The Diabolical History of Slave Selling

The water… the most lasting memory of any who survived and suffered the middle passage, was the water. Its rhythmic, sloshing ambiance was the backdrop to an unimaginably terrifying ordeal. Shackled to another with barely room to breathe, illness and disease riddled the lower decks of the slave ships.

People would try and escape, would attempt mutiny when they could, yet should a rebellion fail – torture and violent abuse were certain. Food came once a day if then and was barely digestible. Many found the only escape was to take one’s own life jumping off the deck – if one could even reach the deck and if the slavers hadn’t put nets up. Yet for weeks going into long months, the rhythmic sloshing of the water was the only semblance of nature to enslaved persons of the Atlantic slave trade – cold, blue, indifferent, anonymous – their only possible escape and certain death. Welcome to History on Fleek, today we examine the diabolical history of the Atlantic Slave trade. Why the slave trade? Starting in the 16th century through to its abolition in the 19th century, the Atlantic Slave trade very much shaped the world. Essentially, the slave trade was borne of the European desire for cheap labor on their tobacco, cotton, and sugar plantations, but also their mines.
The overwhelming majority of people victims of the slave trade were from Central and Western Africa. The First Passage of the Atlantic Slave trade was the forced removal of Africans from their homes, typically they had been captured by rival tribes or even their own, where they were taken to African ports before being sold and loaded as cargo. In the 16th century, the first party to buy West African slaves to transport them across the Atlantic for forced labor were the Portuguese.
Across the following centuries, the Dutch, the French, and The British would soon join. It’s understood the Portuguese were slave traders who would actively join raids on the African coast to plunder parties for slavery. Curiously, Europeans would avoid the practice in the majority – not for their upstanding morality mind you – but due to the lack of commercially available malaria treatment at the time.
Ultimately, at the expense of much humanity, European traders had found profit in the forced labor of the enslaved and systemized it. As the Atlantic Slave trade began to find pushback across the continent of Europe, America would carry on its course of economic expanse through the forced labor of slavery. As estimates stand, between 12 to 12.8 million Africans were made cargo for the Atlantic slave trade over some 400 years.
From personhood to ‘thinghood’ The first European transportation of African slaves was in 1525 from Sao Tome to New Spain. Infamously, the physical transportation of slaves was hideously overcrowded and beset with inhumane conditions. A voyage across the Atlantic could last as long as one to six months.
A typical slave ship held several hundred slaves with around 30 crew members. From the barracoons of West Africa to their arrival in the ‘New World’, enslaved Africans were only viewed as cargo. They were treated as the property of the slave traders and were not afforded any protection or rights.
Male slaves were chained together by the ankles in pairs, and women and children would be granted a margin more room. If there was food for the ‘cargo’, it would be one meal a day with water, typically yams, rice, corn, and palm oil. Once the food was scarce, slave traders and crew became the only priority to feed. Characteristic of most slave transports, the traders and crew were forever in fear of a mutiny of revolt – on some French ships, slaves would be given brief periods on deck for fresh air, yet this was atypical.
The conditions below deck were radically dehumanizing, and the consequences were shudderingly real. A trade of trauma At its most heinous and inhumane, the Atlantic Slave trade hit its stride in the triangular slave trade – slave ships left Europe with goods, arrived in Africa traded goods for slaves, then sailed the slaves to the European colonies in America.
This period of the journey from West Africa to the Americas is colloquially known as ‘The Middle Passage’ – also a bi-word for the most dangerous and life-costing section of the journey. Below the decks of the slave ships, hundreds of slaves were forced below to live in horrific conditions of squalor for months at a time. With no consideration or care for well-being or hygiene, the people below deck faced an astonishing mortality rate.
The biggest killers on the journey to the Americas were starvation and disease. The spread of scurvy, amoebic dysentery, smallpox, measles, and syphilis were heightened in the cramped and close quarters below deck. So bad were these conditions that crew members of the slave ships would actively avoid going below themselves. Many of those enslaved would have been taken as cargo already ill, but this was hardly an endeavor concerned for their wellbeing.
It was more than possible that a slave could find themselves shackled to an individual who would soon die. They could then be left shackled to the diseased for hours even days. Crowd control was a distinct reality for the enslavers and their ships. Could a voyage keep the enslaved fed and hydrated it worked well for the grander operation – providing healthy slaves for the shores of the New World.
However, these enslaved were people and the conditions they faced were hideous, most slavers would use force and torture to gain obedience from the independent. It cannot be understated the extent of cruelty used to ensure humans became orderly cargo. Should a pregnant woman give birth on the voyage, she risked that newborn being killed, to not hinder her sale on the other side.
