Terror of the Middle Passage :: Slavery

A popular literature has painted this part of the slave experience as uniquely evil and inherently more inhuman that any of the others horrors of the slave life(Klein 130). Slaves were taken from their homes and was forcibly traded.One cannot, of course, mention the Middle Passage without eliciting the horrors of tightly packed men, women and children chained together, to keep them from rebelling, or from choosing the suicidal fate of jumping overboard. The mortality of captives in Africa, therefore, included not only losses among those headed for export at the Atlantic coast but the additional losses among those destined for export to Orient among those captured and transported to serve African masters(Engerman and Inkori 117). The death that the slaves went through while they were being shipped was crucial and insane. It shows how the Middle Passage was the most terrifying journey for the slaves. The terror of the slaves in the manner in which they was carried and the mortality tha t they suffered, proves how the slaves was treated ruthlessly during the Middle Passage. Klein indicates the slavers carried 1.6 slaves per registered ship’s ton, with 5 to 7 square feet of deck area given to each slave. Most of the ships were outfitted with partial decks and platforms in the space below, the main deck and above the second or between the deck (Klein 132).The ships were different lengths and could hold only a certain amount of weight. The Brooks weighed 300 tons, and it held about 609 slaves. This arrangement gives a deck estimate at over 3,000 square feet, which provided an average of just under 7 square feet per slave. The LaVigilante is shown at 240 tons with 347 slaves and probably marks the lowest bound estimate with a deck area that results in 5.6 square feet per slave(Klein 133). Most slaves were crammed in into their designed spaces like loaves of bread on a shelf, with an average of six to seven square feet and rarely more than two or three feet of head space (Postma 23). Many slaves who, were in their nakedness, crouched on the lower ba ck. Men slaves were generally shackled two by two , making movement extremely difficult, and small groups were strung together by longer chains to take them to the upper deck for meals and fresh air. Women and children were generally confined to a separate deck space or in cabins and allowed greater mobility(Postma 23).