This chapter considers some basic quantitative characteristics of the Middle Passage from evidence generated in the course of the Royal African Company's trading between 1673 and 1725. The evidence presented here, on the sizes of slave cargoes and the ships that carried them, the seasonality of the trade, and the correlates of mortality on the slaving voyages, will perform two general functions, both of which will serve as a prelude to the chapters that follow. One is to provide a quantitative picture of what constituted typical patterns and outcomes in the slave trade of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The other, which emerges from an investigation of the factors that gave rise to these patterns and outcomes, is to give an indication of the extent to which the early transatlantic slave trade was a business that responded in systematic and rational fashion to a variety of underlying forces.

The size of slave cargoes

Some summary information on the size of slave cargoes shipped by the Royal African Company is presented in Table 2.1, which shows the mean number of slaves delivered per shipload. Over the entire period of the company's trading, the mean size of cargoes delivered by ships in the sample analyzed here was 231 slaves. The decennial breakdowns do not reveal any significant secular trends in this mean cargo size.

The typical size of the company's slave cargoes varied according to their destination. Whereas the mean cargo of 235 slaves delivered to Barbados did not differ greatly from the mean number of 270 delivered to Jamaica, the mean size of cargoes delivered to the Leeward Islands, of 163 slaves, was considerably smaller.