Why Did Slaves Learn to Read Weegy

Groundwork

Between 1500 and 1866, Europeans transported to the Americas nearly 12.5 million enslaved Africans, about ane.8 million of whom died on the Middle Passage of the transatlantic slave trade. In 1672, the Majestic African Company received a monopoly over deliveries of captives to the English Caribbean islands of Barbados and Jamaica. Before outfitting its own ships, the company hired vessels at a rate of £five to £6 per slave delivered alive to America. The captains of these ships sailed first to Africa, where they sold appurtenances—textiles, metals, decorative items, and guns—for enslaved Africans, who were picked up either direct from African dealers or from littoral forts built past the company to hold already purchased slaves. This human being cargo, which commonly numbered several hundred people per vessel, was then taken to America on the Middle Passage, suffering mortalities of virtually fifteen pct. A few ships came straight to Virginia, while near sold their choicest cargo at college-book ports in Jamaica or South Carolina, delivering unsold "remainder" slaves to the the Chesapeake Bay region. An estimated 140,000 enslaved captives dismbarked in the Chesapeake region, initially to work in the tobacco fields. In 1698, the Majestic African Company lost its monopoly and presently was eclipsed past private British and American merchants. Those based in Bristol and London dominated the Virginia merchandise until the 1730s, when the London merchants were overtaken past others based in Liverpool. Nearly two-thirds of the Atlantic slave trade took place between 1698 and British abolition in 1807–1808.

The Ships and Their Voyages

Slave ships ranged in size from the x-ton Hesketh, which sailed out of Liverpool and delivered ensalved captives to Saint Kitts in 1761, to the 566-ton Parr, some other Liverpool ship that sailed in the 1790s. Ships comparable in size to the Hesketh were designed to deport every bit few every bit half dozen pleasure passengers; refitted equally a slaver, the Hesketh transported a crew plus thirty Africans. The Parr, on the other manus, carried a crew of 100 and a cargo of as many as 700 enslaved people. Nigh ships—nicknamed Guineamen, after the Gulf of Guinea on the w coast of Africa—were sized somewhere in between, growing in tonnage over time as the Atlantic trade itself grew. American traders preferred somewhat smaller ships than their British counterparts: two-masted sloops (25 to 75 tons) and schooners (30 to 150 tons) required smaller crews and shorter stays on the African declension, where tropical diseases were a abiding threat to crew and cargo akin.

At showtime, merchants adapted full general merchant vessels for the slave trade. Afterwards they built ships to the trade's item specifications, which included portholes for better airflow to the lower decks and copper-sheathed hulls to combat the wood rot and boring worms institute in tropical waters. Sometimes ships were modified to increase the space between decks, although a typical 140-ton Guineaman might have had only four and a half feet between the lower deck's floor and ceiling, which would accept precluded many of the Africans bars at that place from standing. The lower deck generally was divided into split up compartments for men and women, with the men shackled together in pairs. Almost women were left unchained merely confined below, while children had the run of the ship. African men and women used the children as means to communicate with one some other and, in some cases, to plan insurrection.

A wooden grating separated the men's quarters from the main deck and was designed, along with the portholes, to facilitate airflow through the lower deck. Fifty-fifty so, with the captives crowded together, unsanitary conditions, and oppressive estrus, 1 observer described the area below decks as "most impure and stifling." The anonymous author of Liverpool and Slavery: An Historical Account of the Liverpool-African Slave Trade past a Genuine "Dicky Sam" (1884) cited a trader who "stated that after remaining 10 minutes in the agree, his shirt was as wet as if information technology had been in a bucket of water." "Then close and foul was the stench," the writer said, that some enslaved Africans "take been known to be put down the agree strong and healthy at dark; and have been expressionless in the morn." In addition to seasickness, the captives suffered from dysentery and outbreaks of smallpox in the crowded conditions. Bloodshed rates among captives averaged above 20 percentage in the first decades of the slave merchandise and about ten per centum by 1800.

