Economic incentives kept captives alive but iron shackles still tore flesh fatal.

Evidence

Slavery at sea, as historians have long written, brought terrors to the captives beyond our worst nightmares. The extreme challenges of food preservation and water rationing made the transoceanic journey itself treacherous. The economics of the trade and financial incentives for captains and ship surgeons conspired to keep alive as many captives as possible. But there were limits. Starting with space. The surgeon Alexander Falconbridge described conditions aboard his ship where captives “had not so much room as a man in his coffin, neither in length or breadth, and it was impossible for them to turn or shift with any degree of ease.” Captain John Ashley testified before the members of the House of Commons that he “frequently heard them crying out when below for the want of air.” Suffocating as if buried alive, with human waste uncontainable, men were shackled side by side as metal and iron tore into flesh with every jolt of the ocean. Mustakeem found a report in the archives of several men on the Venus who died from “Part of the Scrotum torn off w’th their Irons.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 282

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The detail that economies incentivized survival while the physical apparatus of restraint still killed — profit and brutality bound together, not opposed — is a dense, somewhat counterintuitive coupling.