Istwa Nou

The first great expansion of Atlantic slaving produced the longest voyages and the highest death rates in the whole history of the traffic, for the crews as much as for the people in the hold. Ships were slower, provisioning was worse, and nobody had yet worked out how to keep several hundred confined human beings alive for three months at sea. Within the period the regional differences were enormous. People embarked in the Bight of Biafra died at two to three times the rate of people embarked in Upper Guinea, a gap that reflects the length of the route, the disease environments at either end, and how long a captive had already been held on the coast before boarding. Faster ships and later regulation brought the overall figures down. The seventeenth century numbers stayed in the record as the baseline, and every improvement the eighteenth century claimed for itself was measured from here.