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The Atlantic Slave Trade1770-1807

Sourcebook 2-The Slave Experience

Lesson 1 – Slave AuctionsSource 1 – A doctor describes the arrival of slaves in the Caribbean.

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They were crouched down upon their benches around a large room; during a visit of more than an hour not a word was spoken. They were nearly all naked... with a few exceptions they were but skin and bone, too weak to support their weary bodies...

Source 2- from a history textbook

When the ships arrived in the West Indies, the slaves were prepared to be sold. The better the condition of the slave, the higher the price! Heads were shaved. They were washed in fresh water. They were rubbed with olive oil and beeswax. Prices for slaves were sometimes different in different islands. Captains had to take account of the number of slave ships selling their cargo as this could affect the price of the slaves.

Source 3 – an image of slaves being prepared for auction.

Source 4 –

This was the most common way of selling slaves. Posters would be displayed to attract buyers and the slaves were sold to the highest bidder. This often split up many of the slave families.

Source 5 – An illustration of a slave auction

Source 5 – a textbook description of a ‘scramble’

The slaves were kept together and the buyers paid beforehand, either for a fixed sum or for a certain number of slaves. Once the buyers had paid, they ran into the areas

where the slaves were and grabbed the slaves they wanted. This was humiliating and frightening. The buyers pulled at their faces to look at their teeth and treated them like animals. Again, many were split up from their families and friends.

Source 6 –

The refuse were the slaves who were not taken in the scramble. They were sold in lots to anyone who would take them. Those too weak or ill were often left to die. Sometimes they were purchased for a small price by doctors. The doctors hoped to cure them and then sell them for a higher price. Plantation owners also bought them with a view of working them to death quickly.

Lesson 2 – Plantation Life

Source 7 –

Being a slave in the West Indian plantations was hard, hot, heavy work. The ground had to be dug, weeded, planted and manured in the hot sun. A white overseer was in charge of the slaves. He used a whip to make sure they all worked on the soil which was baked so hard it would break their tools. Most slaves were field hands.

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Source 8 – a list of jobs carried out by slaves.

The most difficult time for slaves was during the harvesting of the sugar crop. They had to…

Cut the sugar cane and load it onto carts. Crush and boil the cane in a mill to take away the brown

sugar juice. This was left in barrels until it became syrup. This was called molasses and was used in rum. Slaves often crushed their fingers in the giant rollers. The heat was unbearable. Arms and legs would swell up and even the strongest slave could not work for more than 4 hours in the boiling house.

Clear sugar left behind. They worked 18 hour days at harvest time and on average,

slaves on the plantations lived for 7 years.

Source 9 –

They worked from dawn until dusk. Children as young as 3 years were given small jobs to do. They worked using a Gang System. First Gang - Made up from physically fit young male and female slaves. They did the hardest work. Second Gang – Made up from people usually between the ages of 12-18, slightly older people and pregnant women. They did slightly easier work. Third Gang – Made up from the very young or the very old. They carried out less demanding work like gathering rubbish. All the gangs were supervised by a ‘Slave Driver.’ This was another slave who had to make sure the gangs were doing their jobs properly. He answered to the white overseer.

Source 10 –

There were different levels within slave societies. At the very top came the highly skilled slaves, especially those who were allowed by their masters to earn some money of their own. Next came the slaves who were 'drivers' on plantations - those who used whips to drive other slaves to do their work. House slaves came next they often had white fathers and black mothers and were called mulattos. Then came slaves with special skills: herbalists, nurses, potters and cabinet-makers. Finally, at the bottom of the heap, came the field workers.

Source 11 –

Source 12 -

Millions of slaves suffered terrible illnesses and died young. In 1792 half of the slaves bought by Worthy Park, a plantation in Jamaica, were dead four years later. One of the main problems was that the slave ships brought

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with them all the African killer diseases and these then mixed with the illnesses of Europe and America with dreadful results.

Source 13 –

Estates doctors were usually helped by a local nurse, often a slave, who lived on the plantation. Most doctors tried their best, but often they did not know what to do to cure the sick slaves. They used the best European medicine, but this was often useless against tropical diseases. The slaves themselves sometimes used old tribal remedies, and these often worked better than western medicines. Slaves died from African diseases like yaws; from European diseases like measles and whooping cough; and from dropsy and dysentery. When slaves died, their deaths were written in the plantation slave book. The owner had lost a piece of property which would have to be replaced.

