The Gold Coast

File:Transatlantic Slave Trade Map.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

The triangle slave trade is the name given to the three-part water route taken by the slave transport ships while moving slaves from thier homes in Africa to the Americas and West Indies as slaves. For the ship and its sailors, this voyage started in Europe. Liverpool, England is one of the many ports Britannic ships would embark from. Other European ports include Nantes, Bristol, and Le Havre (4). These ships were outfitted with the goods necessary to, “exchange for captives in Africa” (2).

In spite of these influential ports and location cites, I choose to focus more on the sailor’s second leg of their journey: a voyage often referred to as “the middle passage”. It is here that the slaves solidify thier new roles as englaved people, and for them, it is the first oceanic leg of their journey (3). In Africa, at least 10% of slaves were bought and traded for in an area referred to as “The Gold Coast” (4). 

Men, women, and children were brought from Central Africa (4) and as per the account given by Richard Miles, a fort officer who served on the Gold Coast, bought and traded slaves to ship captains, “subjected every AFtrican he considered purchasing to a humiliating bodily inspection, … to sift people according their health and age” (3).  These inspections often included the inspection of one’s mouth to look for decaying teeth, dies in the hair to help gauge age, various tests to measure the captive’s sensory capacities, a close scrutiny of their genitals to look for venereal diseases. This can be summed up best in reiterating the enslaved people were, “thoroughly examined, even to the smallest Member, and that naked too both Men and Women, without the least distinction of Modesty” (3).

The treatment of the slaves did not improve as they were sold. In fact, “this process of unmaking, … produced a dramatic climate of terror in the world of slavery at sea that resulted in mental disorientation, familial and communal separation, malnourishment, lack of sanitation and cleanliness, severe isolation, debilitating diseases, sexual abuse, phychological instablilty, and bearing witness to physical violence commited against kin and shipmates” (1). This started as slaves were packed tightly together and, as was the case with the Zong, ship captains would attempt to transport dangerous numbers of slaves, allowing for the easy spread of disease amoungst the captives (3). They were packed below deck, the men having been shackled together in pairs by their ankles and wrists, for fear of an attempted uprising. 

Due to the vast number of slaves “in crowded rooms below deck for long periods of time” they were “slowly poisoned by carbon dioxide, which steadily increased in concentration as hundreds of people exhaled in poorly ventilated spaces” (3). In addition to this, crew members did not allowing the slaves to frequently wash or shave themselves. Most slave ships consented to their washing once weekly/biweekly (3). 

The women and children were often help in the back of the ship, separated from the men slaves. However, slave captains admitted that crews often abused them. Former slave Ottobah Cugoano later recalled, “It was common for the dirty filthy sailors to take the African women and lie upon their bodies” (2). 

Scholars believe those who survived the voyage of the middle passage were scattered throughout 179 ports throughout the Americas. Some of these included those in Brazil, Jamaica, Haiti, the United States, etc (4). After selling the slaves, the ships would return back to Europe and resart the process once more, acting as en unstoppable engine powering the slave trade. 

Works Cited

  1. Feelings, Tom. The Middle Passage. 375 Hudson St, New York, Penguin Random House, 2017.
  2. Mustakeem, Sowande. Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (New Black Studies Series). Illustrated, University of Illinois Press, 2016.
  3. Radburn, Nicholas. The Long Middle Passage: The Enslavement of Africans and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 1640-1808. 2016. Johns Hopkins University, PhD dissertation.
  4. “Slave Trade Routes.” Slavery and Remembrance, http://slaveryandremembrance.org/articles/article/?id=A0096. 

Parent Map

Romantic Tensions Map

Coordinates

Latitude: 4.743055600000
Longitude: -2.090277800000

Timeline of Events Associated with The Gold Coast

Date Event Manage
circa. The end of the month Autumn 1781 to circa. 1807

The Zong

In August of 1781, captain Luke Collingwood left Africa with more than four hundred slaves with the intent to sell them in Jamaca. Accustomed as we are to massive cruise ships that can carry, on average, three thousand people, this number does not seem particularly high. However, for the time, it was customary for the average slave ship to cary a capacity of 1.75 slaves per ton. The Zong carried a ratio of 4.0 persons per ton (2). This practice caused multiple problems, not the least of which could potentially include a shortage of water or food. 

With this in mind, a scarcity of water was claimed to be the primary reason for which, upon approaching the island of Jamaica, more than 130 african slaves were jettisoned over board. A rough fifty of these included women and children (2). “Overcrowding, malnutrition, accidents, and disease had already killed several mariners and approximately 62 Africans” (2). 

As explains Anita Rupprecht in her essay, “A Very Uncommon Case” she summarizes simply that, “it is the narrative fact that Luke Collingwood ordered the jettison of 132 living Africans, and that he did so in order to make an insurance claim” (1). The reality of the matter is, whatever claims the slave traders may have made in regards to limited water supplies, it was primarily the “sickness and mortality” (1) that came from the manor of transporting the slaves that caused the massacre of the Africans. In an attempt to recuperate potential losses in profit if the disease was allowed to persist and spread aboard the ship, the Gregson slave-trading sydicate that owned the ship filed for insurance based on the claims the crew members gave. 

Though the lower courts upheld the case given in favor of the ship owners, in a later appeal, it was revealed that the Zong was not, in fact, short of water at the time of the jettison of the slaves. In said appeal, the claims of the insurers were upheld, thereby ruling against the claims of the syndicates (2). 

The abolitionists of the time viewed the Zong case as a rallying point and Granville Sharp, a prominent abolitionist, had “no patience with formal arguments about insurance law. The ‘transaction’ in question was about life, not property” (1), and could not “ignore the case of Zong. It almost too perfectly, and gruesomely, dramatised the horrific consequences of legal perversion in the name of profit: maritime insurance, that perfectly prudent commercial ‘safety net’, also sanctioned calculated mass murder” (1). He, in effect, advocates for the humanization of the slaves and tries to put his readers in a place to sympathize with them, exploring in his writings the dehumanization and disempowering of the African during the middle passage (the voyage between Africa and the Americas) (1). For Sharp, “the line of argument was uncomplicated. The legal definition of slave humanity legitimised murder” (1).

The tragedies of the Zong did not end with Sharp. His work was built upon by other abolitionists - more notibally by William Wilberforce who referenced the Zong in speeches to the House. The case of the Zong, though sad in it’s reality, marks a huge stepping stone in the process in the abolition of slavery. In 1788, seven years after the diseased slaves were jettisoned into the ocean, the Slave Trade Act was passed, which amongst other things as the first law passed regulating slave trade, limited the number of slaves that could be carried per ship. Further laws were added in 1791 that “prohibited insurance companies from reimbursing ship owners when enslaved people were murdered by being thrown overboard” (2). All culminating in the eventual abolition of slavery in 1807.

Works Cited

(1) Anita Rupprecht (2007) ‘A Very Uncommon Case’: Representations of the Zong and the British Campaign to Abolish the Slave Trade, The Journal of Legal History, 28:3, 329-346, DOI: 10.1080/01440360701698494

(2)“The Zong Massacre Begins.” African American Registry, 29 Nov. 2021, https://aaregistry.org/story/the-zong-massacre-episode-begins/.

The jettison of diseased slaves from the Zong