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By Root 462 0

home ports in northern Eur ope, where captains provisioned their ships with trade goods—rum or brandy, gunpowder, beads, and cloth—and headed out to Africa. Once on the shores of the continent, they purchased slaves and transported them to the New World markets on the middle leg of the journey. The final leg of the tripartite journey was the voyage home, bringing sugar, tobacco, or other agricultural products from the colonies to European or American ports. For a period of more than three hundred years, the ships plied the waters of the Atlantic. It is estimated that during the period of the slave trade there, from 1527 to 1866, there were 27, 233 transatlantic trips. The litany of ships and their names seems endless.

On September 13, 1693, the Hannibal left Gravesend, England, for the African coast. On January 13, 1698, the sloop Albion Frigate sailed from the Downs, on the English Channel, to the African coast. On October 25, 1773, Adventure cleared Newport, Rhode Island, for the Atlantic coast. On November 22, 1806, the brig Tartar, owned by Frederick Tuell of Charleston, South Carolina, headed out of Rhode Island bound for Rio Pongo in Guinea. The schooner Nancy left Charleston for Senegal on June 1, 1807. The trips continued clandestinely after the Transatlantic Slave Trade was outlawed in 1808; in 1845, the Spitfire sailed from New Orleans and was captured and found to be transporting 346 individuals. The Wanderer left Charleston flying the flag of the New York Yacht Club with false papers claiming it was sailing for Trinidad but in reality set course for the Congo, completed its journey successfully, and returned to the Georgia coast on December 1, 1858. Virtually all the nations of northern Europe engaged in the trade. Eventually they were joined by the northern and southern ports of the colonies that became the United States.

Ships left at all times of the year from Bristol and Liverpool in England; from Nantes, Bordeaux, and La Rochelle in France; from Boston, Providence, Newport, Baltimore, New York, Annapolis, Charleston, and other ports throughout the northern Atlantic. Canny slavers out of the British ports even calculated their sailings with the objective of arriving in South Carolina or Virginia between May and October, during the growing season, when Africans fetched higher prices. No matter what their home port or when they set sail, ships were provisioned with shackles and slaving equipment as well as with some staples that had to last the entire journey. The scale of provisioning ships was such that purchases by British slave traders influenced the cost of everything from the timber that was used to refit the ships’ holds once they arrived on the African coast to edible stores.

Slave ships required more food than any of the other vessels trading on the Atlantic. In addition to the rations of the crews, which numbered about thirty individuals, they also had to provide for feeding three hundred or so enslaved Africans, who came from different cultures and had different food preferences. Slave-ship provision lists from Royal African Company records from 1682 to 1683 include such items as stockfish and beef, beans, salt, flour, and brandy, which was both a provision and a trade good. (In later years, the brandy was replaced with rum.) All was boarded for the first leg of the journey to the African coast. Estimating a six- to fifteen-week journey from British ports to the African coast, depending on winds and weather, captains planned on arriving on the West African coast in time for the harvests there, in order to be better able to take on additional supplies.

Once on the West African coast, the ships met up with others with the same mission, and it became a race among them to fill their hold with food and slaves. Captains cajoled and bribed African rulers, traded with middlemen and factors, and bought foodstuffs from locals while they waited for enough slaves to fill the holds, which were like voracious maws gobbling up human lives. Often they remained on the African coast for months at a time, sailing