1627 · Africanyear only
A ship where the crew will not go below the deck
›Read the full entryClose
A description written in 1627 sets out what the inside of a slave ship was. Captives were packed under the deck in chains, the men linked to one another at the neck and at the feet, so that a row of people had to move together or not at all. They were kept below for the length of the crossing and did not see the sun or the moon. There was no ventilation to speak of, and the account records that the Spanish crew were themselves afraid to go down through the hatches because of what came up out of them. Food was a bowl a day of uncooked maize flour or millet, with a little water. None of that was the accident of one bad voyage. The packing, the irons and the ration all follow from a single decision, to move the greatest number of people at the lowest cost with a rate of death agreed in advance. The arithmetic was done in offices, by men who never went below.
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.