The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage by John Harris

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 704-707
Author(s):  
Robert Colby
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Slave Ships

Oceanic Intimacies

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-165
Author(s):  
Mona Narain
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Do So

In this essay, I explore what intimacies might be revealed if we trace oceanic entanglements created by eighteenth-century maritime routes and journeys in historical and contemporary imaginative reconstructions of such histories. I respond to Lisa Lowe’s proposal to use “intimacies as a heuristic,” and to decentre the European notion of “the human” constructed by colonial epistemologies. To do so, I offer two counter-histories, embedded in and through different waters, which challenge imperial two-dimensional epistemologies. “Porous Intimacies” discusses the seafaring part of Sheikh I’tesamuddin’s The Wonders of Vilayet (1765), one of the first travelogues written by an Indian about Europe. “Immersive Intimacies” analyzes David Dabydeen’s poem “Turner” (1995), which imaginatively reconstructs the middle passage of captured Africans on British slave ships bound for the Caribbean. Rethinking former historical accounts within and outside colonial and liberal frameworks, I analyze new intimacies through oceanic connections.

France and the Slave Trade

2020 ◽  
pp. 60-78
Author(s):  
Alan Forrest
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Short Overview ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Triangular Trade

The chapter begins with a short overview of France’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and shows how, by the second half of the eighteenth century, more and more merchants and investors became dazzled by the profits offered by a successful slave voyage. All the Atlantic ports engaged in the slave trade, though Nantes had the highest level of slaving and the greatest dependence on the triangular trade with west Africa and the Caribbean. The economics of a slave voyage are analysed, as well as the cargoes purchased for trading in Africa; the captains’ involvement in slave markets in both West Africa and the Caribbean; the risks run by the slave ships and their crews during the voyage; and the conditions that were endured below deck during the Middle Passage.

Doldrums

2018 ◽  
pp. 160-186
Author(s):  
Deirdre Coleman
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Rice Cultivation ◽  
Wet Season ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
The West ◽  
Slave Ships

Smeathman returns to the Bananas where, instead of collecting, he cultivates a large provision garden for the slave ships. His chief staples were Palma Christi, pepper, and Guinea rice but rice cultivation was James Cleveland’s preserve. Cleveland also objected to Smeathman’s attempts to intensify the women’s methods of growing and harvesting the rice. In the end Cleveland’s cattle destroy Smeathman’s garden. Broken in health, and dreading the oncoming wet season, Smeathman joins a fully slaved and leaky ship bound for the West Indies. As a passenger unconnected to the trade, Smeathman’s experience of the middle passage offers new perspectives and insights.

scholarly journals MIDDLE PASSAGES OF THE SOUTHWEST INDIAN OCEAN: A CENTURY OF FORCED IMMIGRATION FROM AFRICA TO THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE

2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Harries
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Southwest Indian Ocean ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
History Of ◽  
People Today

AbstractForced immigration from the Southwest Indian Ocean marked life at the Cape of Good Hope for over a century. Winds, currents, and shipping linked the two regions, as did a common international currency, and complementary seasons and crops. The Cape's role as a refreshment station for French, Portuguese, American, and Spanish slave ships proved particularly important in the development of a commerce linking East Africa, Madagascar, and the Mascarenes with the Americas. This slave trade resulted in the landing at the Cape of perhaps as many as 40,000 forced immigrants from tropical Africa and Madagascar. Brought to the Cape as slaves, or freed slaves subjected to strict periods of apprenticeship, these individuals were marked by the experience of a brutal transhipment that bears comparison with the trans-Atlantic Middle Passage. The history of the Middle Passage occupies a central place in the study of slavery in the Americas and plays a vital role in the way many people today situate themselves socially and politically. Yet, for various reasons, this emotive subject is absent from historical discussions of life at the Cape. This article brings it into the history of slavery in the region. By focusing on the long history of this forced immigration, the article also serves to underline the importance of the Cape to the political and economic life of the Southwest Indian Ocean.

Casting

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrina Dyonne Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Salt Water ◽  
Diverse Populations ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
And Gender

This chapter examines the manner in which African captives were forced to perform music, song, and dance during the Atlantic voyage. Within the Middle Passage, white slavers brought the slaves on deck for airing. While on deck, the slavers drenched the captives with salt water, inspected them for any hint of disease, and, ironically, made them sing and dance. Historically, music and dance during the Middle Passage were viewed as a form of exercise used to preserve the human cargo. This chapter analyzes those scenes to illustrate the transformation of the top deck of the ship into a stage upon which race and gender roles were prescribed and performed. It shows that European and American ideals of Africanness were forced upon the captives in order to transition the diverse populations into chattel. The coerced performances on slave ships distorted the normally sacred or ritualistic meanings of music, song, and dance.