The captain and his officers enjoyed personal motel space, usually below the raised quarterdeck at the stern of the ships, while common sailors slept on the main deck, sometimes under embrace of a tarpaulin or in the longboat. Likewise on the main deck, and built especially for the slave ship, was a ten-foot-alpine wooden battlement that bisected the deck at the primary mast and extended about 2 feet beyond the ship'south sides. This barricado separated the African men from the women, and in case of insurrection, the crew retreated to the women'due south side and used the barricado as a defensive fortification. Captain William Snelgrave, inA new account of some parts of Guinea, and the slave-trade (1734), described how a group of African men "endeavoured to forcefulness the Barricado on the Quarter-Deck, not regarding the Musquets or Half Pikes, that were presented to their Breasts by the white Men, through the Loop-holes." Slave ships were well armed in case of insurrection or assault past pirates. According to an officer on the 140-ton Diligent, which sailed out of France in 1731, the ship carried "8 four-pound cannons, fifty-five muskets, 18 pistols, twenty swords, and two swivel guns, all in fantabulous condition."

While the ships were all the same off the declension of Africa—accumulating cargoes could have from a few weeks to several months—the coiffure congenital a "firm": a bamboo enclosure on the chief deck designed to secure Africans prior to leaving the coast. The sailor James Field Stanfield, in Observations on a Republic of guinea voyage (1788), labeled the concern of amalgam the house "destructive" and "fatal" to the crew because harvesting the bamboo forced crew members to exist "immersed upward to the waist in mud and slime; pestered by snakes, worms, and venomous reptiles; [and] tormented by muskitoes, and a thousand assailing insects," all the while being whipped and otherwise prodded by "their relentless officers."

Once the ship was ready to brainstorm the Middle Passage, the coiffure removed the house and hung netting from the sides of the ship. This was designed to catch anyone who tried to escape by jumping overboard. (Although many enslaved Africans committed suicide in this manner, so did some crew members, who were also tormented by disease, low-quality food, and the officers' whips.) In the warm waters, sharks often followed the ships, feeding off the bodies of the dead thrown overboard. "When dead Slaves are thrown over-lath," the Dutch merchant William Bosman wrote in A New and Accurate Clarification of the Coast of Guinea (1705), "I accept sometimes, not without horrour, seen the dismal Rapaciousness of these Animals; four or five of them together shoot to the bottom under the Transport to tear the expressionless Corps to pieces, at each seize with teeth an Arm, a Leg, or the Head is snapt off; and before you lot tin tell 20 accept sometimes divided the Body amidst them so nicely that not the to the lowest degree Particle is left."

Captains and Crews

The captain of a slave transport was an employee of a merchant or company in Europe or the Americas. He hired and managed the crew; outfitted the ship; sold its cargo for humans on the declension of Africa; enforced a harsh subject on crew members and Africans alike on the Middle Passage; worked to prevent mutiny, coup, and sickness; and sold the slaves in America for the all-time possible price. The "crux of the whole enterprise" was subject field, according to the historian Marcus Rediker. Maintaining social club was critical in keeping an oft-drastic crew in line, and the routine violence employed by the captain and his officers trickled down the ranks, as the author of Liverpool and Slavery pointed out: "The captain bullies the men, the men torture the slaves, the slaves' hearts are breaking with despair."

Rebellion or mutiny could spread like a virus, and many captains attempted to snuff out resistance by terrorizing the accused (either crew members or Africans) in full view of their fellows. This most often involved either a cat-o'-9-tails (a whip of ix knotted cords attached to a handle) and total horsewhips or, for Africans, thumbscrews. Even so, as well much violence, employed routinely, might spark mutiny, insurrection, or suicide, making it the captain's job to strike the right residuum. Merchants often put in writing that their captains should refrain from mistreating the African cargo, merely few held their employees to business relationship. Fewer still were captains who, like John Newton, experienced a humane—in his case religious—awakening and attempted to treat their slaves well. More than common was the sort of captain described by James Field Stanfield: as his ship approached Africa, Stanfield wrote, "the Demon cruelty seems to fix his residence within him."

Crew members were often the directly recipients of the cruelty. Frequently forced into shipboard service because of debts or run-ins with the police force, sailors performed the backbreaking and often trigger-happy work of the slave ship, which included building the "business firm" and barricado, cooking and dispensing food, scrubbing the decks and the often feces-covered hold where the slaves were kept, and policing the convict Africans. They besides were the victims of their officers' whips and suffered from the same diseases that ravaged the Africans, including dysentery, the leading cause of death, equally well as diseases prevalent along the African coast, such as malaria and yellow fever. The bloodshed charge per unit among sailors, according to one survey taken betwixt 1784 and 1790, was higher than 20 percentage. In fact, according to Rediker, one-half of all European seamen who journeyed to West Africa in the eighteenth century died within a year.

