39 pages • 1 hour read
Stephanie E. SmallwoodSaltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Anomalous Intimacies of the Slave Cargo”
This chapter discusses the experiences and interactions of the people held captive on the ships. These people, torn from their homes and communities, were thrown together in “anomalous intimacy” once aboard a ship (101). To comprehend the diasporic identity they formed, Smallwood examines the recorded indigenous traditions and accounts of contemporary European observations to appreciate who these African people understood themselves to be before their enslavement.
Dialects of Akan, Guan, Ga, Ewe, and Gbe could be found among the cargoes assembled at the Gold Coast—usually, there were at least three, if not four, distinct languages to be heard aboard. A ship’s ethnic makeup was dependent on the complex, fast-changing politics and shifts of power on the Gold Coast. For example, the Asante state’s rise to power changed the volume and makeup of the cargoes of enslaved people from the Gold Coast. European cartographers provided a helpful framework for the socio-ethnic landscape with maps that labeled the regions with names and their observations and notations about the people who lived within those territories.
Smallwood goes on to discuss one of the known recorded Asante traditions regarding the origin of matriclans and the matrilineal system of descent that was common to the Gold Coast’s Akan-speaking groups. Ankyewa Nyame, the original ancestress of the royal Oyoko clan, is said to have descended from the sky into the forest region that became the Gold Coast. She did not find the area to her liking, and thus she disappeared and went to a different district. When she reappeared, others “from the ground appeared near her and the 10 family Royal [all] also appeared from the ground in different parts” (112).
Among the Akan-speaking people, the matriclan, the matrilineage, and the lineage segment are the three levels of kinship organization that “structures the individual’s relationship to areas of social and politico-economic power” (111), with the matriclan being the largest. The matriclan links individuals in kinship, over time and space (though there may be no actual basis in shared genealogy), to facilitate “the integration and social cohesion of societies shaped by incorporation on a large scale of immigrant strangers” (111). Because of this tradition, Smallwood explains, history and genealogy were not reliable anchors of identity for commoners and enslaved people. Identity, for the Akan-speaking people, depended on many factors and was not simply rooted in shared language or culture.
European sources from the same period, however, when describing Africa, are rife with references to kings and countries, though African states were not nations in the way that Europeans viewed nations and did not share their concept of nation-state. Based on this understanding of countries, European traders had assumed that all war between African states produced enslaved people. Their misunderstanding impacted their supplies of enslaved people—people were only put onto the Atlantic market when they did not share kinship affiliation with their captors. This would change after the 17th century when the authority of kingship overrode the power of the matriclan and kinship.
Smallwood concludes that while there was linguistic and ethnic diversity within the ships, it did not prevent communication between captives. Many individuals understood close dialects, and movements across borders through marriage, war, or sheer proximity allowed for some familiarity with other major languages. However, common language did not necessarily facilitate easy relationships. As the people held captive sought to understand their displacement and surroundings aboard the ships, the necessity of engaging and communicating with their fellow exiles laid the foundation for “a novel social formation that bore no correlation to the communities they left behind, and therefore no recognizable meaning or order” (121). This was a new dynamic forged in the isolation and despondency of their forced migration.
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Living Dead aboard the Slave Ship at Sea”
Smallwood next discusses enslaved people’s experience on their transatlantic voyage. From the European point of view, the ship represented “the height of maritime commercial endeavor: a useful conveyance that linked markets in a known seascape” (122). However, the African narrative is one of survival, whereby people held captive attempted to maintain some agency and free will, rather than “exist as an object aboard the slave ship” (123). Smallwood uses Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative (1789) to lend some insight into enslaved people’s experience at sea. Equiano describes the ship in the Atlantic as “this hollow place” (123); as Smallwood clarifies, this was a place “distinguished by its many lacks—its material and social poverty, its cognitive dissonance, and its defenselessness in the face of the supernatural” (126). People were forced into temporal and spatial disorientation as land disappeared from the horizon, and there was only the constant movement of the ship and “the sheer scale of the unknown element” (125).
Unlike the African people whom they enslaved, Europeans had cultivated maritime knowledge over the years to facilitate Europe’s westward capitalist expansion. Navigational skills were passed down and refined through the generations, and tools, charts, and maps were developed to travel the seas. In addition to the mariners and merchants, European travelers also added to the body of knowledge about the Atlantic. Immigrants in the New World wrote to family and friends about the voyage across the Atlantic. Unlike Europeans, Africans had no reason to acquire knowledge of maritime travel beyond inshore coastal areas. There were also very few Africans who traveled across the Atlantic and back, and their experiences were lost among the millions who were involuntarily deported and never returned. There were no lines of communication established between those who went before and those who were to come, so people who were herded onto the ships traveled with their own preconceived notions developed via the rumors that circulated in their communities about enslavers and the New World.
