The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History, Revised Edition

12. The Middle Passage

BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 243 / / The Transatlantic Slave Trade / James A. Rawley 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [First Page] [243], (1) Lines: 0 to 17 ——— 5.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [243], (1) 12. the middle passage Few stereotypes about the Atlantic slave trade are more familiar than popular impressions of the Middle Passage—the crossing from Africa to America. Huge ships—crammed to the gunwales with Africans, packed together like spoons, chained to one another, daily exposed to white brutality, meager provisions, and hygienic neglect—in long,slow voyages suffered abnormally high mortality rates for their hapless passengers. A diagram of the Liverpool slave vessel, the Brookes, has for nearly two centuries nourished this stereotype. A nauseous sketch depicted a large ship of 320 tons, whose narrow and shallow decks were packed with slaves “like books on a shelf.”The diagram was printed in 1788 when Parliament was deliberating upon a law that in effect would have restricted the Brookes to a cargo of no more than 454 slaves. It was calculated that if every man slave was allowed six feet by one foot, four inches, platform space, every woman five feet ten by one foot four, every boy five feet by one foot two, and every girl four feet six by one foot, the Brookes could hold 451 slaves. A witness who had been on the Brookes’s voyage of 1783 testified that“they bought upwards of 600 slaves, and lost about seventy, in the voyage.” On its voyage in 1785, the Brookes shipped 740 Africans from the coast.1 The sketch and the calculation were the work of the London abolition committee , based upon dimensions that the government investigator, Captain William Parry, had brought back from Liverpool. The print, Thomas Clarkson declared,“seemed to make an instantaneous impression of horror upon all who saw it.”Abolitionists circulated the print in Great Britain and abroad. Clarkson carried a copy to Paris where the revolutionary Mirabeau had a small model built for display in his dining room. In Philadelphia some 3,700 copies were distributed. Since then nearly all popular accounts of the slave trade, as well as a good many scholarly studies, reproduce this print.2 Ships of 320 tons were not uncommon in the trade in the 1780s, though they were not the standard. Certainly for the long years before the middle of the BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 244 / / The Transatlantic Slave Trade / James A. Rawley 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [244], (2) Lines: 17 to 27 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [244], (2) eighteenth century most slave ships were much smaller, as we have seen. Nor were most slave ships specially built to transport human cargoes. In this chapter we shall try to thread our way through the controversial topic of the Middle Passage. Witnesses before the parliamentary investigators at the end of the eighteenth century offered often-contradictory points of view, drawing on their own experience in the trade. This welter of views serves to point to the complexity of the subject. It also serves to point to the partisan atmosphere in which abolitionists and defenders of the trade were giving testimony to shape legislation. Wilberforce scored the testimony of the Liverpool slave trader, Robert Norris, who “had painted the accommodations on board a slaveship in the most glowing colours.” He then proceeded to depict the misery of the slaves, fettered to one another, cramped for space, amidst stench, without sufficient water or food, forced to eat, forced to exercise, singing not songs of joy but of lamentation for the loss of their homeland, subject to brutality and severe mortality.3 For analysis of the problems posed by the Middle Passage we shall look at rates of mortality for Europeans and for whites in Africa, for crew members, tropical medicine in the slave era, government regulation of the trade, causes of mortality, care of slaves in transit, brutality, “tight packing,” disaster at sea, preembarkation mortality, and postembarkation mortality. Comparison of Middle Passage mortality for slaves with white mortality...