Crews still managed to inflict more their share of suffering on Africans in the form of physicial violence and sexual exploitation. An extreme example occurred aboard the slave ship Zong in 1781. Over several days, the crew—at the urging of the captain—bound and threw overboard 122 living Africans. This was done obviously because the helm feared an outbreak of illness, and the ship's owners were liable for all disease-related deaths. The ship'due south insurance company, however, would cover unnatural deaths—from punishment, coup, or, in this instance, beingness thrown alive into the sea. In improver to the 122 captives thrown overboard, ten more committed suicide and sixty succumbed to disease, reducing the transport'southward human cargo from 470 to 278.

Convict Africans

The men and women exposed to the brutalities of the Middle Passage came from up and down the west coast of Africa—from Senegambia in the north and west to the so-chosen Slave Coast of present-mean solar day Benin and western Nigeria to West-Central Africa. They came from increasingly further inland as the trade grew and transformed the people of the continent from farmers to raiders, traders, and refugees. They tended to exist prisoners of war, piffling criminals, or common people kidnapped by African traders. (European powers often encouraged or waged war for no other reason than to produce prisoners.) Their religions varied—many Africans, specially in Angola, were exposed to Christianity through Portuguese missionaries. Their languages besides varied, but, especially amid Africans of the same region, were often mutually intelligible. Although captains worried about chaining men of shared backgrounds together, lest they know how to speak to one another and plot insurrection, they besides feared chaining together men who could non speak to 1 some other, lest their inability to communicate in their shared distress lead to quarrels and injuries.

The ii-person leg irons chafed, causing pain and making any move difficult, especially when one political party needed to employ the "necessary bucket." Some captains used both wrist manacles and leg shackles, others merely one or the other. Some captains fifty-fifty declined to restrain certain ethnic groups that had proven over time unlikely to rise in revolt. Later sixteen hours in the concur, all Africans were herded onto the main deck for about eight hours each 24-hour interval, weather condition permitting. There they were fed twice and forced, as a form of practise, to "trip the light fantastic toe" and sometimes sing, although almost any movement was painful for those in manacles and shackles.

Africans on the slave ships lived in terror. Many of them had been separated from their friends, families, and communities when get-go captured, and then separated again aboard ship. They were the victims of frequently-terrible punishments and sexual exploitation, and many believed that the white men planned to impale and eat them. (Their misapprehension of European cannibalism was actually encouraged by some African elites who manipulated their people with the fear of enslavement.) Africans did resist, nevertheless. Some committed suicide by jumping overboard, while others refused to swallow. The latter were fed with the help of the speculum oris, a pair of scissors-shaped musical instrument that, with the aid of a thumbscrew, forced the jaws open. Officers often treated hunger strikers with special ruthlessness because such acts of resistance were decumbent to spread.

Enslaved captives revolted nonetheless. They planned their actions carefully, using a diversity of ways to communicate. The risk of discovery was great so the groups of conspirators were often kept small, with the hope that others would join spontaneously when the fourth dimension came. Concrete separation hindered communication between males and females, and tensions between indigenous groups too caused problems. In carrying out an insurrection, many African men benefited from previous experience in the war machine and, in some cases, with European firearms. Occasionally slaves were able to survive the weaponry arrayed against them and take control of the ship, every bit they did aboard the Clare in 1729. In other instances, an coup resulted in the deaths of nearly everyone aboard—captives and crew—such as what happened on the "ghost ship" discovered in the Atlantic in 1785. Although several hundred uprisings are known from the records of slave ships, insurrections normally failed and resulted in a large loss of African life and gruesome punishments.

The Africans who survived to arrive in Virginia were cleaned, greased with palm oil to improve their advent, and prepared for sale, which took identify either aboard ship (in what was called a "scramble") or at a marketplace on shore. Here those who had bonded over the length of the Middle Passage—through terror, sickness, and resistance—were separated once more. Having been known to their custodians on the ship just every bit numbers, they now were given English names. And, every bit Rediker has noted, if they boarded the ship as Igbo, Fante, or Ndongo, they left it enslaved and Black.

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Source: https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/slave-ships-and-the-middle-passage/