High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [15]
The beverage was water, occasionally flavored with molasses. On some ships the allowance of water was a half pint per meal, unless the ship was put on short rations as punishment or because of the length of the voyage. Some slavers noted a general African taste for the “bite-y” and offered rice wine flavored with cayenne pepper. Usually, though, wine and spirits were only used medicinally or given on a cold day to ward off illness. All ships meals for the enslaved and for the crew were prepared under the direction of the ship’s cook.
The cook was an important part of the slave ship operations because his ability to feed the newly enslaved in a manner that allowed them to survive was directly related to the voyage’s financial success. Although not originally considered skilled laborers on board, like coopers and navigators, cooks were essential in the slave trading process. Cooks usually came from the ranks of superannuated sailors who could no longer hoist heavy items or climb the riggings. They usually spent their time in the cookhouse or galley of the ship, surrounded by pots, pans, and boilers. Their task of feeding three hundred to four hundred enslaved daily, plus crew and officers, was a daunting one, to say the least. By the eighteenth century in the northern colonies, the profession of ship’s cook had become one of the few career paths open to free people of color, and even on slaving vessels this role was increasingly taken by African Americans or by one of the Atlantic Creole sailors. Whatever the cooks’ color, they were frequently aided by “guardians,” or confidential slaves, who were given positions of power because of their linguistic ability or because they were deemed more tractable. Considered less of a threat to the ship’s security, women were often assigned such food preparation tasks as milling corn and husking rice, and as a result, the African hand remained in the cooking pot, evidenced by foods prepared with malagueta pepper and palm oil.
Mealtimes were dangerous times onboard slave ships, as the enslaved were usually brought on deck to eat. There are numerous accounts of mutinies and insurrections where slaves attacked the sailors with bowls and gouged them with spoons. Meals therefore were distributed with armed sailors in attendance at full watch.
Often press-ganged into service or waylaid in seaport taverns, the sailors who guarded the enslaved on board had living conditions only marginally better than those of their captives. These sailors were often flogged by the captain and other crew, and their diet consisted of moldy sea biscuits, weevil-infested grain, and the same beans that were served to the enslaved. If the ships lay becalmed in the horse latitudes, the crew could be put on short rations and their water supply reduced as well. Sailors supplemented their oftenmeager rations by fishing over the side of the ship. Many an ordinary sailor protested that the slaves were given better rations than the crew, and sailors frequently found themselves in competition with the enslaved for food. As Olaudah Equiano recalled,
one day they had taken a number of fishes; and when they had killed and satisfied themselves with as many as they thought fit, to our astonishment who were on deck, rather than give any of them to us to eat as we expected, they tossed the remaining fish into the sea again.
White sailors died at a higher rate than their captives, and shorthanded crews were occasionally supplemented with the enslaved. Sailors on the slave ships were certainly deemed more expendable then the slaves, and their high mortality rate gave credence to the slavers’ saying
Beware and take care
Of the Bight of Benin.
For one that comes out
There are forty go in.
Sailors in the slave or Guinea trade also died of the fevers and diseases that waited on the African coast, as well as from the privations