Bristol and Liverpool slave ships averaged 356 captives and preferred young men.

Evidence

After being captured or sold, individuals were dragged to barracks, where they often lived for months—some of them died there—before slavers loaded them onto ships, one batch of bodies at a time. The transport phase of the human manufacturing process lasted anywhere from three to five weeks, depending on whether a ship was traveling to Barbados, Jamaica, or New England. Slavers who had originated in Bristol or Liverpool carried, during the peak years, an average of 356 captives on board. Strong, healthy African men in their prime, between fifteen and twenty-five years old, made up the bulk of the enslaved at sea. “Planters preferred adult males for work in sugar cultivation,” Rawley and Behrendt write, and particularly favored men from Guinea, who were perceived to be “docile and agreeable.” Ship captains aimed for a two-to-one ratio of men to women, with a small percentage of boys and girls. Traders judged women’s fitness by their reproductive potential, just as horse breeders might judge the qualities of a broodmare. In the House of Lords’ Records of Certificate of Slaves Taken on Board Ships, one merchant recorded: “the Women in general having good Breasts were strong and well.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 281

Categorization

• SHARE: The horse-breeder analogy for judging women’s reproductive fitness is grim and specific — a dark detail a slavery-studies colleague would appreciate.