by Ira Berlin
Taken from deep within the African interior, Africans faced a long, deadly march to the coast. Traveling sometimes for months, they were passed from group to group, and slaves might find themselves sold and resold many times over. Each time they would be imprisoned in some filthy pen, poked and prodded, and perhaps auctioned off to yet another set of strangers, as many peoples participated in the slave trade. Even before they reached some central distribution point, according to one account, “great numbers perished from cruel usage, want of food, traveling through inhospitable deserts, &c.” But whoever drove the captives to their unwanted destiny, the circumstances of their travel were extraordinarily taxing. Ill clothed and ill fed, the captives moved at a feverish pace, only to stop again and languish in some pen, while middlemen bartered over their bodies, sold some, and purchased yet others to add to the sad coffle.
Captives did not go quietly. Resistance that began at the point of capture continued as the enslaved marched to the coast. Rebellions rarely succeeded and, while some captives escaped, most of the fugitives were recaptured; the journey then began again. Conditions improved over time, but in the 1790s one in four slaves taken in central Africa died before reaching the coast. In some places, more than half the slaves perished between their initial capture in the interior and their arrival on the coast. Overall, the movement to the coast was nothing more than a death march for many.15
Conditions in coastal factories were, if anything, even more lethal. Often built in low-lying swamps, they were breeding grounds for disease. Captives found themselves packed away in dank dungeons with little ventilation and little concern for the most elementary sanitation. There they could languish for weeks, sometimes months, depending on the nature of the trade. The weak and traumatized fell by the thousands, as epidemics swept through their crowded pens. The corpses, according to one account, were simply dumped into the surrounding marshes, as a kind of human landfill. Inevitably they reeked of death.16
Exhausted and emaciated, the survivors did not simply await their fate. Even at this last moment, captive men and women sought to regain their freedom. Some tried to get word to their families, so they might be ransomed. A few well-connected captives were redeemed. The vast majority of captives with neither the connections nor the resources needed to buy themselves out of bondage sought to escape. However, once they entered the walled castles, flight became increasingly difficult; the handful who succeeded were soon recaptured and returned, as the towns that grew up around the barracoons had little sympathy for the fugitives. Still, the barracoons were rife with conspiracies and insurrections. Revolts and escapes, though rare, punctuated the history of the coastal enclaves, perhaps because the captives’ desperation pushed them to risk all. Carried from holding pens to the awaiting slavers, some jumped overboard and swam toward shore. Others, refusing to see their loved ones shipped across the Atlantic, banded together with friends and relatives in order to assault the canoe men. But only a handful of these last gasps for freedom succeeded.17
These were the fortunate few. Most captives faced the nightmarish transatlantic crossing. The depths of human misery and the astounding death toll of men and women packed in the stinking hulls shamed the most hard-hearted. Slave traders themselves testified to the deleterious effects of the trade. Even among those who defended slavery, there were those who condemned the Middle Passage as an abomination. But, like all human experiences—even the worst—the Middle Passage was not of one piece. While the vast majority suffered below deck, a few men and women chosen from among the captives helped set the sails, steer the ships, and serve the crews that carried the mass of Africans across the Atlantic. A few were armed to guard the enslaved. Denmark Vesey, the former slave whose alleged conspiracy shook South Carolina in the 1820S, was but one of many slaves who sailed the Atlantic as the personal servant of the ship captains. Some slave ships employed free black sailors among their crews, and a handful sailed with black crews. Others were elevated from the mass of captives to the crew when the ship was shorthanded or required some special service, such as a pilot or translator. Guardian slaves—many of them drawn from the gramettoes who defended the barracoons—continued their collaboration with slavers on board. In addition, “privilege slaves,” who were the property of the captain and other officers, were given an indulgence as part of their compensation and mixed with others of no special rank. Such slaves received special treatment, if only to allow their owners to realize this benefit. The Atlantic passage of these captives differed greatly from those stowed below deck.18
The Middle Passage differed from place to place and changed over time. While some slave ships shuttled from port to port purchasing and selling slaves to amass the most marketable cargo, others loaded a full complement and proceeded directly across the Atlantic. Once in the Americas, slavers might discharge their entire payload at a single port or travel to different ports, peddling slaves in small lots. Depending upon the port of embarkation and the port of arrival, the transatlantic crossing could take weeks or months. Slave ships, no less than other vessels, suffered the hazards of ocean travel, be they pirates, privateers, or shipwrecks. Seasonal changes in trade winds made a difference, as did the skill of the captain and crew, the nature of maritime technology, and the vessel’s construction. In general, the shorter the voyage, the better the slaves’ chances of survival—although short journeys under unfavorable circumstances could be more deadly than months at sea.19
Slave captains appreciated the benefit of delivering their captives alive and healthy. If they needed a reminder, the great merchants who financed the trade instructed them as to the care of their valuable cargo, issuing orders respecting rationing, exercise, and medical attention. Corpses, after all, found few buyers. But aboard ship the alleged rationality of the market faltered before the irrationality of the trade in human flesh. While captain and crew might be directed to allow slaves “every indulgence Consistent with your own Safety,” the safety of the ship and the profits rendered its owners always trumped indulgences granted to slaves, with disastrous results for the captives. Fear of shipboard insurrection induced slave traders to keep captive men cramped below deck for weeks and sometimes months, and pressure to reduce expenses left many slave ships short of provisions, water, and medical supplies. Even the most enlightened captains—whether alert to their own pecuniary interests or mindful of the needs of their captives—often lacked the ability or resources to deliver their cargoes alive and well. Some slave ships were well supplied and directed by seasoned mariners; others lacked proper provisions and were captained by incompetent or simply untested seamen. But the best-supplied ship, directed by the ablest mariners, could suffer disastrous consequences if it ran short of provisions, was struck by disease, or was thrown off course. The highly competitive trade in slaves, with its thin profit margins, fostered the wildest speculation. Some traders took risks that lacked only intent to be criminal. Skimping on food, filling the hold with extra slaves—so-called tightpacking—redounded to great profits for the trader, but they also meant great pain for the traded. The ever-changing mortality rates speak to the fact that the Middle Passage was always a nightmare, but it was not always the same nightmare.20
