Conditions on the Slave Ships

The ship that carried the Africans across the Atlantic was the Teçora, a slave ship sailing under a Portuguese flag, bound for Cuba. The ship was a brig, specially built for the slave trade, with a narrow, clipper-shaped hull and a sharp bow built for maneuverability and above all speed, to evade British anti-slave trade patrols.

The voyage the "Middle Passage" across the Atlantic took two months. After weeks or months of waiting in the baracoons at the river mouth, embarkment happened in a sudden rush: the slaves were herded out of the baracoons, marched to the water's edge and forced into large wooden canoes to be ferried out to the slave ship looming beyond the surf. The European slavers and their African workers, members of a coastal tribe, the Kru, worked rapidly; if a British cruiser suddenly appeared on the horizon, the venture was lost and the slaves likely thrown into the surf to drown.

In a series of wrenching dislocations, this must have been most terrifying. None of the captives had ever been to sea before, in all likelihood. Many, convinced they were going to be killed and eaten by their captors, tried to plunge into the surf and drown themselves; slavers and Kru men had learned to watch carefully for that.Once loaded, the slave ship quickly weighed anchor and sailed off. Land -- Africa -- would have dropped out of sight within a few hours, if any of the slaves were on deck to see it. The Middle Passage had begun.

The slaves were packed into a dark, stooped space called the slave deck, about four feet high, built below the main deck, above the hold. In the testimony later given by the Amistad Africans about this nightmare voyage, the most vivid aspect of the experience was the cramped waiting, tossing in the waves, in suffocating, fetid darkness. Periodically they were brought up on deck and fed rice. If some of the captives tried to starve themselves, as often happened, they were whipped and forced to eat. Few managed to starve, but over the two months they were at sea, water supplies ran low, and disease spread through the close-packed, unventilated slave deck. By the time theTeçora had crossed the Atlantic, a third of the Africans had died.

http://amistad.mysticseaport.org/discovery/story/middle.passage.html