Source 14 –

Source 15 –

Owners saw it as their right to attack slaves. They flogged (whipped) them when they did not think they were working hard enough and very few reached the end of their working lives without being flogged. They had to be careful they did not disable the slaves so they could not work. The sexual abuse of female slaves was acceptable to the owners. The slaves were punished for stealing and deliberate sabotage. They would usually lose a hand, limb or ear as a punishment for this. Crimes such as murder or rebellion on the plantations were punished by the slow and painful death of hanging. The owners liked to give maximum pain as it would teach the other slaves a lesson.

Extension – A description of life on the Codrington Plantation

The land at Codrington totalled 710 acres. The rich red soil and plentiful rain produced a first-rate crop of sugar. There were three wind-powered mills for pressing the juice out of the cane, the largest “boiling house” on the island for turning cane juice into sugar and molasses, and a distillery for making molasses into rum.

Like a steadily increasing number of West Indian plantations, Codrington had absentee owners and so and so its fine “great house” was occupied by a resident manager, helped by a dozen or so white employees, ranging from a storekeeper to the captain of the plantation’s

They lived in huts which were made from stone, wood or woven basket. Slave drivers had the best houses as they had beds with mosquito curtains, a pillow, a blanket, a mattress, a good table, chairs and a small shed for cooking in. Field hands only had a bed, table, bench and a few cooking tools. Families usually had their own rooms but they shared fireplaces and kitchens with others.

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ship, which carried barrels of sugar and rum around the island to Bridgetown, to be loaded onto ships for England. Nineteen slave servants took care of their every need: cooking meals, doing laundry, and emptying chamber pots.

In what little spare time they had, Codrington’s slaves built and repaired their own rickety. Earth-floored wooden huts, continually repairing the leaky thatch roofs, made of sticks and “trash”—cane after the juice had been squeezed out—held together with thin strands of rope. Hurricanes left the sturdy stone Codrington great house standing but generally blew down the slave quarters.

In a good year, Codrington’s profits were more than £2,000—roughly £600,000 in today’s money. The plantation’s accountants kept a detailed running inventory of all its assets, including the slaves. A headcount in 1781 showed the slave quarters holding 276 men, women, and children. Skilled male workers like the carpenter and three barrel makers were valued at £70 a piece, the two children’s nurses at only £15 each.

At Codrington, slaves from Africa were first “seasoned” for years receiving extra food and light work assignments. Slaves were vulnerable during this early traumatic period, when they were most liable to suffer disease, run away, or to commit suicide. The ordeal of the middle passage, plus the shock of adjusting to new lives, foods, and diseases, was so great that roughly one third of Africans died within three years. If you survived those three years, you were regarded as ready for the hardest labour.

Cultivating and harvesting the crop was brutal work. If you were a field hand, you planted cane shoots in holes or trenches you dug by hand, often in marshland where the air was dense with mosquitoes. At harvest time you carried huge, heavy bundles of cane to the mill. You then fed each bundle twice through powerful vertical rollers that squeezed out the juice, which flowed into large copper vats in the boiling house, where it was simmered, strained, filtered, and allowed to crystallise into sugar.

The exhausted slaves who worked these vats were ‘very apt to get scalded” a manual for planters matter-of-factly noted, “especially when they are obliged to continue their work in the night time. The canes juice fermented and turned sour within a day or two after cutting, so it had to be rushed to the mill immediately. Profit -hungry planters recklessly grew more cane than they had mill capacity for, and during the harvest season mills often ran around the clock to process it all. Slaves then had to work in the mill or boiling house four to six hours on alternate nights in addition to a full day in the fields. Their clothes soaked with cane juice, they often lay dawn to sleep wherever they were, too exhausted to walk to their huts, and many caught pneumonia.

When Lady Nugent visited one plantation,

“l asked the overseer how often his people were relieved. He said every twelve hours; but how dreadful to think of their standing twelve hours over a boiling cauldron, and doing the same thing; and he owned up to me that sometimes they’d fall asleep, and get their poor fingers into the mill; and he showed me a hatchet, that was always ready to sever the whole limb, as the only means of saving the poor sufferer’s life!”

