The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (30 page)

The body count has been estimated as anything from 15,000 (Sherburne Cook) to 250,000 (Woodrow Borah) per year.
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The nineteenth-century historian William Prescott insisted that the Aztecs sacrificed at least 20,000, possibly 50,000, people per year over the course of two centuries.
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At the other end are revisionists who insist that the Aztecs hardly ever sacrificed anyone, no matter what those lying Spaniards said. Bartolome de las Casas and Voltaire claimed that only about 150 Mexicans were sacrificed each year, and that the Spaniards exaggerated in order to justify their conquest.
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In any case, an estimate of 15,000 or 20,000 a year (total of about 1.2 to 1.6 million) seems to be the most widely repeated one.
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ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

Death toll:
16 million
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Rank:
10

Type:
commercial exploitation, racism

Broad dividing line:
Europeans enslaving Africans

Time frame:
1452–1807

Location:
from Africa to the Americas

Major supplying nations:
Ashanti, Benin, Dahomey, Kongo, Lunda, Oyo

Major seafaring nations:
France, Great Britain, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, United States

Major receiving colonies:
Brazil, Carolina, Cuba, Georgia, Jamaica, Maryland, Saint-Domingue, Virginia

Who usually gets the most blame:
European slave traders, African middlemen, and American planters

Economic factors:
slaves, sugar, gold

B
Y THE EARLY 1400S, THE EUROPEANS HAD DEVELOPED REVOLUTIONARY
new oceangoing ships that could travel anywhere at all, regardless of the wind, currents, distance, or direction. Mariners started looking around to see what they could find. The Spanish and Portuguese stumbled across several archipelagos in the eastern Atlantic: the Azores, Canaries, and Madeira. The Portuguese also began to poke southward along the coast of Africa, looking for the source of the gold that had steadily trickled out of Africa since the beginning of recorded history. Eventually, they connected with western African kingdoms on the Gulf of Guinea, and picked up some gold from native traders. Almost as an afterthought, they took some slaves too.

Although slaves had always
been a major African export (see “Mideast Slave Trade”), there was not much of a market for them in Europe. The land already had enough serfs, and it was much easier to hire domestic servants from the local peasantry than to import them from another continent. Eventually, the Portuguese discovered there was money to be made putting masses of slaves to work on sugar plantations in recently discovered tropical Atlantic islands such as Madeira and Cape Verde. This established the model for future expansion.
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The discovery of America p
ushed slavery into the center of the European economy. With Native Americans dying off from devastating new diseases against which they had no inborn immunity (see “Conquest of the Americas”), the New World was facing a serious labor shortage. A whole hemisphere of land was worthless because there was no one to work it. After a few experimental plantations in the Caribbean proved that growing sugar with African slaves would turn a profit, the Spanish crown opened the New World to Portuguese slave traders in 1513.

Collection

The Europeans didn’t capture the slaves themselves. Deadly tropical diseases and grouchy native kings discouraged Europeans from probing too deeply into the African mainland. For most of the slaving era, the only permanent European presence in western Africa was a dozen or so coastal forts. These were established to prevent rival Europeans from encroaching on the trade, not to conquer the natives. The first of these was the Portuguese fort of Elmina (now in Ghana), established in 1482 and named after the mines that were thought to supply the gold.
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For over a century, slaving remained a purely Portuguese activity, but in the 1630s, Dutch warships challenged and thoroughly defeated the Portuguese all across the globe. This broke the Portuguese monopoly, and the rest of Europe swarmed in and set up slaving stations up and down the African coast.

Native kingdoms like Ashanti, Oyo, and Kongo became profitable middlemen in the slave trade, and their kings grew rich and magnificent off the tribute, taxes, and kickbacks that kept the trade flowing. In r
eturn for slaves, Africa got the usual trade goods (copper and brass trinkets, textiles, pots, kettles, knives, and cowrie shells)
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plus some more interesting ones (guns, rum). Most important in the long run, Africa got maize, which became a staple crop all across the continent, even deep inland.