For the captives, however, some things never changed. Fear was omnipresent as the captives, stripped naked and bereft of their every belonging, boarded the ship and met—often for the first time—white men. Brandishing knives, whips, shackles, neck rings, and—perhaps most frightening—hot irons to mark their captives in the most personal way, these “white men with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair” left more than a physical scar. Many enslaved Africans concluded they were in league with the devil, if not devils themselves. For others, their seared skin confirmed that they were bound for the slaughterhouse to be eaten by the cannibals who had stamped them in much the way domesticated animals were marked.21
The branding iron was but the first of many instruments of savagery the captives faced. Eighteenth-century ships were violent places
where imperious captains ruled with the lash, and the barbarity of maritime life reached even greater heights on the slave ship, where whips, chains, shackles, and thumbscrews were standard equipment. When it came to subduing slaves, the captains’ autocratic power was extended to the crew, and men who had been themselves brutalized often felt little compunction in brutalizing others. Indeed, the inability of the captives to defend themselves unleashed the most sadistic impulses, promoting appalling cruelties, as the lines between the callous and the cruel, the cruel and the vicious, and the vicious and the sadistic were fine indeed. Under the best of circumstances, slaves could expect the lash for the slightest infraction and various other punishments for actions that threatened or even appeared to threaten the success of the voyage.
While violence was ubiquitous on the slave ship, it was neither random nor purposeless. Rather it was calculated to intimidate captives in circumstances where there could be few incentives for men and women to submit peacefully. By awing captives with overwhelming power wielded without regard for life or limb, slavers hoped the display of force would convince the captives that resistance was futile. To that end, captives were stripped of the trappings of humanity: denied personal possessions, privacy, and other prerogatives accorded the meanest members of free society. Slavers used every occasion to emphasize the captives’ degraded status and utter isolation—indeed their lack of status. The filth and violence dissolved the carefully developed distinctions between the pure and the impure upon which many African societies rested. The humiliation that accompanied such degradation was almost always public, giving the captives little means to maintain their dignity. Among the lessons taught in this systematic debasement was the sacrosanctity of white skin. More than any single place, the origins of white supremacy can be found in the holds of the slave ship. Speaking through a black interpreter, one captain informed his captives that “no one that killed a white man would be spared.” Few were.22
Equally inescapable was the horror and anguish that accompanied the captives’ stark realization of what transport across the Atlantic entailed. Sometime during their journey, in one terrifying moment, they understood that family, friends, and country were gone, never to be seen again. The markers of identity—many of which had been physically inscribed upon their bodies in ritual scarification, tooth filing, body piercing, and tattooing—were denigrated, if not transformed into a source of ridicule. Lineage, the most important source of social cohesion in African society, was dissolved. Sons could no longer follow fathers or daughters their mothers. The captives had been orphaned, and their isolation shook them to the very essence of their being, as they realized they were no longer subordinates within communities of mutual—if unequal—obligations but rather excluded from all communities. Observers universally commented on the captives’ consternation—“terrible apprehension,” “deepest distress,” and, most tellingly, “the terror”—as they confronted the stark reality of death in life.23
In like fashion, other critical social distinctions lost their meaning, as the complex hierarchies and webs of dependencies that gave form to African societies were swept away. Unlike Europeans who crossed the Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—even those coerced as indentured servants, debtors, or criminals—there would be almost no possibility of going back, no connections to relatives and friends in their homeland, and no aspirations for a brighter future. Perhaps for that reason, most shipboard rebellions took place within sight of the African coast. Once land fell from view, the captives’ appreciation of their separation from everything they knew and loved deepened. The effect was devastating. As one observer noted, “All cried very much at going away from their home and friends, some of them saying they would kill themselves.”24
The violence and horror of isolation soon yielded to an even more pervasive companion. As the sharks that trailed the slave ships well knew, death was a universal presence aboard the slave ship. Its ubiquity was matched only by its variety, as men and women sickened from disease, dehydration, and the ever-present effects of the rolling yaw of the ship. Many died. The damp, dank, crowded holds spawned endless varieties of deadly afflictions. Children, whose mortality exceeded that of adults, fared particularly poorly. Although mortality rates of those crossing the Atlantic improved over time, on average more than one in seven Africans who boarded a slave ship did not leave alive. The count was generally higher among men than women and higher still among children of both sexes. Slave ships left a trail of dead bodies across the Atlantic.25
For those who survived, few escaped some kind of disability or illness. Fevers from a variety of diseases to which Africans had no immunity as well as crippling dysentery—the feared bloody flux—were a fate shared by almost all aboard the ship at one time or another. The numerous pathogens that accompanied tainted water exacerbated the effects of the various contagions. These, in turn, were multiplied by the primitive medical care offered by the ship’s physician, who might be a barber by training. The emaciated condition and deranged psyches of those who disembarked on the west side of the Atlantic were a measure of the frightful costs of the transatlantic slave trade.
