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the Gambia River to Angola by the time of the transatlantic trade. Akan merchants in the Gold Coast region were among the few who offered corn in the enormous amounts the slave ships required; corn was also obtained on the Slave Coast. It was estimated that an adult captive would consume between fifteen and twenty stalks a day, and the journey could take months. Holds had to be filled to ensure slaves’ survival. Demand was fierce. Prices fluctuated, and woe unto the trader who arrived during one of the periodic famines or between the twice annual corn harvests. For captives from the Senegambia and ricegrowing regions, rice was needed. An African cultivar of rice (oryza glaberrima) was grown near the mouths of the Gambia and Senegal rivers and as far as the western extent of the Gold Coast (today’s Ghana). While rice from the Carolinas was shipped to England and became a part of the English provisioning of the ships, it often was not adequate and had to be supplemented with bulk quantities of African rice bought on the upper Guinea coast. Captives from the Gulf of Benin required yams, the true yams that are native to the African continent and grown from the Ivory Coast to eastern Cameroon. They were the primary crop for the traders of Calabar and Bonny in present-day Nigeria, where the all-important yam was harvested, beginning in August. Supplies for sale usually lasted through early March. All the newly enslaved Africans were also thought to have a “good stomach for beans.” As the trade increased, knowledge of African agriculture and growing seasons was employed by all traders to provision ships. Falconbridge reported:

In their own country, the Negroes in general live on animal food and fish, with roots, yams and Indian corn. The horse beans and rice, with which they are fed aboard ship, are chiefly brought from Europe. The latter, however, is sometimes purchased on the Coast where it is superior to any other.

Other nationalities provisioned their ships and fed their captives differently, but North American slavers commonly fed their captives rice and corn, both of which could be obtained on the African coast and in America. They also gave them black-eyed peas. Seed rice was brought aboard ships to be winnowed and processed by enslaved women during the journey, then boiled in iron cauldrons: the corn was fried into cakes. British ships fed their captives fava beans, which were known as horse beans. They were brought from England and stored in vats, later to be mixed with lard and turned into a pulpy mash.

On most vessels, the enslaved were given two meals a day. In the morning they were brought on deck, and the hold was sluiced down in an attempt to alleviate illness and keep the notorious stench of the Guineamen, as the slave ships were called, at bay. The first meal was distributed around ten in the morning and usually consisted of rice, corn or yams, depending on the origins of the enslaved, along with water. Following the meal, the bowls, called “crews,” and spoons were collected, as they could serve as weapons during mutinies. On some ships, bread was offered to the adults in the afternoon, occasionally with a pipe of tobacco and a tot of brandy. The afternoon meal was more dependent on European stores and might consist of slabber sauce or dabbadab. William Richardson recalled in A Mariner of England:

Our slaves had two meals a day, one in the morning consisting of boiled yams and the other in the afternoon of boiled horse-beans and slabber sauce poured over each. This sauce was made of chunks of old Irish beef and rotten salt fish stewed to rags and well seasoned with cayenne pepper.

Others suggest that the infamous and repellently named slabber sauce was a mixture of palm oil, flour, water, and chili. The second concoction, dabbadab, was a mixture of rice, salt meat, pepper, and palm oil. The pepper, which was a part of many slave rations, was not the chili of the New World or the black pepper of the Indies but rather one of the pre-Columbian African spices: melegueta, or malagueta, pepper, a relative of