Black Moves

Transfers ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Cresswell
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
African American Male ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Football ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Runaway Slaves ◽  
Mobility Studies

Th is article explores the mutual constitution of blackness and mobility in the context of the United States. Using insights gained from the interdisciplinary field of mobility studies, it argues that mobilities have played a key role in the defi nition of blackness (particularly black masculinity) at the same time as blackness has been mapped onto particular forms of mobility. The article is constructed through a series of suggestive vignettes moving backward through time that illustrate continuities in the way forms of movement, narratives of mobility, and mobile practices have intersected with representations of African-American male bodies. Examples include end-zone celebrations in American. football, stop and frisk procedures in New York City, the medical pathologization of runaway slaves, and the Middle Passage of the slave trade.

scholarly journals Visualizing the Middle Passage: The Brooks and the Reality of Ship Crowding in the Transatlantic Slave Trade

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 533-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Radburn ◽  
David Eltis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Accurate Representation ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Contemporary Artists

Crowding on slave ships was much more severe than historians have recognized, worsening in the nineteenth century during the illegal phase of the traffic. An analysis of numerous illustrations of slave vessels created by then-contemporary artists, in conjunction with new data, demonstrates that the 1789 diagram of the British slave ship Brooks—the most iconic of these illustrations—fails to capture the degree to which enslaved people were crowded on the Brooks, as well as on most other British slaving vessels of the eighteenth century. Five other images of slave ships sailing under different national colors in different eras further reveal the realities of ship crowding in different periods. The most accurate representation of ship-board conditions in the eighteenth-century slave trade is in the paintings of the French slave ship Marie-Séraphique.

Prize voyages and ideas of freedom

2019 ◽  
pp. 97-132
Author(s):  
Mary Wills
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Racial Attitudes ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
African People ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
St Helena ◽  
Naval Officers

To witness the human trauma of the transatlantic slave trade was extraordinary employment for British naval officers, and this chapter examines rare surviving accounts of life on prize voyages, whereby naval officers were tasked with transporting captured slave ships to Admiralty courts for adjudication. It explores the extent to which officers engaged with the individuals they were ‘liberating’ – on captured slavers, on HM ships, or while stationed at the British territories of Sierra Leone or St Helena. Officers’ ideas about freedom, its limits, and its applicability to African people were concepts bound to racial attitudes. A prize voyage could constitute an alternative ‘Middle Passage’ for captive Africans, a state of affairs naval officers could contribute to. This chapter looks at the experiences of captive Africans, and at cases where individual Africans were taken into British guardianship by naval officers.

scholarly journals Rufino Joins the Slave Trade

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-74
Author(s):  
João José Reis ◽  
Flávio dos Santos Gomes ◽  
Marcus J. M. de Carvalho ◽  
H. Sabrina Gledhill
Keyword(s):  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Strategic Position

Now a freedman, Rufino starts working as a cook aboard slave ships, a strategic position in the business of transporting captives alive across the Atlantic, for cooks kept the slaves and crew healthy during the Middle Passage lasting 27 to 60 days. Rufino may also have used his earlier experience to prepare medicine and amulets for Muslim slaves. After the slave trade was banned in 1831, slave ships were frequently overcrowded, leading to an increase in mortality rates. Rufino’s first employer was a trader named Joaquim José da Rocha who sent slaves from Angola to Rio de Janeiro. Later, he would work for other slave traders, such as Joaquim Ribeiro de Brito, who operated between Luanda and Recife, in the province of Pernambuco, where at least 28,000 slaves were disembarked between 1837 and 1841.

scholarly journals Ship Crowding and Slave Mortality: Missing Observations or Incorrect Measurement?

2017 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 1177-1202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter M. Solar ◽  
Nicolas J. Duquette
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Missing Observations ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Incorrect Measurement ◽  
Over Time

Inconsistent measurement of ship tonnage, the denominator in the usual measures of crowded conditions on slave vessels, may confound estimated associations between crowding and slave mortality on the Middle Passage. The tonnages reported inLloyd's Registersare shown to be consistent over time and are used to demonstrate that both the unstandardized and standardized tonnages in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database are deeply flawed. Using corrected tonnages, we find that crowding increased mortality only on British slave ships and only before the passage of Dolben's Act in 1788.

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