from Howard Zinn’s A People’s Histo

from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States
*** (This means I cut out some of the article. You’re welcome.) 
In fact, it was because they came from a settled culture, of tribal customs and family ties, of communal life
and traditional ritual, that African blacks found themselves especially helpless when removed from this.
They were captured in the interior (frequently by blacks caught up in the slave trade themselves), sold on
the coast, then shoved into pens with blacks of other tribes, often speaking different languages.
The conditions of capture and sale were crushing affirmations to the black African of his helplessness in the
face of superior force. The marches to the coast, sometimes for 1,000 miles, with people shackled around
the neck, under whip and gun, were death marches, in which two of every five blacks died. On the coast,
they were kept in cages until they were picked and sold. One John Barbot, at the end of the seventeenth
century, described these cages on the Gold Coast:
As the slaves come down to Fida from the inland country, they are put into a booth or
prison... near the beach, and when the Europeans are to receive them, they are brought out
onto a large plain, where the ship's surgeons examine every part of everyone of them, to the
smallest member, men and women being stark naked... Such as are allowed good and sound
are set on one side... marked on the breast with a red- hot iron, imprinting the mark of the
French, English or Dutch companies... The branded slaves after this are returned to their
former booths where they await shipment, sometimes 10-15 days...
Then they were packed aboard the slave ships, in spaces not much bigger than coffins, chained together in
the dark, wet slime of the ship's bottom, choking in the stench of their own excrement. Documents of the
time describe the conditions:
The height, sometimes, between decks, was only eighteen inches; so that the unfortunate
human beings could not turn around, or even on their sides, the elevation being less than the
breadth of their shoulders; and here they are usually chained to the decks by the neck and
legs. In such a place the sense of misery and suffocation is so great, that the Negroes... are
driven to frenzy.
On one occasion, hearing a great noise from below decks where the blacks were chained together, the
sailors opened the hatches and found the slaves in different stages of suffocation, many dead, some having
killed others in desperate attempts to breathe. Slaves often jumped overboard to drown rather than continue
their suffering. To one observer a slave-deck was "so covered with blood and mucus that it resembled a
slaughter house."
Under these conditions, perhaps one of every three blacks transported overseas died, but the huge profits
(often double the investment on one trip) made it worthwhile for the slave trader, and so the blacks were
packed into the holds like fish.
First the Dutch, then the English, dominated the slave trade. (By 1795 Liverpool had more than a hundred
ships carrying slaves and accounted for half of all the European slave trade.) Some Americans in New
England entered the business, and in 1637 the first American slave ship, the Desire, sailed from
Marblehead. Its holds were partitioned into racks, 2 feet by 6 feet, with leg irons and bars.
By 1800, 10 to 15 million blacks had been transported as slaves to the Americas, representing perhaps onethird
of those originally seized in Africa. It is roughly estimated that Africa lost 50 million human beings to
death and slavery in those centuries we call the beginnings of modern Western civilization, at the hands of
slave traders and plantation owners in Western Europe and America, the countries deemed the most
advanced in the world.