[Footnote 37:  Snelgrave, Guinea and the Slave Trade (London, 1734), pp. 162-185.  Snelgrave’s book also contains vivid accounts of tribal wars, human sacrifices, traders’ negotiations and pirate captures on the Grain and Slave Coasts.]

The discomfort in the densely packed quarters of the slave ships may be imagined by any who have sailed on tropic seas.  With seasickness added it was wretched; when dysentery prevailed it became frightful; if water or food ran short the suffering was almost or quite beyond endurance; and in epidemics of scurvy, small-pox or ophthalmia the misery reached the limit of human experience.  The average voyage however was rapid and smooth by virtue of the steadily blowing trade winds, the food if coarse was generally plenteous and wholesome, and the sanitation fairly adequate.  In a word, under stern and often brutal discipline, and with the poorest accommodations, the slaves encountered the then customary dangers and hardships of the sea.[38]

[Footnote 38:  Voluminous testimony in regard to conditions on the middle passage was published by Parliament and the Privy Council in 1789-1791.  Summaries from it may be found in T.F.  Buxton, The African Slave Trade and the Remedy (London, 1840), part I, chap. 2; and in W.O.  Blake, History of Slavery and the Slave Trade (Columbus, Ohio, 1859), chaps, 9, 10.]

Among the disastrous voyages an example was that of the Dutch West India Company’s ship St. John in 1659.  After buying slaves at Bonny in April and May she beat about the coast in search of provisions but found barely enough for daily consumption until at the middle of August on the island of Amebo she was able to buy hogs, beans, cocoanuts and oranges.  Meanwhile bad food had brought dysentery, the surgeon, the cooper and a sailor had died, and the slave cargo was daily diminishing.  Five weeks of sailing then carried the ship across the Atlantic, where she put into Tobago to refill her leaking water casks.  Sailing thence she struck a reef near her destination at Curacao and was abandoned by her officers and crew.  Finally a sloop sent by the Curacao governor to remove the surviving slaves was captured by a privateer with them on board.  Of the 195 negroes comprising the cargo on June 30, from one to five died nearly every day, and one leaped overboard to his death.  At the end of the record on October 29 the slave loss had reached 110, with the mortality rate nearly twice as high among the men as among the women.[39] About the same time, on the other hand, Captain John Newton of Liverpool, who afterwards turned preacher, made a voyage without losing a sailor or a slave.[40] The mortality on the average ship may be roughly conjectured from the available data at eight or ten per cent.

[Footnote 39:  E.B.  O’Callaghan ed., Voyages of the Slavers St. John and Arms of Amsterdam (Albany, N.Y., 1867), pp. 1-13.]

[Footnote 40:  Corner Williams, p. 515.]