Slave Purchasing Strategies and Shipboard Mortality: Day-to-Day Evidence from the Dutch African Trade, 1751–1797

Abstract

The mortality of enslaved Africans in the Atlantic crossing has long preoccupied historians but the relationship between slave traders' purchasing strategies and slave mortality rates in transit has escaped close investigation. We address these issues by using records of 39 eighteenth-century voyages of the Dutch Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie. These allow shipboard mortality rates of enslaved Africans to be estimated. They also reveal previously un-noticed age- and gender-based variations in slave purchase and mortality patterns, which in turn shed light on the relative importance of African and shipboard conditions in determining slave survival rates in the middle passage.