Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora

Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora by author and history professor Stephanie E. Smallwood is a work of historical nonfiction that recreates the trade of enslaved people through the eyes of enslaved African people. Published in 2007, it won the 2008 Frederick Douglas Book Prize, awarded to the best book written in English regarding slavery or abolition. The book seeks to expand the current understanding of the Atlantic trade of enslaved people through a deep analysis of the records of the Royal African Company from 1675 to 1725. This archival material includes voyage journals, business records, and correspondence generated by white European settlers and traders of enslaved people. Through these documents, Smallwood recreates the journey of early enslaved African people from their homes to the Gold Coast, across the Atlantic Ocean on what is commonly known as the Middle Passage, to the Americas.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss slavery, abuse, and suicide. This guide uses the word “slave” in quotation only.

Smallwood begins by describing the trade of enslaved people on the Gold Coast in the 17th century. First, she explains the rise of the area known as the Gold Coast and the history of trading in Africa. Trading allowed for increased wealth and goods, which led to the introduction and importation of European weapons. These weapons changed the way that wars were fought and aided in the rise of states and political centralization in the Gold Coast communities. Military campaigns produced captives, and these prisoners of war were the first people who were enslaved and transported to America. Slavery was common in pre-colonial Africa; however, enslaved African people now were being sold to European traders, who would relocate them to the New World to labor.

The author delves into this commodification of enslaved African people in greater detail, describing the pseudo-scientific process through which traders turned people into property. Smallwood describes the traders’ brutal methods, which essentially involved breaking humans down “to the sum of their biological parts” (43), then estimating the bare minimum needed to keep their captives alive through their transatlantic voyage. As the traders discovered, to their chagrin, these exacting measures took their toll on the captives: The surviving enslaved people who arrived in the New World were often the very antithesis of what the buyers were seeking. Upon landing, the traders would have to make the people on the ships resemble those already enslaved in America to complete the commodification process.

Through the documentation of European traders and buyers, and very rarely, from “saltwater slaves” themselves, Smallwood shows repeatedly the physical and psychological damage the commodification process had on the captives and the normalization of this process by the enslavers and other individuals involved in the trade of enslaved people. Unlike previous historians, Smallwood writes from the perspective of the enslaved African people and extrapolates from the historical documentation a story of high rates of illness and mortality, abuse, disorientation from time and place, and extreme fear on these long voyages in inhumanely overcrowded ship holds.

The author ends with a description of the plight of those who survived the journey. The newly arrived were alienated on an entirely different continent, without any means of returning home. Smallwood presents the psychological rigors of adjustment as one of the factors contributing to the high mortality rates of the survivors of the transatlantic journey in the early years of enslavement in America. These individuals were experiencing a “social death” without family or community and with no opportunity or ability to establish any kind of identity. Only in the 1720s in Virginia did children born into slavery survive to adulthood, and they were thus able to put down roots and raise children of their own.