39 pages • 1 hour read
Stephanie E. SmallwoodSaltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Turning African Captives into Atlantic Commodities”
Smallwood discusses the commodification of enslaved African people in greater detail, describing the process through which traders turned people into property. The transformation began at the oceanfront, where the captives witnessed the market where they were sold. Captives would be shackled around the wrists with “short irons” and around the ankles with “long irons” (39-40), and then incarcerated, either in trade forts, which had a space specifically intended for housing captives to be exported, or in ships, which were essentially floating warehouses, accruing captives until there were enough for a shipment. Irons and enclosures were often not enough to hold captives. Shackles were a luxury that was not always available, and even when they were, they did not stand up well to the corrosive effects of high humidity. People frequently liberated themselves due to lapses in security and poorly constructed holding areas.
The captives would be kept alive through the “rationalized science of human deprivation” (35): Traders used “the trial and error of experiment and observation” to determine the bare minimum needed to sustain the captives (35). The captives’ meals reflected “a calculation balancing the cost of the slaves’ maintenance against their purchase price” and consisted of rations that were devoid of nutrition (44). Food shortages were frequent, and captives spent this waiting period wavering between abject starvation and reliable sustenance. In addition to poor nutrition (or in some cases, no nutrition at all), the holding areas in which the captives were kept were poorly constructed, and the sheer volume of individuals in a small, contained space meant that illness and disease easily ravaged the incarcerated population.
Smallwood explains the social death of people held captive when they reach the littoral. Very few captives had families or communities powerful enough to secure their release, recorded in the written accounts as “redemption of a free man” (52-53). For most, the only way out was to liberate themselves. While some were able to get away from the physical constraints, they soon found that the market itself prevented them from seeking freedom. They found it difficult to hide the physical features of starvation and trauma that incarceration wrought upon them, and therefore they were easily recaptured. As Smallwood clarifies, “the most powerful instrument locking captives in as commodities for Atlantic trade was the culture of the market itself” (56). Saltwater slavery meant a kind of death, as individuals sold into slavery were never heard from or seen again. However, unlike physical death, which allowed the deceased and the living to connect through the practice of ancestor worship, the disappearance of enslaved people from their communities put them in “the perpetual purgatory of virtual kinlessness” (61), out of reach of their family members both physically and spiritually.
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Political Economy of the Slave Ship”
Smallwood discusses the economy of the ship carrying enslaved people across the Atlantic. Maritime trade was only considered worthwhile if it was possible to recuperate shipping costs for goods transported overseas. Shipping captive people across the Atlantic doubled the price that was paid originally, and that, combined with the shipping of trade goods from Europe to Africa, meant that the transportation fees totaled “approximately three-quarters of the selling price of an African in the Americas” (67). Because of this, traders would incarcerate people until they had the necessary number to sail toward American markets. They treated enslaved people as objects to be arranged and oriented in the most economical way to fit as many captives as possible in the allotted space.
The Royal African Company required that ship owners be outfitted with a holding space for enslaved people, complete with “a sufficient Quantity of Deals for platforms for ye Negroes, Shackles, bolts, firewood, a bean room large enough to stow such a quantity of beans as is sufficient for provisions for ye Negroes” before departing for the African coast (69). To maximize profit, the ship needed to stretch its carrying capacity. It was therefore routine and encouraged to add more people where they would fit. In correspondence, the Royal African Company approved “the use of children as filler to top off the cargoes put aboard the company’s ships” (71).
Most seagoing vessels used in English trade at the time, however, were not meant to transport human cargo. Extensive alterations had to be made so that existing ships could accommodate human trafficking. In addition to space and capacity, the most important variable for the ship’s captain was time. It was in the best interest of human traffickers’ physical and financial well-being to acquire and transport their cargo from the African coast as quickly as they could. The ship captain had to contend with disease and weather, as well as dwindling supplies. The necessity for a speedy departure put the Europeans at a disadvantage, as they were forced to accept what was available to them. They often had to set aside their preferences for men, the strong, and the youthful if they hoped to complete their cargo.
Chapters 2-3 Analysis
Chapters 2 and 3 show the process of commodification that the enslaved African people suffered as they were trafficked across the Atlantic. From the time they reached the littoral, they were reduced to “the sum of their biological parts, thereby scaling life down to an arithmetical equation and finding the lowest common denominator” (43). Their lives were judged on their purchase price, and the cost of keeping them alive was weighed against that price. Smallwood’s account of this process highlights The Dehumanizing Effects of Commodification. On ships, the people being held captive were arranged as though they were inanimate objects, without consideration for their comfort or physical well-being. As is apparent from the language used in ship captain William Snelgrave’s documentation, traders and buyers justified their actions by absolving themselves of moral accountability. In their eyes, the individuals being enslaved were “so drained of social value, so severed from the community, that their lives were no longer beyond price” (63), and as such, buyers were merely responding to a business opportunity by creating “value by exchange” (62). Smallwood hence conveys that while commodification caused dehumanization, dehumanization also enabled the commodification process to continue.
This sentiment is seen again in the ledgers detailing profits and losses, where the humanity of the individual is stripped away and enumerated in quantitative facts. It becomes apparent that the interests of the traders and shippers were very different than those of the buyers. The main concern of the traders and shippers was to turn a profit. To do so, they needed to keep the costs of business as low as possible, while still sustaining the captives enough that they survived the trip across the Atlantic to be sold to enslavers.
While Smallwood focuses more on the lived experience of enslaved people, she continues to explore Establishing Social Structures and Community Amid Forced Displacement. As the captives suffered these new physical abuses upon their arrival at the littoral and transportation across the Atlantic in squalid conditions, they were also undergoing the psychological trauma that Smallwood calls “social death.” If the captives reached the littoral, they were facing what was effectively permanent exile and complete severance and alienation from everything they had ever known, while simultaneously being forced into an unnatural, painful social setting. Smallwood later speculates that social death factors into the high mortality rates of the enslaved people who survived the transatlantic trip and were sold to enslavers.
