Slave ships were large cargo ships specially converted for the purpose of transporting slaves, especially newly captured African slaves to the Americas.
Atlantic slave trade
Only a few decades after the arrival of Europeans to America, demand for unpaid labor to work plantations made slave-trading a profitable business. The peak time of slave ships to the Atlantic passage was between the 18th and 19th centuries, when large plantations developed in the colonies of America.
In order to achieve profit, the owners of the ships divided their hulls into holds with little headroom, so they could transport as many slaves as possible. Unhygienic conditions, dehydration, dysentery and scurvy led to a high mortality rate, on average 15% and up to a third of captives. Often the ships, also known as Guineamen, transported hundreds of slaves, who were chained tightly to plank beds. For example, the slave ship Henrietta Marie carried about 200 slaves on the long Middle Passage. They were confined to cargo holds with each slave chained with little room to move.
"Stalin's slave ships", ships the Soviet government used to transport political prisoners in the Soviet Far East in the 1930s; see Dalstroy#Ships of the Dalstroy
See also
Hell ship, a ship with extremely unpleasant living conditions or with a reputation for cruelty among the crew
Slave Ship is a 1956 short science fiction novel by Frederik Pohl, originally serialized in Galaxy. The scene is a world in the throes of a low-intensity global war, which appears to be an amplified representation of the Vietnam War, in which the U.S. was just beginning to be involved. The plot involves telepathy, speaking to animals, and, in the last few pages, an invasion by extraterrestrials.
The nominal adversaries in the novel are known as "cow-dyes", a corruption of Caodai, a religion of Vietnamese origin. On the American side, telepaths, who are used in espionage and other covert activities, are falling victim to "the glotch", a fatal affliction which is believed to be a Caodai bio-weapon, transmitted telepathically.
Reception
Galaxy reviewer Floyd C. Gale praised the novel as "an authentically convincing picture of a wartime navy and . . . a think-tank tickler."Anthony Boucher reported Slave Ship to be "at once fascinating and disappointing." Boucher praised Pohl for his "Heinleinesque skill in the detailed indirect exposition of a convincing future," but faulted the novel as episodic, weakly characterized, and arbitrarily resolved.
Off in the distance rises up a mighty roar I look around to see I'm not touching the floor I'm just a pawn in ancient pan-galactic wars To mine the ether ore is my eternal chore Not here, not now, not anymore I'm tired and my head is sore Asteroids live and breathe and planets fall in love Bat-beings groan and seethe and fit you like a glove Traverse Orion's leg in the blink of an eye Warm hands at dying suns and boiling midnight skies No day or night, eternal vacuum, hard and cold I slave where time is growing old Slaveship Slaveship We're on Another run Slaveship We're on Another run Slaveship We're on Another run
... the emancipated African slaves ... Herman Melville was appalled by steerage on a "good" ship — "an open cesspool They were packed like slaves on a slave ship." These were the long cónra (coffin ships).
When the white crew took an unsanctioned shore leave in Charleston in the early morning hours of May 13, Smalls and several other slaves hijacked the ship, piloted it past Fort Sumter and surrendered it to a Union blockading squadron.
When the white crew took an unsanctioned shore leave in Charleston in the early morning hours of May 13, Smalls and several other slaves hijacked the ship, piloted it past Fort Sumter and surrendered it to a Union blockading squadron.
... at East Carolina University, she was one of the experts strapping into diving gear and combing the seafloor between the Florida Keys and Cuba for the lost wreck of a 200-year-old Spanish slave ship.
When the white crew took an unsanctioned shore leave in Charleston in the early morning hours of May 13, Smalls and several other slaves hijacked the ship, piloted it past Fort Sumter and surrendered it to a Union blockading squadron.
Savannah and the OceanicSlaveTrade, which featured reproductions of the manifests of slave ships coming into Savannah, a deconstructed slave ship and ceramic sculptures in the outside pool ...
For his three-part project “The AmericanManifest,” he confronted the ongoing legacies of colonialism and slavery in America with a 110-foot-long sculpture resembling a ship from the slave trade.
He worked on slave ships when he was young and then became the captain of his own slave ship ... Though born free, he became a slave himself ... About a year later, Newton was rescued and set free by another slave trader.
Abandoned dreams were converted into slave ships then launched to cross dark, storm-tossed skyways. The ships docked at islands of imperium in the sky.
'No way! Oh my gosh... That is mind-blowing.' ... Ahmir Thompson) ... 'That's incredible.' ... The DNA testing indicated that his ancestors were part of a group of 100 slaves who were shipped on the schooner Clotilda (often misspelled as Clotilde) in 1860 ... ET ... .
She painted the picture of Africans crammed onto slave ships headed from West Africa to America...Scott Joplin introduced the bouncy, staccato rhythms of ragtime; the moan of the slave ships and the ...
The novel’s structure is rich in perspective, leaping between Ebby’s time in the French countryside, her parents’s childhood homes, the rocking wood slats of the slave ship that carried her family’s ...
Chatanooga Times Free Press
12 Mar 2025
Chatanooga Times Free Press
12 Mar 2025