Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora

“Understanding of how and why a region that had been an importer of people from elsewhere became an exporter of its own people requires analysis of the relation between emergent institutions of political authority and the Atlantic market economy, by then firmly rooted in the Gold Coast.”

This quote describes the roots of the Gold Coast’s participation in the Atlantic trade of enslaved people. Several states were vying for power within the Gold Coast region, and as such, there was an increased number of prisoners of war. Those in power saw an opportunity in the Atlantic market trade to use their prisoners to obtain firearms and other European goods that would give them an edge in the conflict for political control.

“The human spoils of war produced two forms of wealth: If assimilated as slave laborers and wives, war captives supplied productive and reproductive labor; alternatively, if disposed of through sale, war captives could be made into profitable commodities and exchanged for European goods on the Atlantic coast.”

Commodification is a theme that runs through the book, and here we see the commodification of African prisoners of war by other Africans. These individuals would come to supply the Atlantic trade of enslaved people through their power consolidation in the Gold Coast region.

“Rather, theirs was a ‘social death,’ a form of exile to which no end was foreseeable. They inhabited a new category of marginalization, one not of extreme alienation within the community, but rather of absolute exclusion from any community.”

This describes the plight of the “saltwater slaves” and how their experience differed from those who were enslaved within a new African community. Those enslaved through the Atlantic trade were given no opportunity to assimilate into any community. They were ripped from their families and everything that was known to them, with no means of maintaining those former social ties. They were not equipped to create new communities due to their extensive trauma and alienation.

“Traders reduced people to the sum of their biological parts, thereby scaling life down to an arithmetical equation and finding the lowest common denominator.”

Smallwood describes the commodification process. Traders of enslaved people such as the Royal African Company calculated the basic food, water, and space needs of the captives against the profit they would make. They gave the absolute minimum needed for the captives to scarcely survive the transatlantic journey, and in many instances, it proved to be too little.

“The most powerful instrument locking captives in as commodities for Atlantic trade was the culture of the market itself.”

More than actual chains, the strength of the commercial drive of the market bound the captives and prevented them from escaping their imprisonment. Escapes occurred often, despite the shackles and enclosures used. Shackles were often not kept in good working condition, and enclosures were poorly constructed and poorly guarded. However, the physical appearance of the captives more than marked them as such—many of them were emaciated or injured—and this prevented them from effectively hiding from those who were strongly driven by the economic gain of the trade of enslaved people.

“In some Atlantic African communities it was believed that persons who departed in this way did in fact return but traveled not on the metaphysical plane of the ancestors but rather, transmuted as wine and gunpowder, on the material plane of commodities—an idea suggesting that the special violence of commodification produced not only social death, but more ominous still a kind of total annihilation of the human subject.”

Concerns about the afterlife for those who died in slavery plagued the African captives in the Atlantic trade of enslaved people. These concerns became more pressing as they voyaged across the Atlantic. The mortality rates on ships were high, and the numbers did not decrease after the captives disembarked. This was one interpretation of the afterlife.

“Quality was necessarily subordinate to quantity, which was required for the slave ship’s speedy departure.”

The agenda of the ship captains differed from that of the enslavers. Many ships were under contract not to sail unless they had a complete cargo. It was therefore in the captains’ best interests to accrue as many captives as quickly as they could to maximize profit. The agents on the African coast had to contend with the difficulties of maintaining the enslaved people that they had already obtained while they were completing the cargo. The concerns of the enslavers were necessarily different: They sought enslaved people (preferably males) who would be able to do the hard labor on a plantation.

“Atlantic commodification meant not only exclusion from that which was recognizable as community, but also immersion in a collective whose most distinguishing feature was its unnatural constitution; it brought strangers together in anomalous intimacy.”

Cargo holds of ships were usually packed to ensure the maximum number of individuals were transported. This meant that strangers were kept close in a way that was usually reserved for intimate relations. Additionally, captives were in a culturally, linguistically, and ethnically diverse group, one that would not usually be together in one place.

“Cartographic representations of what Europeans needed to know about the region’s politico-economic landscape provide a useful framework for exploring questions about the socioethnic landscape of the Gold Coast.”

European maps defined the Gold Coast as they understood it, with notations as to how various states related to European trade interests. Aside from these self-serving interests, these maps do show changes in the socio-ethnic landscape as they happened. However, it is unclear if the geographic boundaries corresponded with the boundaries of political authority and power of the various states at the time.

“The ethnic and linguistic diversity on the slave ship did not mean that people could not communicate with one another.”

The diversity on the ship did not prevent communication between captive people, as many individuals were able to understand close dialects. Additionally, movement between borders was extremely common (laborers, marriage, war refugees, prisoners of war) and facilitated a familiarity with the other major languages in the region. However, this familiarity with language did not necessarily ease communications on a ship.

“The sheer scale of the unknown element disabled many of the cognitive tools supplied by Africa epistemologies, which attributed dangerous supernatural powers to the watery realm.”

The ocean was an unknown entity for enslaved people, and its vastness contributed to the captives’ sense of displacement. While on the ship, they lacked spatial and temporal awareness, and as the days stretched to months, this disorientation only deepened. Nothing they had ever learned had prepared them for the experience of the ship at sea.

“This truth lends substance to Equiano’s poetic insight that the ship packed beyond capacity with a ‘full complement’ of African captives was a ‘hollow place’; a place distinguished by its many lacks—its material and social poverty, its cognitive dissonance, and its defenselessness in the face of the supernatural.”

A former enslaved man, Olaudah Equiano, provided insight into the unique terror that the captives faced once the shoreline disappeared and the ship was on the high seas. Despite the densely packed cargo hold, the immenseness of the ocean all around them weighed upon the captives. This “hollow” feeling only worsened their fears and deepened their trauma during the transatlantic voyage.

