Portuguese explorers establish trading posts on the Gold Coast, beginning commercial exchange that transforms African communities.

The Gold Coast transitions from importing enslaved people from elsewhere in Africa to exporting its own people to European traders.

Sugar plantation expansion in Brazil drives European traders to seek African labor, bringing slave ships back to the Gold Coast.

War captives brought to the Gold Coast littoral are shackled and held in trade forts or ships while cargo accumulates.

Traders use trial and error to calculate the bare minimum food needed to keep captives alive through their voyage.

Captives are confined in overcrowded, unsanitary holding areas where illness and disease spread rapidly through the incarcerated population.

The Royal African Company requires ships to be outfitted with holding platforms, shackles, and provisions before departing for Africa.

Captives from multiple ethnic and linguistic groups across the Gold Coast are loaded together onto transatlantic ships.

Land disappears from the horizon and captives lose all sense of time and location, having no prior knowledge of ocean travel.

Disease ravages the ship holds during the Middle Passage, killing an average of 20% of captives before landfall.

Survivors disembark at American ports where agents sort through malnourished, traumatized captives to assess their commercial value before sale.

Potential buyers board ships to inspect and negotiate prices for enslaved people, assessing them based on physical appearance.

Enslaved people are sold at American markets and permanently separated from the shipmates who shared their transatlantic ordeal.

High mortality continues on plantations, with as many as half of new arrivals dying within three years of their arrival.

Enslaved communities gradually overcome social death by building fictive kinship networks and creating new cultural identities on plantations.

Saltwater Slavery traces the forced journey of African people from their homelands to enslavement in the Americas, beginning with the establishment of Afro-European trade on the Gold Coast. As European demand for labor grew and the Gold Coast shifted from importing to exporting enslaved people, captives were taken to coastal holding areas and subjected to brutal minimum-sustenance conditions before being loaded onto transatlantic ships. The Middle Passage subjected captives to complete disorientation, overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, and devastating disease, killing roughly one in five before landfall. Survivors arrived at American ports malnourished and traumatized, assessed for commercial value, then sold and permanently separated from those who had shared their ordeal. High mortality continued on plantations as newly arrived Africans struggled to survive their first years under enslavement. Only gradually, through the slow rebuilding of community and fictive kinship, did enslaved people begin to put down roots and allow new generations to emerge.

The core arc of African enslavement from Gold Coast trade to American plantation life.

Spanish and Portuguese traders first introduce enslaved people from elsewhere in Africa into the Gold Coast as imported commodities.

States including Denkyira, Akwamu, and Asante gain dominance by selling war captives to fund the purchase of European weapons.

European weapons imported through Gold Coast trade revolutionize warfare, enabling territorial expansion and political centralization among competing states.

Some captives escape their physical restraints but are recaptured because visible signs of starvation and trauma make them easily identifiable.

Very few captives are released through family-secured redemption, as most lack kin powerful enough to buy their freedom.

Ship captains are forced to abandon preferences for strong young men and accept available captives to complete their cargo.

The Royal African Company formally approves using children as filler cargo to maximize the carrying capacity of its ships.

Europeans bring generations of accumulated maritime knowledge to the Atlantic, while captive Africans have no prior experience of ocean travel.

Captives use moon cycles to track the passage of time at sea but cannot determine their location or remaining distance.

Ship captain Peter Blake's journal records the deaths of enslaved people aboard the Royal African Company vessel the James.

A geographical hierarchy of value determines where enslaved people are sold — Barbados first, then Jamaica, the Leeward Islands, and finally Virginia.

Enslaved people deemed refuse are sold at reduced prices in a secondary market to buyers hoping to rehabilitate them for profit.

Some survivors of the Middle Passage attempt suicide near water, hoping death in that setting would carry them to their ancestors.

Enslaved women assume crucial social roles — building kinship networks, preparing food, tending the sick, and performing mourning rites.

The first generation of American-born enslaved children in Virginia survives to adulthood and is able to raise children of their own.

This pool traces the specific mechanisms and secondary developments that made the Atlantic slave trade function, from its earliest roots on the Gold Coast through to the emergence of a new generation of American-born enslaved people. It covers the internal political transformations on the Gold Coast, including how competing states harnessed European weapons and the sale of prisoners to consolidate power. It follows the practical operations of the trade — how ships were filled, how captains compromised their preferences, and how the Royal African Company managed its human cargo. The pool also examines the experiences of captives at sea through the lens of navigational disorientation and the grim mortality record kept by ship captain Peter Blake. It then traces the geographic sorting of survivors across American markets and the secondary trades in those deemed unsellable. Finally, it ends with the painful psychological aftermath on plantations and the slow, women-led reconstruction of community that allowed the first American-born enslaved generation to survive and take root.

Behind-the-scenes forces and secondary moments that shaped the slave trade's machinery.

Smallwood establishes the Royal African Company's records as her primary source for reconstructing the experiences of enslaved African people.

Edward Long's observation of American-born enslaved people calling new African arrivals 'salt-water Negroes' reveals how the Middle Passage shaped diaspora identity.

Smallwood reveals that African rulers previously executed war prisoners but discovered the Atlantic market offered a commercially valuable alternative.

Selling prisoners overseas transforms captivity from temporary local marginalization into permanent, devastating exile and irreversible social death.

Captives at the littoral discover the market culture itself prevents escape more powerfully than any physical shackle.

Captives board slave ships carrying only circulating rumors and fears about enslavers, with no reliable knowledge of their destination.

Captives' irons are removed at sea, but preexisting malnutrition, exhaustion, and seasickness leave them deeply vulnerable to onboard diseases.

Olaudah Equiano's first-person account describes the slave ship as 'this hollow place,' capturing the spiritual void of the Middle Passage.

The inability to perform mortuary rites for those who die at sea leaves the dead spiritually unmoored, deepening collective trauma.

Smallwood explains that Akan matriclan identity spans time and space, contradicting European traders' false assumption that Africans formed nation-states.

American agents feed captives fresh food and rub them with oil in the week before sales to disguise Middle Passage damage.

Buyers express disappointment that arriving cargoes contain too many women and children and too few strong adult men in their prime.

Spanish American buyers purchase enslaved people at Jamaican sales for onward transport and resale to Spanish American colonists in South America.

'Sibell recounts to John Ford how her brother-in-law sold her into slavery in exchange for a gun and gunpowder.

Smallwood concludes that the trauma of the Middle Passage made full narrative closure impossible for survivors like 'Sibell.

This pool follows the intellectual and emotional turning points in Smallwood's reconstruction of the Atlantic slave trade, from her introduction of the Royal African Company archives through to her final reflection on the impossibility of healing from the Middle Passage. It reveals how the Gold Coast became a supplier of enslaved people through a calculated decision to sell prisoners rather than execute them, transforming captivity into permanent exile. Pivotal moments aboard the ships — the removal of irons, the spread of disease, the deaths without proper rites — are shown to compound one another into a unique and devastating form of social and spiritual destruction. Olaudah Equiano's testimony and the Akan matriclan tradition offer rare windows into the inner lives and identities that enslavers sought to erase. The final revelations follow enslaved people through American markets, where deceptive preparation by agents could not conceal the depth of their suffering, and end with 'Sibell's testimony — a powerful reminder that for survivors of the Middle Passage, the trauma could never be fully narrated or resolved.

The key discoveries and pivotal shifts that define how saltwater slavery was made and endured.