Rebellion was the risk of risks for any slave – one tale of quelled rebellion aboard an enslaver resulted in one slave being murdered and two more slaves being forced to devour his liver and heart. Beatings of the enslaved were commonplace and resistance was far from uncommon. Tragically and unsurprisingly, the most common theme of resistance from the middle passage was suicide alongside a refusal to eat.
So entrenched was suicide during the middle passage, the enslavers soon netted the side of their decks to quell the problem. Curiously, the indigenous West African Kru peoples developed a reputation of being substandard slaves – which absolutely wasn’t the case.
They were viewed by their slavers as such because they would attempt suicide upon the loss of their freedom, they held their pride and identity above any lifetime of slavery. The Zong Among the very worst examples of enslaved people’s treatment was the voyage of the Zong in 1781. A disaster that simply escalated thanks to each element of the cargo’s grim treatment.
The British slave ship started with a no doubt greed-induced problem of overcrowding. Along the journey, the standard middle passage fare of malnutrition and disease had been heightened, around 60 slaves and serval crew members were dead. Throw in some bad weather and the already calamitous voyage was slowing dangerously, drinkable water became scarce.
As a result, the crew drowned many slaves at sea. This was to conserve drinking water but more chillingly, to allow owners to reap insurance on ‘lost cargo’… In total, some 130 enslaved people were killed on the journey. Many of them simply took their own lives in defiance, they didn’t need throwing into the sea, they jumped.
The Zong massacre as it would be historically earmarked became a tentpole in the abolitionist movements to come. The trade of the trade Upon arrival in the New World, the passage for the enslaved was no less fraught with danger and damage. The loss of identity had been continually cited as one of the lasting damages of the Atlantic Slave trade.
On top of being forcibly taken and stolen from their homeland, should a family find itself on the other side of the middle passage, it would be separated. Parents, children, their siblings, husbands, and wives would all be sold to different vendors. On a journey that had only broken minds, bodies, and spirits, the enslaved would face the further indignity of being sold at auction.
Buyers, typically plantation owners would inspect the slaves in terms of their physical features, their strength, and overall health, this all before any bidding began. In a systemic commodification of human beings, the European colonists developed a period of adjustment for their newly purchased slaves called ‘seasoning’.
This entire process included adjusting the enslaved Africans to the language, geography, diet, and labor regimen ahead of them. In the eyes of slave traders, the ‘seasoning’ was critical to their forced labor requirements – it held the opportunity for both physically and mentally stronger slaves and those who survived seasoning would gain a higher market value.
Yet this is not what happened a lot of the time. In the thirteen colonies of America, death rates during seasoning are estimated at 25 to 50 percent. The severity of these radical changes upon displaced and traumatized people had profound aftermath. Enslaved Africans who somehow survived the middle passage found conditions only similar ashore in the Americas.
Physical violence in the form of regular beatings, many to the point of death, and in the case of female slaves, sexual assault and rape were all horrors awaiting in the New World. Abolition and aftermath For the good of all, the Atlantic Slave trade would come to an end. In the latter part of the 18th century, the British (of all people) would raise the question of morality in slavery and an abolitionist movement was born.
In a telling sign of how developed morality was or wasn’t on the matter, the abolitionist movement in Britain would gain traction ultimately through economic arguments and not moral ones. Uck. However, the slave trade was finally abolished in the 19th century. Though Britain is usually credited with leading the charge, (for the record, they were no doubt the most effective as world leaders at the time) they were not the first.
Following its independence from France in 1804, it was actually Haiti who became the first western hemisphere nation to abolish slavery. Britain would take all the headlines three years later in 1807 and this was no small feat as it placed the onus on their cousins across the Atlantic. However, slavery continued to exist in many parts of the world, most prominently in the United States.
While Northern states would abolish slavery in 1804, ending the procurement of slaves from the west African coast was countered by an internal slave market in the US. It would take a Civil War and the ratification of the 13th amendment until the end of the Civil War in 1865. In essence, so much of the growth of the United States from the New World to a Superpower was made possible through the forced labor of slavery.
A toxic mix of a country on the up only looking to deepen its economic growth and atrocious means meant the US stuck a course longer than the rest of the world. As consequence, in a Western hemisphere shaped by inequality and subjugation, the US holds a bold legacy of racism visible to this day. From gerrymandering to police brutality, from voter suppression to the segregation of schools, the sins of America’s past hold stains visible today.
The phrase ‘all men are created equal’ was penned by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. It is uniquely American and has gone on to be one of the most famous on earth. It is a pure, ideal, moral standard that the country and culture strives to obtain and… you know, being forever placed as the world’s loud and proud optimists… in a country born in defiance, in an experiment begun in the name of freedom, in a place synonymous with liberty – you wanna bet against ‘em? This is History on Fleek, and we’ll see you next time!