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 non-fiction that recreates the slave trade through the eyes of African slaves. 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 slave trade 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 slave traders. Through these documents, Smallwood recreates the journey of early African slaves from their homes to the Gold Coast, across the Atlantic Ocean on what is commonly known as the Middle Passage, to the Americas.

Smallwood begins by describing the slave trade 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 initial subjects of the slave trade. Slavery was common in pre-colonial Africa; however, African slaves now began being sold to European traders, who would relocate them to the New World as a means of labor.

The author delves into this commodification of African slaves 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 slaves who arrived in the New World were often the very antithesis of what the buyers were seeking. Upon landing, the traders would have to turn their cargo into American slaves 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 individuals associated with and involved in the slave trade. Unlike previous historians, Smallwood writes from the perspective of the African slaves 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 slave ship survivors in the early years of the slave trade. These individuals were experiencing an “unprecedented social death” without family or community and with no opportunity or ability to establish any kind of identity. Only in 1720s Virginia did children born into slavery survive to adulthood, and they were thus able to put down roots and raise children of their own.