William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner. William Hague

usually yoked together and underfed, with a consequently high rate of mortality. The original kidnappers might have received only a small fraction of the final price of the slave by the time they had paid tolls and duties in the course of a journey and sold on their captives to intermediary traders, at large fairs held specifically for that purpose. In the words of Alexander Falconbridge, a surgeon aboard slave ships who would later give evidence to Parliament:

      The unhappy wretches thus disposed of are bought by the black traders at fairs, which are held for that purpose, at the distance of upwards of two hundred miles from the sea coast; and these fairs are said to be supplied from an interior part of the country. Many Negroes, upon being questioned relative to the places of their nativity, have asserted that they have travelled during the revolution of several moons (their usual method of calculating time) before they have reached the places where they were purchased by the black traders … From forty to two hundred Negroes are generally purchased at a time by the black traders, according to the opulence of the buyer, and consist of all ages, from a month to sixty years and upwards. Scarcely any age or situation is deemed an exception, the price being proportionable. Women sometimes form a part of them, who happen to be so far advanced in their pregnancy as to be delivered during their journey from the fairs to the coast; and I have frequently seen instances of deliveries on board ship.¹⁹

      Despite the constant supply of slaves thus proceeding to the coast, such was the competition among European traders that they often had to anchor for many weeks while slowly filling their decks with slaves amidst much haggling. John Newton’s diary for the year 1750 gives some flavour of what was involved.

      Wednesday 9th January … the traders came onboard with the owner of the slave; paid the excessive price of 86 bars which is near 12£ sterling, or must have let him gone on shoar again, which I was unwilling to do, as being the first that was brought on board the ship, and had I not bought him should have hardly seen another. But a fine man slave, now there are so many competitors, is near double the price it was formerly. There are such numbers of french vessels and most of them determined to give any price they are asked, rather than trade should fall into our hands, that it seems as if they are fitted out not so much for their own advantage, as with a view of ruining our purchases. This day buried a fine woman slave, number eleven, having been ailing sometime, but never thought her in danger till within these two days; she was taken with a lethargick disorder, which they seldom recover from …

      Thursday 17th January … William Freeman came onboard with a woman girl slave. Having acquitted himself tolerably, entrusted him with goods for 2 more.Yellow Will sent me word had bought me a man, but wanted another musquet to compleat the bargain, which sent him.

      Wednesday 23rd January … Yellow Will brought me off a boy slave, 3 foot 10 inches which I was obliged to take or get nothing. Fryday 25th January … Yellow Will brought me a woman slave, but being long breasted and ill-made refused her, and made him take her onshoar …²⁰

      Sometimes the traders resorted to simple trickery to fill their cargoes, as in this eyewitness account of Falconbridge:

      A black trader invited a negroe, who resided a little way up the country, to come and see him. After the entertainment was over, the trader proposed to his guest, to treat him with a sight of one of the ships lying in the river. The unsuspicious countryman readily consented, and accompanied the trader in a canoe to the side of the ship, which he viewed with pleasure and astonishment. While he was thus employed, some black traders on board, who appeared to be in the secret, leaped into the canoe, seized the unfortunate man, and dragging him into the ship, immediately sold him.²¹

      For most slaves, the moment of being taken on board a ship was one of utter terror. Very often they were convinced they were to be eaten – Equiano recalled that when he 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’.²² Newton remembered how the women and girls were taken on board ‘naked, trembling terrified, perhaps almost exhausted with cold, fatigue and hunger’, only to be exposed to ‘the wanton rudeness of White savages’. Before long they would be raped: ‘The prey is divided upon the spot, and only reserved till opportunity offers.’²³ It was said that a slave ship was usually ‘part bedlam and part brothel’. Newton recorded that while he was on shore one afternoon one of his crew ‘seduced a women slave down into the room and lay with her brute like in view of the whole quarterdeck, for which I put him in irons. If anything happens to the woman I shall impute it to him, for she was big with child. Her number is 83.’²⁴ Not surprisingly, it was at this point that many slaves made desperate attempts to escape or to kill themselves, something which their captors were unable to comprehend. As another British captain recorded:

      the men were all put in irons, two and two shackled together, to prevent their mutiny or swimming ashore. The Negroes are so wilful and loth to leave their own country, that they have often leap’d out of canoes, boat and ship into the sea, and kept under water until they were drowned to avoid being taken up and saved … they having a more dreadful apprehension of Barbados than we have of hell though, in reality they live much better there than in their own country; but home is home.²⁵

      If the slaves did indeed have a premonition of hell, then they were not far wide of the mark, for, unbelievably, the worst part of their ordeal was yet to come. The economics of the slave trade required the maximum number of slaves to be carried in the smallest possible space, with the result that they were forced into a hold, usually shackled together and often without space to turn round, in which some of their number would have already resided for several weeks. Equiano recalled that:

      the stench of the hold, while we were on the coast, was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time … now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number of the ship, being so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died … The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered it a scene of horror almost inconceivable.²⁶

      Of course, it was in the interests of slave traders to keep their slaves in some degree of health, and during the day they would be taken up above decks and encouraged to ‘dance’, which generally meant jumping up and down with the encouragement of a whip. But in rough weather they would be confined below decks, with the portholes closed, in a scene of sometimes unimaginable horror. Falconbridge explained that the movement of the ship would cause the wooden planks to rub the skin off shoulders, elbows and hips, ‘so as to render the bones in those parts quite bare’.²⁷ The result was that they not only suffered from excessive heat and the rapid spread of fevers, but that ‘the deck, that is the floor of their rooms, was so covered with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the flux, that it resembled a slaughter-house. It is not in the power of the human imagination, to picture a situation to itself more dreadful or disgusting.’²⁸

      At this stage only the Portuguese had made any effort to regulate the conditions in which slaves could be carried. Amidst the terrible overcrowding and putrid stenches of the slave ships, an average of around one in ten of all the slaves carried on the ‘middle passage’ across the Atlantic during the eighteenth century died before reaching the Americas, but on ships which were hit by bad weather or severe fevers the death toll was far higher. The journey across the ocean normally took at least five weeks, but it could take many months, with disastrous consequences: the captain of one French ship which lost 496 of its 594 slaves in 1717 blamed his appalling rate of loss on the ‘length of the voyage’ as well as ‘the badness of the weather’.²⁹ It is not surprising that many of those confined in these circumstances lost the will to live: ‘Some throw themselves into the sea, others hit their heads against the ship, others hold their breath to try and smother themselves, others still try to die of hunger from not eating …’³⁰ Consequently, force-feeding was added to the list of brutal treatments. Falconbridge reported that ‘upon the negroes