Life on a Slave Ship

“Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves.” - Abraham Lincoln

The Atlantic slave trade saw millions of Africans taken from their homeland and shipped across the ocean and forced to work in brutal conditions in the Americas. The conditions on slave ships were abhorrent. They were filthy, cramped, disgusting and terrifying for their occupants. Slavery was part of African society long before the arrival of European slave traders. However, the type of slavery practiced in the African tradition was entirely different. Captives who could be debtors’ prisoners of war, or political prisoners were traded within the cabinet as a sign of wealth. Slaves were not considered chattel, With the influx of Islamic merchants, slaves from Africa were transported to the Mediterranean and later to the Americas by European merchants. When Europeans arrived in Africa they first tried to raid the areas themselves. Those raids weren’t successful so Europeans changed strategies and began buying enslaved people from African slave traders in places like the Congo. The influx of European money became highly tempting and African traders began to raid nearby towns and villages to acquire more people to sell to the Europeans. Captives from throughout Africa were brought together in port cities to be transported across the Atlantic Ocean.

As they moved around from place to place on their journey towards the coast, enslaved Africans would be changed to one another in slave trains. Usually in shackles joined together by a metal chain or often by their necks in a type of long continuous wooden or metal collar, spaced less than a metre apart and joined by timber or metal chains. The people in these trains came from a variety of different backgrounds, spoke different languages and may never have seen the ocean before. But what we can say without question is that they had never been on a ship like the one they were about to board. Once at the port city slaves were marched onto the ships and placed below deck after being freed, former slave Oladuah Equiano who was active in the abolition movement in England in the 18th century wrote about his experiences, when it came to his journey on a slave ship he described the initial confusion and shock he felt and said that he wasn’t sure the white men were going to ‘kill’ or ‘eat’ him. Once he was onboard, in his own words ‘a multitude of black people of every description chained together, everyone of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow.

Chains used on the enslaved Africans would chafe and cut into their skin making movement painful, with such a high death rate among the middle passage, many of the captive would regularly find themselves chained to a corpse. Slave ships were designed to carry hundreds of people but in the interest of profit, they were often severely and dangerously overcrowded. Captives were often packed into the ships so tightly that they would be unable to move or sleep without touching off another prisoner. Engravings depicting the conditions on the infamous slave ship ‘The Brooks’ which were later a key exhibit in the argument against the slave trades, showed how the slaves were laid out below deck on the ship. Prior to the passage of the regulation act in 1788 ‘The Brooks’ carried over 700 slaves. After the law was passed regulations restricted the number of captives aboard to 450 prisoners.

Given the chance many of the enslaved tried to end their own lives by varying different means. Captives would refuse to eat or try to poison themselves. Others would try to jump overboard into the sea. To prevent this, hips were equipped with suicide nets. Even if someone managed to get through the nets, ship would send boats out to bring them back. To the crew any enslaved person lost in transit meant a reduction in profits. Because they were considered for labour the majority of captives were men, women were enslaved too. On the ships women and men were kept separate from each other. Woman and girls were sometimes not kept in chains like their male counterparts.

For reasons of profitability keeping human cargo alive throughout the journey was essential. Crew members did whatever it took to get them to eat. Slaves diet include bread, beans and salted meat. If a person refused to eat they were flogged as much to punish them as to demonstrate to the other captives that resistant was not tolerated. Take the story of a slave transported on ‘The Royal George’ a ship that crossed the Atlantic to Barbados in 1727. He refused to eat until he was mostly skin and bones and became seriously sick. This infuriated the ship’s captain Timothy Tucker. He feared that the slave’s cations would inspire the other 200 captives he had onboard. He asked his cabin boy to fetch a large horsewhip to flog the slave. But in this case, it didn’t work. The slave took the punishment and despite Tucker’s threat to kill the man, he did not relent. Crew members would also force fed slaves. They used a special piece of equipment called a speculum oris, which was a long thin, mechanical contraption that was used to force open unwilling throats to receive gruel and hence sustenance. Slavery remained legal in America until the implantation of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on the 1st of January 1863, from that day onward, slavery became illegal in the United States of America.