble's travails were not over on arrival as his delay in leaving Africa had cost him dearly.  He arrived in Britain's premier slave buying colony when planters were busily restocking their plantations after the reduction in the supplies of slaves during the 1780s.  But the supply of slaves in Kingston in May 1794 was too great even for Jamaican planters.  Gamble noted that the island was overrun with French emigrants, was subject to an epidemic of yellow fever and had "very scarce and dear" provisions. Planters could not buy slaves because they lacked adequate foodstuffs. Moreover, the harbor was clogged with ships--Gamble noted seventeen slave ships in Kingston, carrying 5,432 Africans. Not surprisingly, he found the "Sale of Negroes here very indifferent at present."  It took him nearly two months to sell all his slaves (save for four sickly ones he could not sell).  Gamble does not mention the prices he received for slaves and says little about the process of selling slaves in Kingston.  This absence of detail is a great shame, but one suspects that Gamble's profits from the 18-month expedition were very slim. The slave trade was not an easy business, even if overall profits in the trade were healthy.

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  •  Africanists will find this work more useful than will Caribbeanists.  But scholars in general will enjoy Mouser's careful annotations of Gamble's interesting text and will appreciate his careful index and full bibliography.  The only regret is that Mouser could include only a few of Gamble's many illustrations in his edition.  That cannot be helped.  We should be grateful for what we have and be pleased that this important text has been given the sort of care and attention that mark good scholarship.

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  •           Copyright (c) 2003 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and  H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.

OTHER REFERENCES

Adams,Capt. John, Sketches taken during ten voyages to Africa between the years 1786and 1800, London, 1823, Frank Cass, 1966

Canot,Theodore, Adventures of an African Slaver NY 1928

Conneau,Theophilus A, Slaver's Logbook

Donnan,Elizabeth, Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade to America, 4 vols,Washington 1930-35

Falconbridge,A, An account of the slave trade on the coast of Africa 1788

Hair, P. E. H.,Atlantic Slave Trade and Black Africa , 36pp Liverpool UP, 1989

Harms, Robert,  The Diligent: A Voyagethrough the Worlds of the Slave Trade  2003  ISBN: 0465028721

Howard,Thomas. Black voyage: eyewitness accounts of the Atlantic slave trade. [1sted.]. Boston, Little, Brown [1971].

Mannix, DP and Lawley, M, Black Cargoes London 1963

Palmer,Colin A., Human Cargoes The British Slave Trade to Spanish America UrbanaIllinois

Phillips,Thomas, A Journal of a Voyage Made in the Hannibal of London 1693-4 (inChurchill's Collection of Voyages 1732)

Rawley, James,The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade New York 1981

Reynolds,Edward, Stand the Storm, A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, Allison andBusby, 1985

Roemer L F ATrue Account of the Coast of Guinea 1760

Schwarz,Suzanne  SLAVE CAPTAIN The career of James Irving in the Liverpool slavetrade 164pp. Bridge Books, 61 Park Avenue, Wrexham, Clwyd LL12 7AW. Paperback,Pounds 8.95. 1 872424 42 2.

TattersfieldNigel The Forgotten Trade Jonathan Cape 460pp

Villault,N, A Relation of the coasts of Africa called Guinea 1670

Williams,Gomer History of the Liverpool ... with an account of the Liverpool Slave Trade