How many slaves made the Middle Passage? How many died?

Factual Questions
1

As many of you know, the Middle Passage refers to the routes across the Atlantic that the slave ships took while delivering Africans from the Guinea Coast to Brazil, the Caribbean, and continental North America. The pain, humiliation, and deadliness of this voyage to the Africans packed like sardines in the disease-ridden ships’ holds are now legendary. However, the sources I have found disagree hugely as to how many people actually made this brutal trip and how many were killed by the voyage.

Nine million Africans made the passage, and one million of them (c. 11%) died en route. So says John Reader in Africa: A Biography of the Continent.

15% to 25% of the slaves died in the Middle Passage. So says Dale Taylor in The Writer’s Guide to Everyday Life in Colonial America.

24 million Africans made the Middle Passage, and 9 million (c. 38%) died en route. So says Richard Armstrong in The Merchantmen.

25 to 50 million Africans died in the Middle Passage. So says The Middle Passage Institute.

30 to 60 million Africans made the Middle Passage, and 67%(20 to 40 million) died en route. So says Dr. John Henrick Clarke.

Good grief, people! The number of deportations and deaths from the slave trade probably isn’t as meticulously well-documented as, say, the carnage of the Holocaust. But when the figures disagree by a whole friggin’ order of magnitude, somebody’s gotten sloppy! Which of these figures are supported by real data and scholarship, and which figures are the writers pulling out of their behinds?

2

I remember that Rep. Major Owens liked to throw around a lot of questionable numbers. He even claimed (I watched this on C-Span) that sharks were condtioned to follow slave ships because of dead slaves being thrown overboard, and as a result sharks continue to trail ships plying the Atlantic to this very day. What baloney. However, I think we should focus on the evil that did take place. It is stupid to falsify numbers (or fail to question suspect numbers) in order to win attention; you risk alienating the very people you wish to educate. Slavery was evil. Why not just tell the truth? Remember when we were expected to believe that thousands of young women were dying every year from anorexia? In other words, let’s not let anger at the people who fudge numbers (whether intentionally or through sloppy scholarship) take away from the horror and injustice of what happened.

Sorry, I don’t think that I actually answered your question…

3

Okay, forgive me, I couldn’t resist.

** All of them! ** Those who died and those who escaped slavery by jumping overboard were** never slaves.** At this point, they were captives.

4

Just a slight adjustment: The text from the Middle Passage Institute is

“Africans lost to the slave trade” indicates numbers captured, not those who died en route to the Western Hemisphere.

The numbers are still horrible, of course, whether from the higher or lower estimates.

5

The reason (IMHO) that the numbers don’t agree is that this issue is highly political. Some people have something to gain by exagerating the numbers.

A while back I ran the numbers that were told on network TV and found that inorder to meet the number of poeple who died on the voyage you would need something like the the entire population of the contenant of africa (for the ones who died - where did the slaves come from and why are there still native africians?). Their numbers just didn’t make sense.

Conditions were undoutably harsh to say the least but these men were tradors and would have to buy the slaves and then sell the live ones - it would make sense that only the healthiest ones were picked for such a long trip just for ecomomic reasons alone (the cost to ship the slaves across was fixed - the healthy/strong slaves would featch more $ then the unhealthy/week ones - to ofset the cost of transit you would want to only take healthy slaves).

That said I think that healthy slaves stood a good chance of surviving the trip and the tradors would have an interest in keeping them looking healthy and keeping them alive.

That’s not to say that if food grew scarce they didn’t consider fileting a slave to make food for the others.

6

Not true. Many (most?) of them were already slaves when they left Africa.

7

I just read yesterday a paper by a seemingly (according to his position) reliable french scholar which incidently write “between 11 and 20 millions [of slaves were exported across the Atlantic], depending on the authors”.

