The Slave Ship

Africans captured in the interior of West Africa and West Central Africa were transported through land and water pathways until they reached the coast. After arriving in slave ports such as Cape Coast, Ouidah, and Luanda, they were kept confined in castles, barracoons, warehouses of all sizes, fortresses, and other provisional structures for weeks or months, waiting to board slave ships that crossed the Atlantic Ocean to reach the Americas.

Crewmen who sailed from Europe and the Americas to the Atlantic coasts of Africa were quite familiar with the vessels that transported African captives across the ocean. Many of them made the same trip several times, even on board the same slave ships. But to the victims of the Atlantic slave trade, slave vessels were monstruous structures. When captive Africans boarded the slave ship, they entered an unknown stage of their forced migration.

Some men, women, and children, captured not far from the coast, may have heard accounts about big ships that came through the sea. And perhaps they had even seen slave vessels, as stories such as the ones collected at the Anlo village of Atorkor in the Gold Coast, explored in chapter 2, suggest. But for those captured in the interior of Atlantic Africa, the first view of the ship was imprinted in their memory for many years.

In his recollections, Equiano wrote that “the first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave-ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo.” This image was followed by fear and terror: “This filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror, which I am yet at a loss to describe.”⁴ Quite often, the first time enslaved African captives saw the ships that would carry them to the Americas was on the eve of being forcibly embarked.

Like Equiano, Cugoano reported how terrified he was when he first caught sight of a slave ship, and how the vessel’s image was intertwined with the view of fellow naked men, women, and children chained together. Their movements were followed by the distressing sound of “rattling of chains, smacking of whips, and the groans and cries of our fellowmen.”⁵ Decades later, Baquaqua and other enslaved men, women, and children from many parts of the Bight of Benin, “chained together, and tied with ropes round about our necks,” were brought to Ouidah and then transported through the lagoon to a neighboring port to be boarded on the vessel.⁶ Then, from the beach, he saw for the first time the slave ship that would transport him to the Americas. Similar to Equiano and Cugoano, he was frightened and distressed: “I had never seen a ship before, and my idea of it was, that it was some object of worship of the white man. I imagined that we were all to be slaughtered, and were being led there for that purpose. I felt alarmed for my safety, and despondency had almost taken sole possession of me.”⁷

In several African ports, enslaved people were transported by canoe to be forcibly embarked onto slave vessels. In Ouidah and other ports of the Bight of Benin, slave ships remained anchored nearly one mile away in the sea. Still, as depicted in written narratives and visual images of the period, the surf was so strong that canoes carrying enslaved individuals to the slave vessel commonly were overturned, drowning enslaved men, women, and children.⁸ Like Baquaqua’s, the harrowing journey across the Atlantic Ocean for Oluale Kossola (alias Cudjo Kazoola Lewis) started in the Bight of Benin. Upon arriving at their destination, he and the other captive Africans were unchained and stripped of their clothes before being taken in several smaller boats to the beach nearest where the slave ship was anchored.

Historian Marcus Rediker defined the slave ship as a “combination of war machine, mobile prison, and factory.”⁹ These vessels were loaded with cannons that could be used especially against other competitors active in the slave trade business.

Multiple kinds of ships were used to transport enslaved Africans to the Americas. The ships operating both in the North Atlantic and the South Atlantic systems could be as small as eleven tons and as big as several hundred tons, even though the average tonnage was approximately two hundred.¹¹ Various models of vessels were used in the Atlantic slave trade, such as the yacht, brig, brigantine, snow (or snauw), bark, frigate, and sloop, as well as “the ship,” which was the generic term referring to any vessel but also corresponded to the three-masted and largest model of vessel used in the inhumane trade. Bigger vessels could also carry smaller boats that would trade along the coasts of the West Africa and West Central Africa, gradually transporting captives to the slave ship. Ultimately, any vessel could be adapted and transformed into a slave ship.

During the entire period of the Atlantic slave trade, the number of captives carried in slave ships varied according to several factors, including the size of the vessels and the voyages’ distance. Vessels sailing from West Central Africa to Brazil and the West Indies were usually larger, whereas ships sailing from West Africa to North America tended to be smaller. But these patterns changed over time and according to the specific developments of the trade.

Slave vessels could transport between a few dozen up to more than one thousand enslaved people in a single voyage. In 1664, slave traders identified as residents of the Kingdom of Angola petitioned the Portuguese king to request the nomination of two agents to inspect vessels departing from Luanda. According to the petitioners, transporting many more captives than the vessels could carry with low supplies of water was provoking the “death of so many souls.”¹² Although these demands were not immediately heard, by the late seventeenth century, Portugal and other European nations started enacting legislation limiting the number of enslaved Africans to be transported in slave vessels according to their size.¹³ In 1684, Portugal issued a decree regulating the transportation of enslaved Africans from Angola, as well as São TomĂ© and Cape Verde, to Brazil.¹⁴ In the law’s preamble, the king recognized that African captives were packed together so tightly in the slave vessels that not only did they die during the voyage, but those who arrived alive disembarked in “wickedly pitiful” condition. Organized in twenty-one chapters, the Portuguese decree stated the responsibilities of the captain and other officers in charge of the slave vessel. One chapter of the decree determined that the space of each vessel should be measured, and the number of captives transported in each section of the ship should allow enough space to accommodate each captive. Another chapter established that each ship should carry enough water and food to feed the captives three times a day and provide forty-seven ounces of water to each captive daily.¹⁵ These measures were intended to avoid dissemination of disease and preserve the human cargo doomed to be sold in the Americas. But these restrictions were never fully respected. Water was nearly always in short supply and captives ate only two times a day.

In Europe, slave-trading vessels were built in the regions surrounding slave ports such as Liverpool, Bristol, London, Nantes, Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Le Havre, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Lisbon. European nations occasionally imported vessels built by their European competitors. In North America, most slave ships were built in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Maine.¹⁸ Shipbuilding activity also existed in Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, as well as in Cuba and Bermuda in the West Indies.¹⁹

In Brazil, shipbuilding activity had existed in Salvador since the sixteenth century and expanded during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet, in the second half of the eighteenth century, Brazil’s capital moved from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro. Hence, the new capital became the first Brazilian slave-trading port and a hub of shipbuilding activity.²⁰ But until 1808, when the Portuguese royal court moved to Rio de Janeiro to escape the invasion of NapolĂ©on Bonaparte’s army, most ships active in the Luso-Brazilian slave trade were built in Portugal. During the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the high demand for ships to operate in the Atlantic slave trade also led Brazilian traders to charter and purchase ships from other nations such as Britain and the United States.²¹ Whether in North America or in Brazil, enslaved Africans as well as freemen and bondsmen born in the Americas composed a considerable part of the shipbuilding workforce.