After weeks at sea, the routine became familiar. Days and nights blurred in the darkened holds so that the captives could no longer distinguish the two. Packed between decks with hardly enough room to move or even sit, the slaves’ muscles stiffened and their minds numbed as the unrelenting odor of sweat, urine, and excrement generated by the dozens—sometimes hundreds—of men and women stuffed into small, unventilated compartments overwhelmed all. The stench was unforgettable. “Such a salutation in my nostrils ... I had never experienced in my life,” remembered one survivor. Equally unsettling were the sounds—the groans of the dying, the snap of the lash, the creak of the ship itself. Amid the ordeal came the daily ration of foul water, hardtack, and nondescript stews of yams and palm oil with a small piece of salted meat hardly made more palatable by a shot of rum. The only break from the putrid air and darkness was few moments on deck, where slaves—squinting at the light and savoring a sea breeze—took a silent count of who had survived yet another day. Then came the forced “dance”—the captain’s pathetic attempt to keep the slaves’ bodies limber—always under the watchful eye of armed men, fearful that the slaves’ brief release from their confinement would spark rebellion.26
But if the routine grew familiar, it also grew more depressing, and a deep melancholy blanketed the captives as even the most sanguine became resigned to their fate. The sense of hopelessness increased as the ship sailed west. Some captives—distracted by the violence, weakened by malnutrition, sickened by the primitive sanitation, and crazed by lack of water—were determined to destroy themselves. They waited for the right moment and threw themselves into the sea and the waiting sharks. When the crew—determined to protect its valued cargo—blocked the way with nets and other barriers, slaves starved themselves. The crew force-fed some, employing the speculum oris, a diabolical device designed to hold the slave’s mouth open while some gruel was poured down his or her throat. Others were beaten into submission. But having lost the will to live, many slaves were determined to die, and they did.27
Captive women faced special dangers. Although rarely shackled and often housed above deck, enslaved women found themselves prostituted to their captors. Ottobah Cugoano, who endured the Middle Passage in the eighteenth century, recalled that “it was common for the dirty filthy sailors to take the African women and lie upon their bodies.” Officers and crew believed sexual access to the enslaved women to be simply one of their prerogatives. Some captains issued strict orders against dalliances with captives; others partook in the raping, taking multiples “wives” from among the captive women. Vulnerable and available, women, in the words of one captain, “[a]fforded us abundance of recreation.” Surrounded by sexual predators, with but small means to protect themselves, they became subject to outrageous abuse on their person. Although women—in large measure because of their superior abili
ty to retain water—survived the Middle Passage better than men, the scars were deep.28
At no time in the long history of slavery were slaves more at the mercy of their captors than during the Middle Passage. Yet, linked together by a shared determination to survive, black men and women found small ways to control their own destinies. If the enormous differences in power between themselves and their captors left enslaved Africans little room to negotiate, their very desperation forced them to try. Slaves scrutinized the captain and crew, searching for some evidence of empathy in the hard-bitten men who lorded over them. Slavers, despite their monopoly on force, understood even they could not rely on coercion alone. They searched for collaborators who might serve as the captain’s eyes and ears below deck in return for some small shard of privilege. Slavers also enlisted “guardians” chosen from the castle slaves who served a similar function in the barracoons. They purchased others precisely for this purpose, generally from among captive peoples with a long history of animosity against those aboard the slave ship. Slaves from the Gold Coast thus were enrolled to control slaves from the Windward Coast and vice versa. Guardians were dressed in the symbols of European superiority—trousers, blouses, and caps—and given the badges of their office—whips, special foods, and other advantages—to set them apart from those chained below. But like the slaves they lorded over, they too were sold upon reaching the Americas.29
