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Mortality and Voyage Length in the Middle Passage: New Evidence from the Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

David Eltis
David Eltis
Affiliation:
Algonquin College, Ottawa, Canada
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Abstract

New data on mortality and voyage length in the nineteenth-century slave trade make possible further testing of hypotheses on why slaves died during the middle passage. Mortality rates (defined as death per slaves embarked/voyage length in days × 1000) were higher in the nineteenth century than in earlier centuries and varied markedly between regions of embarkation. In the high mortality regions, all ships in the sample appeared to have experienced a higher death rate, suggesting that epidemics were not of prime importance. Mortality rates do not appear to have fluctuated very much during the voyage nor does the slaves–per–ton variable have much explanatory power. The major explanation is probably endemic disease.

Type
Papers Presented at the Forty-Third Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , June 1984 , pp. 301 - 308
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1984

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References

1 Cohn, Raymond L., “Comparative Mortality Experiences on Sailing Voyages,” unpublished paper, 1982, pp. 12–13.Google Scholar Studies of mortality in the slave trade include Klein, Herbert S., The Middle Passage (Princeton, 1978), pp. 229–38;CrossRefGoogle ScholarKlein, Herbert S. and Engerman, Stanley L., “Shipping Patterns and Mortality in the African Slave Trade to Rio de Janeiro, 1825–1830,” Cahiers d'études africaines, 15 (1975), 381–98;CrossRefGoogle Scholar“A Note on Mortality in the French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century,” in Gemery, Henry A. and Hogendorn, Jan S., eds., The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1979), pp. 261–72;Google Scholar“Slave Mortality on British Ships, 1791–1797,” in Anstey, Roger T. and Hair, P. E. H., eds., Liverpool, the African Slave Trade and Abolition (Liverpool, 1976), pp. 113–25;Google ScholarMiller, Joseph C., “Legal Portuguese Slaving from Angola–Some Preliminary Indications of Volume and Direction,” Revue Francaise d'Histoire d'Outre-Mer, 62 (1975), 156–60;CrossRefGoogle Scholar“The Significance of Drought, Disease and Famine in the Agriculturally Marginal Zones of West-Central Africa,” Journal of African History, 23 (1982), 17–61;CrossRefGoogle ScholarCurtin, Philip D., “Epidemiology and the Slave Trade,” Political Science Quarterly, 83 (1968), 190–216, in particular 204–05;CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMedCohn, R. L. and Jensen, R. A., “The Determinants of Slave Mortality Rates on the Middle Passage,” Explorations in Economic History, 19 (1982), 269–82.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

2 Curtin, Philip D. in The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, 1969), pp. 279–82, used 360 voyages for which data on voyage length survive. Records of these voyages appeared originally in the 1845 British Parliamentary Papers Vol. 49, pp. 593–633.Google Scholar A further one hundred of these records were used in Northrup, David, “African Mortality in the Suppression of the Slave Trade: The Case of the Bight of Biafra,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 9 (1978), 47–64.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed Finally, Klein, Herbert S. and Engerman, Stanley L., in “Shipping Patterns and Mortality in the African Slave Trade to Rio de Janiero,” used Rio de Janeiro newspapers and came up with 87 records of voyages that could not be found in the records of the latter. With the exception of these 87, all the data used here come from official correspondence and newspapers in Britain and the United States. The major source is the FO 84 series in the British Public Record Office—for a discussion of sources, see Eltis, “The Direction and Fluctuation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1821–1843: A Revision of the Parliamentary Paper,” in Gemery and Hogendorn, eds., The Uncommon Marker, pp. 273–77. For a further discussion of bias in the mortality data, see the appendix to my book on the nineteenth-century slave trade (forthcoming).Google Scholar

3 This statistic is developed and discussed in Miller, Joseph C., “Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade: Statistical Evidence on Causality,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 11 (1981), 385–423.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 For a similar pattern in the previous century, see Klein and Engerman, “Slave Mortality on British Ships, 1791–1797,” pp. 117–18.Google Scholar

5 Cohn, “Comparative Mortality Experiences,” p. 13. For the original work on these data sets, see J. Postma, “Mortality in the Dutch Slave Trade, 1675–1795,” in Gemery and Hogendom, eds., The Uncommon Marker, pp. 239–60;Google ScholarStein, R., “Mortality in the Eighteenth Century French Slave Trade,” Journal of African History, 21 (1980), 35–41.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

6 For the period 1811–1836. The same differences between the Bight of Benin and the other regions emerge for the 1837–1863 period.Google Scholar

7 The regression equations are (standard errors in first set of parentheses, F statistic in second set): For voyages beginning at Ambriz and Ambrizette, 1811–1836 (1) (2) (1) (2)Google Scholar

8 For Matson's evidence, see First Report of the Select Committee on Slave Trade, pp. 1847–1848, Vol. 22, q. 1474. See also James Kennedy to Palmerston, December 20, 1848, FO 84/716.Google Scholar