15. Short Rations Aboard Slave Ships Often Transformed Already Macabre Conditions Into Nightmarish Ones
It was important to take on enough food and water for the macabre Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean. However, since a slave ship’s voyage was a commercial venture driven by the profit motive, investors seldom wanted to spend more money on supplies than was absolutely necessary to get their human cargo to the New World. Many times, they erred on the side of too little than too much. The results were often catastrophic for the chained slaves in the ship’s hold, and piled even more misery atop their already nightmarish load.
If food and water became scare on slave ships during the Middle Passage, the ship’s crew took care of themselves first. When transatlantic sailings took longer than expected and sustenance ran low, slave ship captains often turned to cruel and cold calculations in order to salvage what they could of their human cargo. As seen below, in order to figure out how to stretch the remaining food and water in order to arrive at port with at least some live slaves to sell, slavers were not above turning to cold-blooded murder.