At first, the local Africans traded whatever slaves they had on hand. Most of them were criminals, adulterers, or debtors, but as demand grew, African coastal kingdoms would start new wars specifically to capture prisoners to sell as slaves. Eventually, native slave traders were raiding inland to kidnap fresh slaves. After capturing a village, the traders usually killed or abandoned the elderly and infants because there was no market for them. The remaining villagers would be dragged away for sale.
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Newly harvested slaves would be herded back to the coast in coffles (chained caravans) along trails hundreds of miles long, on journeys that often lasted months. Slaves were shackled together at the neck, wrists, or ankles, maybe attached to the man in front of him with a yoke on his neck or to the man beside him with chains on his wrist. They were prodded, beaten, and kicked to keep them moving, and the weak would be killed if they fell so they couldn’t recover later and escape. The major slave trails were littered with bones.
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Because American slaves were usually set to work in the fields, big strong men were the most highly valued. About 90 percent of the slaves shipped to America were adults or teenagers, and men outnumbered women by two to one. Women often fetched a high enough price in Africa to keep them from being sold overseas.
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About half of the slaves died while being marched to the coast or while waiting for a buyer.
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The survivors of the march would be collected in coastal slave prisons, or barracoons, until a ship came along. Some barracoons were solid fortresses where slaves were stashed in dungeons. Others were open corrals or cattle pens, with slaves manacled out in the sun. All barracoons were overcrowded, filthy, and buzzing with flies.

European slave ships prowled the coast, looking for the best deals. They would buy a few slaves here and a few there; it often took several months for a ship to assemble a full cargo of slaves crammed below decks. In many places, European ships anchored off the coast while native traders brought slaves out on canoes. Elsewhere, European buyers would come ashore to inspect and haggle. They poked and prodded slaves as they would any other animals. Because proven fertility would make them more valuable, women were inspected for stretch marks and other signs of childbearing. Ages might be estimated by the quality of the teeth, but sellers sometimes shaved heads to hide gray hair. When the sale was final, slaves were branded with hot irons to mark ownership. Then they were herded on board the ships naked because clothes would just add one more thing to get filthy on the trip to the New World.

Slaves that no one wanted were often killed on the spot. Keeping them alive increased maintenance costs, and letting
them go would encourage future slaves to make themselves flagrantly unmarketable. As one contemporary account described it:

The traders frequently beat those negroes which are objected to by the captains, and use them with great severity. It matters not whether they are refused on account of age, illness, deformity or for any other reason. At New Calabar, in particular, the traders have frequently been known to put them to death. Instances have happened at that place, that the traders, when negroes have been objected to, have dropped their canoes under the stern of the vessel, and instantly beheaded them, in sight of the captain.
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Middle Passage

Olaudah Equiano, “a slave who lived to tell the tale,”
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later described his first impression of a European slave ship in the late 1700s:

When I looked round the ship too and saw a large furnace of copper boiling, and a multitude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate and quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted. . . . I asked if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces and long hair?
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Typically two to four hundred slaves were carried on each ship. They were chained below decks in pairs, ankle to ankle, wrist to wrist, lying side by side with about half the space assigned to convicts or soldiers being transported during
the same era.
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Buckets were set up in the corner as toilets, but a slave had to get there while still chained to his neighbor. Many didn’t make it to the bucket on time, and slave ships always stank of human waste.

Men and women were chained in different parts of the ship for both disciplinary and moral reasons. In a classic example of values dissonance, ship captains were fine with slavery but appalled at the possibility of sexual activity on board. Captains also suspected that male slaves became less docile and more protective when they had women among them.
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The voyage typically lasted two to three months. Slaves were not especially mistreated on the ships. They were kept reasonably healthy with plenty of water and starchy food: beans, biscuits, plantains, rice, and yams. If a slave tried a hunger strike, his mouth was wedged open for forced feeding. Once land was safely out of sight and beyond temptation, slaves might be brought above deck in small, manageable groups to stretch and dance. They were usually released from their chains as the voyage progressed.
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Overall, 40 percent of all slaves (4.65 million) were shipped by the Portuguese, and 35 percent (4 million) were sent to the Portuguese colony of Brazil. The trade peaked in the 1700s, when nearly 6 million slaves were transported by all nations. During the 1780s an average of 80,000 new slaves were arriving in America every year. By this time, the British dominated the trade. In the eighteenth century, the British shipped around 2.5 million.
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The slave and sugar economy was so lucrative that every seafaring European country tried to get a piece of it, even those we don’t normally think of as heartless slave drivers, such as the Danes. The Danish West Indian and Guinea Company had two slave stations in Africa where they gathered workers for Denmark’s colony in the Virgin Islands. In all, 28,000 slaves were transported on Danish ships.

In total, some 10 to 12 million slaves were transported across the Atlantic.
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Probably 10 to 15 percent of them died in transit, often from dysentery, scurvy, and smallpox.
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The dead were thrown overboard without ceremony, and sharks followed the ships hoping for an easy meal.
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