Slave Ships and The Slave Trade

This image displays how a British slave ship, the Brookes, set up the stowage to hold hundreds of enslaved Africans on its voyages to the Americas. It was created based on the descriptions of Thomas Clarkson, a British anti-abolitionist who worked to end slavery and the slave trade within the United Kingdom. Source

Beyond bringing animals, plants, and immigrants to the Americas, ships enabled colonizers to transport large numbers of enslaved Africans to the Americas as laborers. As populations of indigenous peoples in the Americas shrunk due to the spread of diseases like smallpox, European colonizers were faced with a large need for laborers to do the immense agricultural work, as well as other work, that would power the colonial economy. The Transatlantic Slave Trade emerged as European buyers traded guns and other manufactured goods to African sellers, who in return sold slaves to the Europeans. As the need for labor on sugar, rice, and tobacco plantations in the colonies grew, so did the number of slaves transported by ships from Africa to the New World colonies. Between 1713 and 1739, the South Sea Company transported around 75,000 slaves to the Spanish American colonies (McDonald). On each voyage, hundreds of slaves would be packed into a ship, with little personal space, and transported to the colonies to be sold to consumers. Interestingly, while some of the crew on these slave ships were enslaved themselves, serving on a slave ship occasionally offered enslaved people a chance at freedom, as they could sometimes able to engage in trade and purchase their freedom from their masters6.  Many slaves, however, ended up working on agricultural plantations such as the sugar plantations in Brazil and the West Indies, both notable for labor-intensive work that resulted in the deaths of thousands of enslaved Africans.

The ships that carried hundreds of slaves per voyage possessed special modifications designed by slavers that enabled them to hold so many people. Three of the biggest features of slave ships were the “house”, “slave deck”, and “barricado”, all of which enabled slavers to temporarily shelter or restrict the movement of enslaved people during transport to the colonies. Enslaved Africans were held temporarily in the “house”, made of timber, on the main deck and later moved to the “slave deck”, a temporary structure build between the main and second deck, chained together in spaces about 5-6ft² in size (Webster). The “barricado”, also constructed of timber, was used to partition and secure areas of the main deck where slaves would stay when they were brought up from below7. One characteristic of each of these structures was that they were easily removable. This meant that these ships could be easily disguised from authorities or used for other purposes, such as holding manufactured goods from Europe. While slave ships also had open grates and holes for breathing in addition to these temporary structures, miserable conditions on the unsanitary, cramped, and nearly airless slave ship, especially in the slave deck, created hazardous conditions that resulted in high death rates for slaves along the Middle Passage. Despite the high death rate of captives, slavers, empowered by the technology of ships and design innovations for slave ships, continued to transport enslaved people to the Americas in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, ensuring that large numbers of people were displaced from Africa and forced to labor for the benefit of colonizers in the Americas.