Name: Life Aboard a Slave Ship | History
Uploaded: 2026-02-23T12:45:42.000Z
Duration: 5 min 1 s
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From about 1525 to 1866, 12 and a half million Africans were taken from their homeland and forcibly transported across the Atlantic, a journey that approximately 2 million of them would not survive.

By the turn of the 18th century, European merchants were building vessels capable of transporting hundreds of enslaved people per journey.

These ships had extra portholes for ventilation, weapons mounted on deck in case of rebellion, and

additional compartments added below deck to take on more human cargo.

Before boarding the ships at African port cities, enslaved people were stripped of their clothing and remaining possessions and had their heads forcibly shaved during boarding, which could take weeks or even months.

Enslaved people lived on the deck of the ship in a temporary wooden house constructed by the crew.

The crew also installed netting around the deck of the ship designed to catch those enslaved who might opt for death over forced servitude.

Once moved below deck, enslaved people would find themselves stuffed into compartments with ceilings as low as four and a half feet where they would spend most of their voyage.

Adult men were kept separately and shackled in pairs, women usually left unchained in their designated compartment, and

children often free to move about the ship.

There were no sanitary facilities of any kind.

Enslaved people were forced to relieve themselves where they sat, creating hellish conditions when combined with the heat and lack of ventilation below deck.

Dysentery, malaria, yellow fever, smallpox, measles, and influenza ravaged the enslaved and crew members alike.

The enslaved people generally spent about eight hours a day above deck, but

were still separated by gender, with a barricado, a reinforced wall that could be used to protect crew members in case of a revolt.

Enslaved people were also subject to forced exercise, which sometimes included dance and song for the entertainment of the crew.

Enslaved captives deemed disobedient were tortured and beaten, usually whipped with the especially cruel Cat O9 Tails, a tool designed to inflict maximum pain.

Enslaved people who refused to e their typical meal of rice and beans were forced to do so, sometimes with a speculum oris, a medieval tool used to force open a person's mouth.

Women, while usually left unshackled, were raped and sexually abused by members of the crew, sometimes arriving in the New World carrying the children of their attackers.

But it was the women, using their minuscule freedoms, who would often coordinate mutinies against their captors.

But these rebellions were rarely success.

The true extent of the horrors of the Middle Passage came to light in a 1783 court trial over the slave ship Zong.

The Zong left present day Ghana in August of 1781 with 442 enslaved on board.

After a two month journey riddled with navigation errors, 62 enslaved people and seven crew members had perished without reaching their destination.

Disease was spreading throughout the ship and fresh water was running dangerously low.

Captain Luke Collingwood was afraid of the financial cost of more deaths.

Enslaved people that died of disease were not covered by the ship's insurance.

Collingwood ordered approximately 130 enslaved people thrown overboard.

He claimed it was necessary to do so to halt the spread of disease.

At the trial between the Zong's owners and their insurance company, the owners argued that because it was legal to kill sick animals for the the health of a ship, it was legal to treat enslaved people the same.

But the trial itself exposed the horrors aboard the Zong.

And its story was republished by British abolitionists with the name of the ship redacted.

Meant to show that this tragedy could happen on any ship transporting enslaved people across the Middle Passage.

24 years after the Zong trial, the international slave trade was outlawed in both Great Britain and the United States.

It would take England an additional 26 years and the US another 58 years plus a civil war before the practice of slavery was officially abolished.