He cites the following authors as sources for this estimate:

Ralph Austen “African economic history”, James Curey, London, 1987

Elikia M’Bokolo “Afrique noire, histoire et civilisations”, Hatier-Aupelf,Paris, 1995

Joseph E. Inikori “Forced migration. The impact of the export slave trade on African societies”,Hutchinson, London,1982

Philip D. Curtin “The Atlantic slave trade. A census”, the University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1969
By the way, he gives also an estimate of other african slave trades figures:

-across the Red Sea : 4 millions

-through the swahili ports on the indian ocean : 4 millions

-by caravans across the Sahara : 9 millions

That said, he gives no estimates about the death rates.

8

A couple of observations: In the immense majority Europeans bought slaves from the natives, they did not go around enslaving the natives. The slaves were therefore enslaved by other Africans, not by Europeans. Those African traders complained bitterly when the traffic was outlawed. For many years it was British ships who enforced the trade ban and it was American outlaws and African chiefs who illegally defied the ban. So let’s put things in perspective: it was Africans who wanted the trade to continue and it was Britain and the USA who declared it illegal.

Also, mortality for slaves during the passage (whatever it was) has to be judged against conditions of voyages and life in general at that time, not by today’s standards. In the days of sail, it was extremely common to lose individual sailors to work accidents or sickness and many entire ships were lost altogether. Probably the mortality of these involuntary passengers was not much worse than that of the sailors who had signed on voluntarily.

9

Clairobscure has hit the big citations. I think Curtin published some recent works in the highly respected Journal of African History over the past decade further refining the estimates. But they all have to remain that.

A comment on sailor’s intervention: your contextualizing of the slave trade transport strikes me as, how shall I say it, unfounded and not properly historical? While it is certainly true that any transatlantic transit in this time period was dangerous. Howeever, to all my reading my understanding has been entirely that even contemporaries regarded conditions of transit for slaves as being rather horrific, by contemporary standards. To attempt to imply otherwise strikes me as unfornate at best.

In the same vein, your characterization of the slave trade and its outlawing strikes me as fundamentally inadequate.

While on one hand the stereotyped picture favored by certain black American activists of slave raiding Europeans is inaccurate, so is a picture which places abolition entirely in the hands of the Brits and the Americans. Anti-atlantic trade sentiments and attempts at ending the trade existed and are documented on the African side also.

Unfortunately a rather nasty dynamic existed, insofar as those nations and states and peoples who continued the trade gained access through it to European war technology, guns and the like. While in the northern plains some indigenous production and importation of guns from Turkish sources occured, European trades could and did supply much greater numbers of guns and better ones. Nor were those traders unaware or innocent of the effects of the same.

So, it strikes me as a distinction without much merit, after one acknowledges that no one group was innocent in the trade.

10

>> A comment on sailor’s intervention: your contextualizing of the slave trade transport strikes me as, how shall I say it, unfounded and not properly historical? While it is certainly true that any transatlantic transit in this time period was dangerous. Howeever, to all my reading my understanding has been entirely that even contemporaries regarded conditions of transit for slaves as being rather horrific, by contemporary standards. To attempt to imply otherwise strikes me as unfornate at best.

Collounsbury, I did not in fact say or imply the conditions were anything but horrific by our standards. Slavery is never pleasant. All I am saying is the conditions have to be judged by general conditions at that time.

In the age of sail almost every long sea voyage lost some sailors to accident or disease and the life of a sailor was very harsh with floggings and such punishments included. As has been pointed out, slaves were valuable cargo and the master’s interest was in delivering as many as possible, not in feeding the sharks.

>> In the same vein, your characterization of the slave trade and its outlawing strikes me as fundamentally inadequate.

For centuries Christians and Muslims in the Mediterranean made a habit of enslaving each other and there was no connotation of immorality on either side. It was business as usual. In this area it was definitely the Christians who tried to end piracy and enslavement and Muslims in Northern Africa were doing it long after Christians had stopped doing it. In fact the USA sent some punishing expedition to Lybia in the early 19th century because Spain and Italy could not stop the pirates there.