Only small children, the elderly, and invalids escaped work. Most Codrington slaves were field hands, and from the age of seven or eight, old enough to hold a special child-sized hoe, they would be put to work weeding, planting corn, gathering fodder for cattle, or shovelling manure into cane holes. Hour after hour in the hot sun, they had to bend over to slash at the base of the stalks with a heavy machete while clearing aside the cut canes with the other hand. Sugar

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cane leaves have knife-like edges and sharp points that can jab the eye, cheek, or ear of a tired or unwary cutter. Slaves had none of the protective gear available today.

The sugar regime was not the only burden. The West Indian climate brought a lot of tropical diseases to both whites and blacks. And with the best arable land on the islands all reserved for cash crops like sugar, the Caribbean slave diet was far worse than that on the North American mainland, causing nutrition -deficiency illnesses like rickets and scurvy. What little protein the slaves were given mostly came from pickled herring or salted cod judged not good enough to sell in Britain. Imported only once or twice a year, the fish often went rotten. The results of these hardships appeared in a common medical measure of health and nutrition. Caribbean male slaves were on average three inches shorter than those in America

Among the slaves, almost all the skilled jobs, like maintaining mill equipment, building sugar barrels, were done by men. The majority of slaves in the fields of plantations like Codrington were women. The fact that women did the hardest work, combined with their abysmal diet, delayed menarche and brought an end to a slave woman’s fertility by her mid-thirties. In the mid-eighteenth-century British West Indies, fully half of all women sugar slaves never bore a child.

Lesson 3 – Rebellion – The Middle Passage

Source 16 –

Slaves resisted on the Middle Passage by trying to take over the ship (mutiny), jumping overboard, starving themselves or committing suicide. If they were let out of their shackles for good behaviour then they would often try and steal some kind of weapon (chisel, stones, knives) to break the chains of other slaves.

Source 17 – an account of a slave uprising

In mid-Atlantic the slaves suddenly swarmed around the captain and beat out his brains with their wooden feeding bowls. The chief mate ordered the crew, who had barricaded themselves on the quarter deck, to fire into the slaves with charges of partridge shot. Eighty Negroes were shot or jumped overboard. On two further occasions they tried to take over the ship, then gave up altogether. Some even starved themselves to death. The slaves were sold very cheaply, as experience showed that resistance, once started, continued. Many of the slaves hung themselves on the plantation in a mass suicide.

Source 18 –

Source 19 –

The greatest fear that ship captains had was that the slaves would rise up and try and take the ship over. This was because there was usually hundreds of slaves on board compared to 30 or fewer sailors.

Source 20 - John Atkins, a ship’s doctor in the Royal Navy, spent some time on the African coast. Here he

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tells of the fate of another attempted uprising led by Tomba, formerly an African chief, who persuaded a woman on the ship to smuggle him a hammer.

Tomba persuaded four of his countrymen to help him break out, but only one did. They and the woman crept up on the sentries and killed three of them before the alarm was raised. Tomba and his accomplices were arrested and tried. The captain was going to hang Tomba and his friend until Tomba pointed out that he would lose a lot of money. So the captain took the three others of Tomba’s men, who were much poorer specimens, hung one and then forced the others to eat his liver and heart. Then they were hung. The captain then hoisted the woman up by her thumbs, and had her flogged and slashed with knives till she died.

Source 21 –

Lesson 4 – Rebellion – The Plantations

Source 22 –

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Most slaves hated the way they were treated. Many of them protested against their treatment in whatever ways they could. They weren't paid for the work they did, so some worked as slowly as they dared; there were many unexplained 'accidents': wheels came off carts, tools broke, china plates fell off shelves and instructions were misunderstood. Some slaves went further and tried to poison their owners, set fire to their sugar canes and burn down their houses. Often the owners did not realize what was really happening. They just thought their slaves were stupid, lazy, or both. Owners who did realise what was happening, punished their slaves harshly.

Source 23 –

Source 24 –

Many slaves tried to run away, and some were successful. They fled from the British Caribbean islands by stowing away in boats which were sailing to Spanish colonies. Some runaway slaves became pirates. In Jamaica many fled to the mountains and joined earlier runaways: the Maroons, who had fled from the invading British in 1655.

