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In school, I used to wonder how people survived this voyage if they were shackled below the whole trip (3 weeks). Wouldn’t the stores they were in, which were o

In school, I used to wonder how people survived this voyage if they were shackled below the whole trip (3 weeks). Wouldn’t the stores they were in, which were only a few feet high (couldn’t stand up), fill up with feces? Apparently they were let up on deck for 2 hours a day. If anyone has any clarification to add to this / that wasn’t in the article, please add.

aphextron 8y ago
>In school, I used to wonder how people survived this voyage if they were shackled below the whole trip They didn't. You have to understand that African slaves were seen as cargo, not human beings. A good percentage would die every single time, and be thrown overboard. This was just accepted as part of the cost of doing business, the same way chicken breeders ship baby chickens in the mail today with the expectation that some will die in transit. The few that die off are more than made up for in profits by your ability to jam as many as possible into one shipment. It's one of those facts that really makes the transatlantic slave trade stand out as perhaps the worst genocide in human history. It wasn't just killing. It was the industrial scale treatment of millions of human beings as cattle for over 300 years.
- javiramos 8y ago
  Your comment reminded me of the famous J.M.W. Turner painting[1] which depicts the throwing overboard of hundreds of slaves so the captain of the ship could collect insurance payments. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Ship https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Ship
- clarkmoody 8y ago
  > worst genocide in human history Yes, racial slavery was a terrible evil. But it wasn't genocide, which has a specific definition (intention to wipe out a specific people). Slave traders wanted enough people alive to sell at a profit. The scope of the death toll was large, but spread over a long period. From Wikipedia: > Approximately 1.2 – 2.4 million Africans died during their transport to the New World. More died soon upon their arrival.[1] Over 300 years. Compare to other genocides[2], which murdered similar numbers (or much more) but happened over just a few years. Maybe you meant "worst" in the sense of most injustice? It certainly stands out, but it doesn't hold a candle to the death inflicted on a colossal scale by the governments of the 20th century during both war and peace. Estimates place Stalin's body count between 3-9 million.[3] WWII civilian deaths are estimated at 50 million and included the genocide of the Halocaust.[4] Slavery is evil, but war is so much worse. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_tol... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_deaths_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_deaths_in_the_Soviet... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
  - rags2riches 8y ago
    Ugh. It just struck me how the tragedy of the commons could apply to a human population.
  - Larrikin 8y ago
    Thank you for well sourced minimization of the slave trade. It really helps to know that enslavement of millions of people shouldn't be thought of as all that bad.
    - clarkmoody 8y ago
      Today I learned that calling something evil -- but not the worst -- is minimization.
      - JoshCole 8y ago
        It's not. Plenty of people read what you wrote and understood it for how you meant it and also understood that the person who responded to you wildly distorted your point. You're not going to find a good conversation there. Its very sad that this type of distortion happens so often, but we live in a world where some people don't appreciate subtle truths.
      - dang 8y ago
        It's not, and the parent reply was uncharitable, yet I can understand why someone would feel revulsion at your post. It feels a bit like a parlor game with numbers. Not technically wrong, let's say—but so incongruent with what it's talking about as to leave one feeling chilled and dehumanized. In that way it does come across as minimizing.
        ChainOfFools 8y ago
        but dang you can't put 'feeling chilled' and 'dehumanization' into rational numbers, and for a certain kind of person the inability to enumerate something or quantify its cost, is an automatic 'irrationality discount.' i.e. 'What can't be counted, can't count for much.'
- ComputerGuru 8y ago
  > It was the industrial scale treatment of millions of human beings as cattle for over 300 years. Actually, in pretty much every developing society cattle are considered prized ownership and are treated well and cared for. Farmers with thousands of sheep or cows still try to avoid the loss of even one. Slaves were treated far worse than that. Perhaps like some used trash you were selling to a junkyard.