“The ship under sail was a world unto itself, where the passengers had to rely only on the expertise of the sailors aboard—and on whatever spiritual power they might be able to summon.”

This is yet another explanation of the powerlessness that the captives felt. They were trapped in the “hollow place” until their captors deemed otherwise. Even if they were to attempt a mutiny or an escape, there was nowhere for them to go. They also had no maritime knowledge and would therefore be unable to orient and navigate the ship to freedom if they were to gain access. They were reliant on their captors to pilot them safely through the Atlantic.

“Slave ships were called tumbeiros in the eighteenth-century Angolan trade, for example, a term historians have translated as ‘floating tombs’ or ‘undertakers.’”

The high mortality rates on the ships carrying enslaved people were well known, to the point where the ships’ deadly nature entered the African language. These ships not only brought death but also brought the captives to their deaths in the New World, severed from their kin and ancestors.

“The language of accounting thus rationalized shipboard mortality, portraying the European agent of commodification as the passive victim of the Africans who died—as an investor robbed of his property by the property.”

This is further documentation of the commodification that Smallwood discusses throughout her book. Peter Blake’s language shows how deeply the concept of commodification runs, going so far as to implicitly blame the captive for dying and thus denying the traders the profit from their sale. Even in death, the enslaved people belonged to their captors.

“In purely commercial terms, it was in the interests of the English merchants, whose aim had been to buy cheap on the African coast, to sell dear in America.”

This is a common investment tactic and is clearly seen in the traders’ commodification of the captives. They spent as little as they could to sustain the captives without outright killing them before they arrived in the Americas. Every cent spent on the captives was calculated against their purchase price, and it would be a cent less that they would gain in profit.

“The equation rested on a contradiction, though: the transport system that doubled the price of human commodities when they reached America also greatly diminished their quality.”

The American agents had to rely on marketing to charge the enslavers an amount that surpassed the high cost of the transport of human commodities, along with the costs of lodging and sustaining the captives, to ensure that they would turn a profit. This was complicated by the difficulties of negotiating the Middle Passage. The ship carrying enslaved people greatly weakened and reduced the captives’ capacity for intense labor. No matter how diminished the enslaved people were, buyers still negotiated for whatever labor they could offer.

“All cargos ‘found’ a market somewhere in the Americas.”

The demand for commodified labor was so great that every single captive in cargo was sold, no matter what his or her condition. A secondary market even existed for the “refuse,” or the least desired captives. Whether due to illness, injury, or temperament, the refuse were purchased at lower prices at the end of the sale by enterprising men who hoped that the captives would recover and regain their vitality so that they could be sold again.

“Having finally escaped the restrictive existence of the slave ship, many found themselves turning to the same goal, setting about to retrace the ship’s path, they hoped in the direction of home.”

Throughout their ordeal, the captives never forgot their origins, and those who saw the opportunity to return home seized upon it when they could. Many were thwarted by the lack of transatlantic transportation—the boats and canoes that they stole were not enough to outrun the enslavers or traders of enslaved people. Some captives chose to die by suicide near riverbanks or seacoasts, in the hopes that the water that brought them to slavery would bring them to the realm of their ancestors.

“This was the composite we can call diasporic Africa—an Africa that constituted not the continent on European maps, but rather the plurality of remembered places immigrant slaves carried with them.”

The geography of the American market created many small diasporas depending on the availability of captives from different regions of Africa, each with its own unique characteristics. For example, in the last quarter of the century, the Gold Coast captives in Barbados constituted 19% of new immigrants, whereas captives from the Bight of Benin constituted 43%. Those percentages shifted in the next quarter century, with the Gold Coast captives making up 48% of the new immigrants, and captives from the Bight of Benin down to 34%. They were joined by captives from West-Central Africa, the Bight of Biafra, Senegambia, and southeast Africa in varying proportions. The captives’ interactions through their shared experiences constituted the diasporic Africa.

“Rather, the connection Africans needed was a narrative continuity between past and present—an epistemological means of connecting dots between there and here, then and now, to craft a coherent story out of incoherent experience.”

The communities created by the Africans in diaspora helped them deal with the dire situation that slavery created. Their past did not prepare them for these specific problems; thus, they could not simply transfer their previous cultural practices to create Africa in the Americas. These old practices and rites no longer served their needs. Only through new practices that transformed and elaborated upon existing cultural content were they able to connect their past and their present and forge ahead anew.

“Women’s roles as wives and mothers surely were among the most vital in this project; but beyond that, the contributions African women made to the communities of American slavery far exceeded the reproductive roles with which these women are generally associated.”

While women were not favored by enslavers, their contributions allowed for normal life (as normal as possible under slavery) to return. African women brought with them a vast store of cultural knowledge and practical skills that aided them in attending to the challenges that enslaved people faced in their new environments. These women greatly contributed to communities of enslaved people and allowed them to reclaim and reestablish their identities so they could emerge from social death.

“The stigma of being a saltwater slave was not Africanness per se but rather the ignorance and inexperience that African birth symbolized in a world increasingly dominated by American-born, or ‘creole’ slaves—a world rooted more firmly in the African diaspora in America than in Africa itself.”

It was largely due to the labor of the first generations of “saltwater slaves” that new generations of American-born enslaved people could survive and thrive. It is ironic that there was a stigma associated with being a “saltwater slave,” when their communities were built from the mistakes and experience of the captives who came before. However, this stigma showed the emergence of the prior captives from social death and their ability to create a new life and identity, despite the trauma they experienced.