Slavery and the Triangular Trade

FOUNDATIONS OF THE ATLANTIC WORLD HIST 1301 | History Slavery and the Triangular Trade In order to supply labour for Europe's commercial endeavours, Europeans forcibly carried some twelve million Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas during one of the greatest migrations in history, which occurred between the late fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The transatlantic trip claimed the lives of almost two million individuals. The ability to take riches from European colonies—the foundation of the mercantilist system—was made feasible by the survivors. Most Africans who were transported over the Atlantic were intended to work on Brazilian and Caribbean sugar plantations. Relatively few Africans under slavery were transported to the North American continent, mostly Mexico; the majority were taken to the Spanish colonies in South America. The idea of utilising enslaved Indigenous peoples to carry out the hazardous and hard work of harvesting cash crops like sugar cane was first entertained by European colonists, but these plans were ultimately abandoned. Too few Indigenous people remained to work in the fields after a high number of them perished from deadly illnesses. When Columbus landed in Hispaniola in 1492, the Taíno natives there numbered at least several hundred thousand. This island was the site of sugar plantations created by both the French and the Spanish. But by 1514, there were only over 32,000 Taíno left. Some had perished from hard labour and subpar living circumstances after being enslaved, while others had been slain on purpose by the Spanish. But the great majority had passed away from illness. In contrast to enslaved Indigenous people who knew the best locations to hide, Europeans believed that labourers who were as unfamiliar with the area as they were would be easier to recapture if they managed to escape. They would also be less susceptible to many of the infectious ailments that plagued Europeans. Europeans recognised that people who had previously had certain diseases, such as smallpox, and survived would not get such diseases again, even though they did not know what generated immunity. They were also aware—due to their extended interactions with Africans—that fewer Africans than Native Americans perished from European illnesses. Africans met both of their essential criteria, according to the European perspective. European indentured servants would have also been a good match, but the hot weather of the Caribbean and illnesses like yellow fever and malaria that were carried from Africa with enslaved people made it difficult for most other European immigrants to get there and resulted in high death rates among Europeans within the first year of their arrival. The labour requirements of tobacco farmers in Virginia and Maryland, where the mortality rate among Europeans was likewise high, were not met by indentured servitude. While a large proportion of indentured servants willingly departed Europe, there were still too many who were convicted felons ordered to be sent to the colonies. Additionally, French colonists saw servants as a less acceptable kind of labour because of a 1664 statute that limited landowners' ability to beat their bonded workers. Therefore, in their haste to make a profit, Europeans turned to Africa for the answer and turned to slavery rather than indentured servitude. They felt that Africans might be enslaved for life, providing a steady supply of field workers, and that Africans were physically more adapted to hard labour than Europeans were. The Portuguese were the first to introduce substantial numbers of Africans to the Americas; they were already using them as slaves to cultivate sugar on islands off the coast of Africa. Two hundred Africans were brought to the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola by the first Portuguese expedition to do so in 1525. The majority were either sold to the Spanish for this use or compelled to cultivate sugar for Portuguese colonists in Brazil. Additionally, the Spanish bought and sold Africans to labour as household servants or in mines in Peru and Mexico. In order to produce sugar, rice, indigo, tobacco, and, by the seventeenth century, coffee in the Americas, the British, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Danes soon began transporting prisoners from Africa as well. For the sake of simplification, the intricate economic system that employed Africans in slavery to cultivate sugar and other crops for European colonists in the Americas is sometimes referred to as the "triangular trade" because it connected the three continents—the Americas, Europe, and West Africa— through a network of trade. One part of the triangle trade involved shipping Africans into slavery across the Atlantic. Europeans traded manufactured products for African slaves with African traders during the initial leg of the trade. After then, the enslaved individuals were transported to European possessions in the Americas over the Atlantic. Because it was the middle (or second) leg of the three-leg exchange, this voyage was known as the Middle Passage. The goods cultivated by current enslaved labourers were bought with proceeds from the sale of Africans held in slavery in the colonies. These commodities were transported to Europe or to other American colonies in Europe in the third leg of the triangle, where they were completed and sent. In African ports, for instance, English slave traffickers traded rum for captured people. After being transported in chains over the Atlantic to England's Caribbean possessions, the prisoners were bought by plantation owners and forced to labour on the cultivation of sugar cane. After that, the plantation owners sent molasses—a byproduct of sugar cane—to other English colonists in the Massachusetts colony, who turned it into rum and sent it back to England. Then, English ship commanders in Africa traded rum for manufactured goods like clothing, weapons, and ammunition in return for captured people. The cycle continued as African slave dealers used the firearms to capture additional individuals to ship over the Middle Passage. The triangle's foundation was made up of individuals who were held as slaves. The commerce would have failed without the rice, sugar, tobacco, coffee, indigo, and rice generated by their labour. The transatlantic slave trade claimed a staggering toll in human lives. There were harsh conditions in the Middle Passage, and some ships could accommodate as many as five or six hundred passengers. Certain that 10 to 20 percent of passengers would perish on the journey, some captains crammed as many people as they could into the hold in the hopes that a sizable portion would make a tidy profit. Men were chained side by side on their backs in the hold, sometimes with only a few inches of space above them, apart from women and children. A British firm called the Royal Africa firm gave commanders instructions in 1713 to provide enslaved persons an area that measured five feet by eleven inches by twenty inches. It was implied that pilots typically crammed passengers into even tighter quarters. Sailors provided food and drink to the enslaved individuals on board, often once a day. Men and women used buckets or tubs that frequently spilled amid choppy waves to relieve themselves because there were no lavatory facilities. The heat was unbearable, the stink was awful, and there was inadequate ventilation. When buyers would not pay high prices for those who appeared weak, crews would occasionally bring the enslaved Africans outside onto the deck for some fresh air and force them to jump and dance to work out their muscles. However, since this was the moment when a mutiny was most likely to occur, removing prisoners from the hold was always risky for the crew. Captains of slave ships punished any attempt at insurrection severely. It was dangerous to take enslaved individuals to the deck since many took advantage of the chance to terminate their lives rather than suffer through the suffering on board the ship or face an unknown future. Some captains threw nets beneath the ship's rails in an attempt to capture anybody who leaped overboard. The captains of slave ships were often afraid of getting sick. Within the ship's cramped cabins, contagious diseases had the potential to spread like wildfire, and the captain's profit was diminished with each death. The most dreaded illness of all was trachoma, an eye infection that left sufferers blind but did not cause death. People in slavery who were blind would not be bought. The thought that the sickness may spread to the crew was even more terrifying. The ship would sit aimlessly in the ocean, unable to reach any port, and everyone on board would starve to death slowly if the crew lost their sight. Slave trips frequently had significant loss insurance. The Zong's skipper made the most of this situation. Both the crew and the slave cargo started to pass away from disease in 1781 when severe weather delayed their ship's journey across the Atlantic. The captain gave the order to toss 132 slaves overboard so they would drown after realising that the ship owner's insurance coverage would only cover captives lost at sea and not those who passed away from illness.