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Throwing Slaves Overboard to Drown and Other Dark Moments From History

Khalid Elhassan July 26, 2020 35 min

Plateau - Slave ship — Slave ship hold. History Channel

37. The Cruel Math of Rationing Sustenance Aboard Slave Ships

Cross-section of a slave ship model. National Museum of American History

If food and water ran low 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.

To figure out how to stretch the remaining food and water in order to arrive at port with at least some living slaves to sell, slavers were not above turning to cold-blooded murder. Once they figured out that the remaining food and water could sustain only a certain number of slaves, the dark logic of the situation called for getting rid of the excess slaves. So they were thrown overboard, to drown or be devoured by the sharks that routinely trailed slave ships.

You May Also Interested: Africatown, Alabama Was Founded After A White Man Bet He Could Smuggle in a Hundred New African Slaves, Costing Thousands Their Lives.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.