Once at sea, the incarcerated people found themselves completely displaced from time and space. While the Europeans had hourglasses and astrolabes to help them measure the passage of time, and geometry and Cartesian coordinates to orient them spatially, the Africans had no such things. On land, Africans relied on the changing of the seasons to mark the passage of time and space. The Akan-speaking people had 40-day cycles known as adaduanan that shaped the agricultural calendar and marked the seasonal demands of the landscape. However, once aboard the ship, people held captive had to rely on the cycles of the moon to maintain their orientation. The rising and setting of the sun marked the days, but the cycles of the moon helped orient them within the agricultural calendar. However, these cycles did not help inform them about location, or how far they had traveled, or how much further they were to go.
In addition to alienation and displacement, the African people on the ships also suffered exposure to many pathogens. Though their irons were removed, restoring some freedom of movement, the relief they felt did nothing to alleviate their preexisting exhaustion, malnutrition, injury, and seasickness. Their plight was worsened by cramped quarters, lack of sanitation, and contaminated food and water supplies. This created a fertile breeding ground for diseases including smallpox, tuberculosis, dysentery, and yaws. Unsurprisingly, mortality rates aboard ships were high—on average, 20% of the people held captive died at sea, and 40% of cargoes experienced death rates above 20%. Ships were termed tumbeiros—translated to mean, among other things, “floating tombs” (137)—in 18th-century Angolan trade. These deaths created further trauma for the African people on the ships—the severance of ties to their ancestors due to the inability to complete mortuary rites, and the trauma of witnessing the death itself.
Chapters 4-5 Analysis
Chapters 4 and 5 recount the captives’ experiences once aboard the ships carrying enslaved people. Chapter 4 discusses the complex ethnic makeup of these ships. The Gold Coast alone was home to a plethora of major languages and dialects. In addition to the linguistic differences, there were also cultural differences. Smallwood uses European sources and recorded oral traditions to show the complexity of the social terrain and to explain why it is not possible to apply the Western ideas of nation and identity to the people who were trafficked from the Gold Coast. She extrapolates a basic understanding of how early Akan societies organized their communities and their relationships. However, while communities may have been organized similarly, “ethnic belonging bears no set correspondence to linguistic, political, territorial, or other cultural boundaries” (118). Ultimately, Smallwood asserts that one cannot assume with any degree of certainty how the ethnic and cultural mixing aboard the ship affected the enslaved people.
What can be asserted is that the “novel social formation” created within the ship to cope with the exigencies did not resemble anything that the captives had left behind (121). Smallwood therefore conveys the fact that Establishing Social Structure and Community Amid Forced Displacement was complex but necessary for survival. The enslaved people’s terrible common experiences gave them a common foundation for “a new kind of diasporic identity” (120), built from the complete isolation from everything the captives had ever known and the horrors of being trapped on a transatlantic voyage.
Being aboard a ship was traumatic in numerous ways that compounded one other. Enslaved African people had no knowledge of the ocean “as an arena for the activities of the living” (126). Many Europeans, despite the generations of accumulated knowledge about maritime travel, were still apprehensive about the dangers of sailing overseas. The people who were trafficked had no choice in the matter, and the unfamiliar outside environment, combined with their prior abuse and their removal from their homes and land, created an “unparalleled displacement” (131). They were disoriented in time and space, completely unaware of where they were, where they were going, and how long it would take. This was made worse by the constant forward movement of the ship and the lengthy ocean voyage, which “stretched their own systems of reckoning to the limits” (131). Smallwood’s portrayal of what this felt like is part of the text’s resistance to The Dehumanizing Effects of Commodification, as she pays close attention to the feelings that European enslavers and traders ignored.
The physical dangers on the ship only exacerbated the captives’ feelings of alienation, fear, and displacement. The African emigrants were kept in crowded conditions that did not allow for much movement. This invariably led to poor sanitation, which created a perfect breeding ground for disease. The African prisoners already suffered from a compromised immune system due to malnutrition, exhaustion, and seasickness. They were often given contaminated food and water. All these factors made them particularly vulnerable to illness, and “in few settings were human beings exposed to a great number of pathogens in the early modern world than aboard slave ships en route to the Americas” (135). This exposure to pathogens was unceasing and prolonged, as the transatlantic voyage was protracted.
Unsurprisingly, mortality rates aboard these ships were high. Smallwood uses Peter Blake’s journal to demonstrate the death toll aboard one of the ships owned by the Royal African Company, the James. Her use of this journal conveys The Historical Silencing of Marginalized Voices, as Blake had the means to write, and his historical record has been preserved. Blake’s notations about the date and manner of death showed how Europeans viewed the captives, “as an investor robbed of his property by his property” (139). This designation of a person as “property” further highlights The Dehumanizing Effects of Commodification. Trapped aboard the ships, the captives were in a sort of purgatory, living in fear of death, surrounded by death, unable to respond to death, and even in death, unable to fully die.