For the Atlantic trade in Subsaharan African slaves I will cite Hugh Thomas in his book “CUBA” where he dedicates chapters 12 to 14 exclusively to slavery and the slave trade. In the 19th century, the biggest impediment to the slave trade, by far, was the British navy. The book concentrates on the slave trade to Cuba but looks at the bigger picture of the entire Transtlantic trade and is very well documented. African slave traders were definitely not happy with the end of the slave trade.

>> So, it strikes me as a distinction without much merit, after one acknowledges that no one group was innocent in the trade.

Well, we totally agree here but, again, for centuries slavery was not considered immoral by Christians or Muslims. It became immoral in Christian nations long before than in Muslim nations and to this day slavery exists in some parts of Africa. I guess what I object to is the general tone we hear where slavery was something evil whites did to innocent blacks. Rather, blacks were enslaved by blacks and sold to whites for profit. The fact that whites would never enslave their own and sell them for profit shows they were somewhat ahead when it came to morality. Blacks had no problem selling their brothers and yet all we hear is whites were the bad guys. That’s what I object to.

11

I would have thought this this meant that they were racist as well as slavers.

12

Morality?

Somewhat ahead in defining racism, as Dave said.
Somewhat ahead in hypocrisy (since they had already laid aside slavery as evil, but took it up again as soon as they could find someone who looked different upon whom to impose it). (And whites did sometimes sell other whites–they simply went to the South side of the Mediterranean to find the market.)

While I’m sure there are some who cry “evil whites,” the actual issue is that the white society created a market whereby more blacks were enslaved and murdered than in any of the home-grown systems. No group is guiltless, but far more damage was done by the creation of the white-driven market than in the local fights that resulted in local slavery.

13

Well, different captains had different ideas. Some captains favored the “loose packing” system in which they took only as many slaves as they thought they could safely carry and attempted to bring them across the ocean in reasonable health. Another group of captains, however, weighed the losses and chose the “tight packing” method in which they filled their holds to bursting, building extra half-decks to hold more bodies, so that when they experienced losses, there would be more of the intitial “merchandise” to survive. The tight-pack method assumed a heavy attrition and caused the captains to stack ever more people into their ships to compensate for the losses. And the more people who were packed, the higher the losses were, causing an ever increasing spiral of overcrowding.

14

The death tolls of 20-60 million sound too high: bear in mind the that the total population of North America in 1860 was only 50 million. (It was only 8.5 million in 1750.)

clairboscur’s numbers seem reasonable, as do his cites. Alas, I don’t know of a good cite for a mortality rate. I did find this:

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/wm/58.1/index.html

It’s a set of conference papers discussing a new data set for the Middle Passage. I’m sure there’s a mortality figure in there somewhere, but I’m too tired to fish it out.

15

… causing a higher rate of infectious disease, misery, and death. Tight-packed slaves were indeed placed cheek by jowl and often in bunk-bed like fashion, as you describe. As the captain’s foremost concern was maximization of profits, an imprecise system of triage dictated that ailing (and presumably infectious) passengers be tossed overboard like spoiled apples. [Though the “Horse Latitudes” first acquired their moniker due to horses being thrown overboard during the doldrums, slaves, too, were thrown overboard, sometimes en masse.] To claim that the crew mortality rate was comparable to that of the Africans defies credulity. The living conditions, food, and treatment of the latter were wretched.

[BTW, as the passage usually took 2-4 weeks and generally occurred during the spring/summer, the stench in the cargo hold grew unbearable. In an effort to mitigate the odor, the crew would toss super-heated pennies into vats of vinegar below deck. The resulting fumes were considered a 18/19th century potpourri.]

Tom, though you’re probably right re: your numbers and the “home-grown system,” a definitive statement cannot be made inasmuch as the myriad African suppliers were sloppy record keepers (if at all). You also correctly mention “white society” as driving the slave market, but should also reference the Caribbean and South America markets.

