Adrian's Reviews > The Slave Ship: A Human History

** spoiler alert ** This is the go to book for understanding the slave trade.

It describes literally every issue regarding the slave trade with the center position being the slave ship.
The book describes how slave ships were being built in UK and USA , how they were fitted and retrofitted to stow , carry , comtain , feed , discipline , kill both slaves and sailors.
We meet the actors : the slaves , the sailors , the captains ,and the ones that made everything possible , the merchants.
It describes the africans , their socieites , relations and even testimonies on how they got kidnapped and forced to walk even 1000 miles from inside the continent to the sea.
Getting on a slave ship for a black was "The point of no return" as none (besides some notable exceptions) would ever get back to their homeland.

How a voyage would go :

Basically you have one merchant that pays up to 300k usd (today money) builds a ship , finds a captain. The captain goes to the docks and fools some sailors or gets them out of jail in return for manning the ship.

The ship then is loaded with food , wine, rum, weapons and trade manufacuturing items to be traded for slaves in Africa.

The ship sails from UK to one of the 7 regions of Africa at the Atlantic (Senegambia, Windeard and Gold coast - Ghana today , Bight of Benin , Bight of Biafra - East Nigeria , Congo , Angola) . This is known as the Outward Passage

It stays on the coast for several months to gather slaves. (Waiting for black merchants/milititas to bring "war prisoners" as they would call them when in reality the people broughht were mostly kidnapped from their villages).

Slaves are mostly villagers that are kidnapped by other tribes and sold to european ships for rum and weapons.

When the ship is full it heads to Caraibbean or US colonies in the hardest part of the voyage known as the Middle Passage.

Upon reaching "the New World" slaves are sold and unloaded. The ship goes back to the UK in what was known as the Homeward Passage.
The captain and the mates collects his pay and also stake, the remaining sailors drink their money in the next 3 weeks.

You basically get a triangular global trade.
UK merchants and US ones fund the voyages. The ships bring the workforce from Africa to the plantations of cotton and sugar in US and Carraibbean.
Many times the money from these pkantations goes into building new ships and nee voyages and you get a self-reinforcing circle.

During the voyage somewhere around 11% of the "cargo" perishes.
A ship carries 1 slave per ton usually, and a medium sized ship has 200-300 tons.


Its needless to talk about the horrific lives of the negroes kidnapped in Africa.

What amazed me was how wretched the life of the common sailor was , many times worse than that of the slaves.

Sailors would be beaten to death and malnourshied and many times left to die on the Middle Passage just for the captaim to get their money.

This book is an enciclopedia of the slave trade in its heyday during the 18 century i would've given it 5 stars if the author didn't put so many stories and a little politically corectness here and there.

The fact is , the white man was not the only one that should be put to blame for this trsgedy.
Blacks would enslave blacks and kidnap them for weapons , rum and manufacturing items, also arabs....its a collective fault.