  - sirk390 8y ago
    >Slaves were treated far worse than that. Perhaps like some used trash you were selling to a junkyard. How can you know that? Do you have book references or something?
    - lostlogin 8y ago
      The link gives me this impression. The death rate alone suggests this.
      - speleding 8y ago
        A live slave is worth more than a dead one. These were business men. There is no reason to think that they would be happy to sail all across the ocean only to then throw their cargo overboard before collecting payment. There is no reason to think these slave traders were acting against their own self-interest. Unless you have evidence to the contrary, I assume they simply worked out that providing better accommodations would cost more than the potential return in live slaves.
        lostlogin 8y ago
        The practice of killing slaves and claiming the insurance payout was eventually banned, but is exactly what you say didn’t happen. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zong_massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zong_massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Ship https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Ship
- vixen99 8y ago
  Meanwhile let's remember that there are an estimated 45 million slaves today according to the World Economic Forum 2017.
  - lostlogin 8y ago
    It’s worth reading up on what’s gone on in Doha in the lead up to the World Cup. https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/international/world-cup-2022-qatars-workers-slaves-building-mausoleums-stadiums-modern-slavery-kafala-a7980816.html%3famp https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/sport/f...
  - throwaway555555 8y ago
    Yeah, but those slaves are not the same sort of slave this article is about. This article is about a specific set of rules enforced by a government, to single out one type of person, for the rest of their life. Indentured servitude should not be equivocated with slavery, which, by contrast, is for life, and was inescapable by law.
talonx 8y ago
I would recommend James Michener's Chesapeake for a graphic account of how the slaves were treated right from the time they were shackled in chains in Africa and made to march hundreds of miles, dying along the way, dying on the voyage, and the lives -if you can call it that - they lived as slaves once they reached America. Although this is a work of fiction, it does a good job of portraying the horror.
goatlover 8y ago
I still wonder how anyone can do that to other human beings for three weeks. Even if you don't view them as the same status, they can clearly speak and think and come from societies with tools, clothing, art and shelter. Were the slave traders all sociopaths? I also wouldn't want to do that to any animal, although apparently it's seen as acceptable with factory farming.
- BadassFractal 8y ago
  Contemporary Westerners constantly underestimate a human's ability to commit unthinkable atrocities under the right conditions. I don't know if it's our education's fault. Maybe we just don't bother to ever emphasize this point. Maybe it's too uncomfortable of a subject to deal with. This last century has presented a rich buffet of historical options to choose from when looking for examples of ideologies that allowed otherwise perfectly normal, God-fearing, salt of the earth folk to turn into horror-machines of rape, mutilation and slaughter. Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, you name it. Maybe even a relative or a next door neighbor in our very own US of A, sent to the wrong Vietnamese village at the wrong time. That seed of pure horror is in all of us, and it's ready to rear its ugly head when the conditions are right. I don't think as a species we've quite figured out how to suppress it.
  - roadnottaken 8y ago
    Pinker’s “Better Angels of our Nature” is a masterwork on the subject. It’s also a terrific read and will change your view of history and make you happy to be alive in the present! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nat...
    - BadassFractal 8y ago
      I've been meaning to read it, however the criticism from historians about it has made me somewhat uncomfortable about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur... Is there anything conclusive about how cherry-picked the numbers in the book are?
code_duck 8y ago
One has to eat food to create feces, especially food with fiber in it. If you’re starved nothing comes out because nothing is going in. I doubt the unfortunate human ‘cargo’ were fed very much or even at all.
- ComputerGuru 8y ago
  I’m not sure why you were downvoted, but it is true and certainly would have factored into the situation.