16

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by tsunamisurfer *
**

Actually, they were super-heated nails.

17

What a resource! Here is the mortality paper-

Transoceanic Mortality: The Slave Trade in Comparative Perspective
Herbert S. Klein, Stanley L. Engerman, Robin Haines, and Ralph Shlomowitz
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/wm/58.1/klein.html

18

First, sorry Tom–when you said “white society,” I assumed you meant only American society.

Excerpts from above: "Their mortality experience on the longer voyage—from England to Africa, to America, returning to England—was often similar to the mortality rates for slaves on the same ships, but the slaves had a shorter time in transit… Despite the long and continuing debate on tight packing versus loose packing of slaves, which refers to the range of slaves carried per ton or per-unit of ship size, “tighter” packing seems to have had little impact on mortality … Very few ships had the high mortality rates that attracted abolitionists’ attention; many more ships tended to have low rates…The number of days at sea on given routes had only a limited effect on mortality except for those unusually long voyages owing to difficulties of weather and sailing conditions.

"Moreover, slave ships were more likely to sail from tropical areas and thus, for slaves, to suffer from tropical diseases…Deaths immediately before the Middle Passage began and immediately after it ended, when added together, were, in some periods, similar to deaths during the voyage itself…While of interest as a historical issue, the Middle Passage is the most easily measured part of the slave movement to the New World. For no other aspect of the enslavement process, in Africa or in the Americas, is the mortality information as extensive or as complete.

“We used a 20% mortality rate as a cutoff point. Eighty-two percent of voyages had a mortality rate below that, only 18% above that. The decline in the right-tail of high mortality voyages helps to explain part of the overall mortality decline. For ships sailing between 1601 and 1700, more than 40% had mortality rates greater than 20% per voyage, while for ships sailing between 1776 and 1850, the figure is 12%. Similarly, in helping to account for variations between parts of Africa, the proportion of ships with a mortality rate higher than 20% is twice as high for the Bight of Biafra as for the other African ports.”

19

Ok, so, Africans were better because theý didn’t care about the race of their slaves while whites were racist because they did not enslave other whites. This made blacks morally superior. Ok, I get it now.

I suppose a thief who steals only from strangers is also worse than one who does not discriminate and steals from his close family as well. This one is obviously morally superior as he treats everyone equally.

Also note that since the early 19th century the traffic was outlawed and so, traffickers were criminals subject to punishment at the hands of the UK and the USA but not at the hands of African slave selling nations.

To put all the blame on whites and ignore the responsibility of blacks is just plain political correctness. The fact remains that those people were enslaved by Africans, not by Europeans.

Now we have a meeting in South Africa where blacks ask western countries to apologize for slavery. Yeah, we’re very, very sorry we bought the slaves you sold us. In the meanwhile it is documented that slavery still takes place in Africa but we cannot criticise that. Better criticise what western nations did two hundred years ago. Gimme a break.

20

I have made no claim that any group was more moral or “better” than any other group. I simply pointed out that your claim for superior European morality had weak foundations. YMMV

As to the current meeting and the calls emanating from it, slavery as a commodity only existed in Africa because of outside influences. Prior to the interventions by the Christian and Islamic societies, slavery was more a haphazard arrangement in which one group might make war on another group and take some captives who would then become the personal servants of their captors. After the intervention from non-African societies, slave taking and slave trading became an enterprise, encouraging groups who had previously waged war in a desultory fashion to become war-driven societies. This change and the havoc it wreaked is directly attributable to the non-Africans who created a commodity for labor.

I have no intention of defending African slave takers. However, it should certainly not be a surprise that the survivors of those chaotic times should now call upon the societies that created the situation (and who most profited by it) to offer redress.

I do not support calls for reparations. There is no equitable way to make them work and there are too many factors involved to assess the “correct” values. On the other hand, I am not going to become indignant that some people are calling for that form of redress. On the one hand, they are not a majority of the people who are at the meeting; on the other hand, we need merely (if politely) say No.