1534 to 1700 · Datasetspan
Voyage length and death rate do not track each other
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Records of early slaving voyages between 1534 and 1700 allow two quantities to be measured for each arrival region in the Caribbean: how long the crossing took, and what share of the captives died on it. The two do not line up. Voyages to the Dutch islands were typically longer than those to British or French colonies and still returned lower mortality. Time at sea therefore explains less than one would expect. What appears to weigh more is the condition people were in when they boarded, which depended on how far they had been marched to the coast, how long they were held in barracoons there, and what diseases were circulating at that particular embarkation point. Alongside that sit the practices of the carrier: how tightly the hold was packed, what water and food were issued, whether the sick were treated at all. Death on the Middle Passage was a variable owners could influence, and the figures show which owners bothered.
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.