Source 25 –

There was a dinner given by a club to the ladies of Kingstown. One Negro boy was left in the upper gallery where it was laid out, to take care of it. After the dancing ended, we went up to supper, but it had gone. Everything but for a few plates had vanished. This was a daring piece of cheekiness; but the lesser kinds of cheekiness are common wherever there are Negro servants.

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Case Study 1 – JamaicaThere had been a number of rebellions by enslaved Africans on the island of Jamaica. Sixteen slave rebellions had taken place between 1655 and 1813. There were also major uprisings in 1816 and 1823. By the 1820s, more than 2500 enslaved people were escaping from the plantations each year.

1831 saw the largest slave uprising. It started with the enslaved people refusing to work. The strike was meant to be peaceful, with the aim of forcing the owners to pay the enslaved people to cut the cane so it would not spoil. Things soon escalated. Enslaved Africans burnt down houses and warehouses full of sugar cane, causing over a million pounds worth of damage. More than 200 plantations in the north of Jamaica were attacked as 20,000 enslaved people seized control of large chunks of land. 

The rebels were led by Samuel Sharpe. The main rebellion lasted 10 days but it took British troops the whole of January, 1832 to restore order. It resulted in the death of nearly 200 Africans and 14 British planters or overseers. However, the repercussions of the rebellion were more terrible. Hundreds of the rebels were captured and over 750 were convicted, of which 138 were sentenced to death. Some were hanged; others were shot by firing squad. Most of those who escaped the death sentence were brutally punished, sometimes so harshly that they died anyway. Sharpe was executed in public.   

The revolt was very important and helped to end British slavery. It also shocked the British government and made them see that the costs and dangers of keeping slavery in the West Indies were too high. It reminded many of the St Domingue rebellion.

There were fears of another major rebellion on Jamaica and many terrified plantation owners were now ready to accept abolition, rather than risk a widespread war. Just one week after Sharpe's death, Parliament appointed a committee to consider ways of ending slavery.

Case Study 2 – BarbadosBarbados had been under British control for a long time and there had been no slave rebellions for over one hundred years, when rebellion broke out in 1816.It shocked the British plantation owners. Within a few hours, the rebellion had spread across a third of the island and enslaved people on seventy plantations were in revolt.

One of the leaders of the revolt was an enslaved African called Bussa, another was Nanny Grigg, a domestic servant. The rebellion was carefully carried out by senior enslaved people across the island. The aim was to overthrow the British planters, gain freedom and create a better life for black and coloured people.

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By the time soldiers had crushed the revolt, a quarter of the island's sugar cane crop had gone up in smoke. Nearly 1000 rebels were killed. After the rebellion, 214 more were executed and 123 were transported from the island to be sold elsewhere as slaves.

Source 26- A list of punishments given to slaves.

Antigua A slave who had run away for 3 months was to be whipped or lose a limb

Any person who killed a runaway slave was to be given £3.Montserrat Any person capturing a runaway slave was to be given 500lb of

sugar.St Christopher

Any white who finds a slave outside of a plantation without a ticket, especially on a Sunday may whip him.

Jamaica A slave found with 5-20lb of fresh beef, veal and mutton is to be whipped

Barbados A slave who is violent towards a Christian is to be whipped, have their nose slit and then be branded in the face with a hot iron

Source 27 –

Source 29 –

Other slaves ran away when they saw a chance. On small islands it was difficult to hide for long but on larger islands like Jamaica slaves could hide in the thick forest for years. In Jamaica over 1094 slaves ran away in 1784.

Source 28- was written by Olaudah Equiano, an ex-slave. He describes how slaves were punished for little ‘crimes’

It was very common for the slaves to be branded with the first letter of the master’s name. Then a heavy iron collar was hung around their necks. This was done for even the smallest thing. They were loaded with chains and often instruments of torture were added. An iron muzzle was put around the mouth. Thumbscrews were used. I have seen a Negro beaten till some of his bones were broken for letting a pot of porridge boil over.

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Source 30 –

Lesson 5 – Attitudes towards slaves

Source 31 –

By calling slaves ‘non-human’, anything could be done to them without feeling guilty. If you were a Christian (as almost all Europeans claimed they were), you did not have to pray for forgiveness. An enslaved person could be beaten to death with impunity (without being punished). Male plantation owners, sailors and other European men freely raped enslaved women: this was not a sin or misdemeanour, as these women were not deemed human.