Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora

Smallwood discusses the commodification of African slaves in greater detail, describing the process through which traders turned people into property. The transformation began at the oceanfront, where the captives witnessed the market where they were sold. Captives would be shackled around the wrists with “short irons” (39) and around the ankles with “long irons” (40), and then incarcerated, either in trade forts, which had a space that was specifically intended for housing captives to be exported, or in ships, which were essentially floating warehouses, accruing captives until there were enough for a shipment. Irons and enclosures were often not enough to hold captives. Shackles were a luxury that was not always available, and even when they were, they did not stand up well to the corrosive effects of high humidity. There were frequent escapes due to lapses in security and poorly constructed holding areas.

The captives would be kept alive through the “rationalized science of human deprivation” (35): Traders used “the trial and error of experiment and observation” (35) to determine what would be the bare minimum needed to sustain the captives. The captives’ meals reflected “a calculation balancing the cost of the slaves’ maintenance against their purchase price” (44) and consisted of rations that were devoid of nutrition.