aphextron 8y ago

>In school, I used to wonder how people survived this voyage if they were shackled below the whole trip They didn't. You have to understand that African slaves were seen as cargo, not human beings. A good percentage would die every single time, and be thrown overboard. This was just accepted as part of the cost of doing business, the same way chicken breeders ship baby chickens in the mail today with the expectation that some will die in transit. The few that die off are more than made up for in profits by your ability to jam as many as possible into one shipment. It's one of those facts that really makes the transatlantic slave trade stand out as perhaps the worst genocide in human history. It wasn't just killing. It was the industrial scale treatment of millions of human beings as cattle for over 300 years.

javiramos 8y ago
Your comment reminded me of the famous J.M.W. Turner painting[1] which depicts the throwing overboard of hundreds of slaves so the captain of the ship could collect insurance payments. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Ship https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Ship
clarkmoody 8y ago
> worst genocide in human history Yes, racial slavery was a terrible evil. But it wasn't genocide, which has a specific definition (intention to wipe out a specific people). Slave traders wanted enough people alive to sell at a profit. The scope of the death toll was large, but spread over a long period. From Wikipedia: > Approximately 1.2 – 2.4 million Africans died during their transport to the New World. More died soon upon their arrival.[1] Over 300 years. Compare to other genocides[2], which murdered similar numbers (or much more) but happened over just a few years. Maybe you meant "worst" in the sense of most injustice? It certainly stands out, but it doesn't hold a candle to the death inflicted on a colossal scale by the governments of the 20th century during both war and peace. Estimates place Stalin's body count between 3-9 million.[3] WWII civilian deaths are estimated at 50 million and included the genocide of the Halocaust.[4] Slavery is evil, but war is so much worse. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_tol... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_deaths_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_deaths_in_the_Soviet... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
- rags2riches 8y ago
  Ugh. It just struck me how the tragedy of the commons could apply to a human population.
- Larrikin 8y ago
  Thank you for well sourced minimization of the slave trade. It really helps to know that enslavement of millions of people shouldn't be thought of as all that bad.
  - clarkmoody 8y ago
    Today I learned that calling something evil -- but not the worst -- is minimization.
    - JoshCole 8y ago
      It's not. Plenty of people read what you wrote and understood it for how you meant it and also understood that the person who responded to you wildly distorted your point. You're not going to find a good conversation there. Its very sad that this type of distortion happens so often, but we live in a world where some people don't appreciate subtle truths.
    - dang 8y ago
      It's not, and the parent reply was uncharitable, yet I can understand why someone would feel revulsion at your post. It feels a bit like a parlor game with numbers. Not technically wrong, let's say—but so incongruent with what it's talking about as to leave one feeling chilled and dehumanized. In that way it does come across as minimizing.
      - ChainOfFools 8y ago
        but dang you can't put 'feeling chilled' and 'dehumanization' into rational numbers, and for a certain kind of person the inability to enumerate something or quantify its cost, is an automatic 'irrationality discount.' i.e. 'What can't be counted, can't count for much.'
ComputerGuru 8y ago
> It was the industrial scale treatment of millions of human beings as cattle for over 300 years. Actually, in pretty much every developing society cattle are considered prized ownership and are treated well and cared for. Farmers with thousands of sheep or cows still try to avoid the loss of even one. Slaves were treated far worse than that. Perhaps like some used trash you were selling to a junkyard.
- sirk390 8y ago
  >Slaves were treated far worse than that. Perhaps like some used trash you were selling to a junkyard. How can you know that? Do you have book references or something?
  - lostlogin 8y ago
    The link gives me this impression. The death rate alone suggests this.
    - speleding 8y ago
      A live slave is worth more than a dead one. These were business men. There is no reason to think that they would be happy to sail all across the ocean only to then throw their cargo overboard before collecting payment. There is no reason to think these slave traders were acting against their own self-interest. Unless you have evidence to the contrary, I assume they simply worked out that providing better accommodations would cost more than the potential return in live slaves.
      - lostlogin 8y ago
        The practice of killing slaves and claiming the insurance payout was eventually banned, but is exactly what you say didn’t happen. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zong_massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zong_massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Ship https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Ship
vixen99 8y ago
Meanwhile let's remember that there are an estimated 45 million slaves today according to the World Economic Forum 2017.
- lostlogin 8y ago
  It’s worth reading up on what’s gone on in Doha in the lead up to the World Cup. https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/international/world-cup-2022-qatars-workers-slaves-building-mausoleums-stadiums-modern-slavery-kafala-a7980816.html%3famp https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/sport/f...
- throwaway555555 8y ago
  Yeah, but those slaves are not the same sort of slave this article is about. This article is about a specific set of rules enforced by a government, to single out one type of person, for the rest of their life. Indentured servitude should not be equivocated with slavery, which, by contrast, is for life, and was inescapable by law.

talonx 8y ago

I would recommend James Michener's Chesapeake for a graphic account of how the slaves were treated right from the time they were shackled in chains in Africa and made to march hundreds of miles, dying along the way, dying on the voyage, and the lives -if you can call it that - they lived as slaves once they reached America. Although this is a work of fiction, it does a good job of portraying the horror.

goatlover 8y ago

I still wonder how anyone can do that to other human beings for three weeks. Even if you don't view them as the same status, they can clearly speak and think and come from societies with tools, clothing, art and shelter. Were the slave traders all sociopaths? I also wouldn't want to do that to any animal, although apparently it's seen as acceptable with factory farming.

BadassFractal 8y ago
Contemporary Westerners constantly underestimate a human's ability to commit unthinkable atrocities under the right conditions. I don't know if it's our education's fault. Maybe we just don't bother to ever emphasize this point. Maybe it's too uncomfortable of a subject to deal with. This last century has presented a rich buffet of historical options to choose from when looking for examples of ideologies that allowed otherwise perfectly normal, God-fearing, salt of the earth folk to turn into horror-machines of rape, mutilation and slaughter. Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, you name it. Maybe even a relative or a next door neighbor in our very own US of A, sent to the wrong Vietnamese village at the wrong time. That seed of pure horror is in all of us, and it's ready to rear its ugly head when the conditions are right. I don't think as a species we've quite figured out how to suppress it.
- roadnottaken 8y ago
  Pinker’s “Better Angels of our Nature” is a masterwork on the subject. It’s also a terrific read and will change your view of history and make you happy to be alive in the present! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nat...
  - BadassFractal 8y ago
    I've been meaning to read it, however the criticism from historians about it has made me somewhat uncomfortable about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur... Is there anything conclusive about how cherry-picked the numbers in the book are?

code_duck 8y ago

One has to eat food to create feces, especially food with fiber in it. If you’re starved nothing comes out because nothing is going in. I doubt the unfortunate human ‘cargo’ were fed very much or even at all.

ComputerGuru 8y ago
I’m not sure why you were downvoted, but it is true and certainly would have factored into the situation.