How did slaves survive captivity?

The survival rate of someone being kept as a slave would depend entirely on where they were taken and by whom. The most notable and well-documented account of slavery was during the European colonial period of the Americas when around 12.5 million people were captured from Africa and sent to various colonies spread out across North, Central, and South America. This all started in the mid-1500s when Portugal began to capture and buy people from West Africa and transport them to Brazil, in numbers as high as 4.8 million between 1560 and 1850.

Most people associate slavery with the United States, but less than 400,000 of those 12.5 million people taken from Africa were sent there. The unluckiest slaves would be taken to one of the tropical colonies in the Caribbean to mass produce things like sugar and tropical fruits. These people had a much lower survival rate than those taken to the US, due to worse living conditions and the threat of tropical diseases. Much of the information on the number of slaves kept and where they came from has purposely been destroyed, with the only exception being the United States, so we will look at the survival rate chances of a slave kept there.

The Voyage

The most dangerous part of being taken as a slave was being transported to the site of captivity. There were an estimated 12.5 million people captured from Africa by various, mostly European nations, and around 1.8 million of those died on the voyage, known at the time as the Middle Passage. There was around a 15% chance that someone would die on the voyage, and the second someone did die or looked like they were getting too sick, they would be thrown overboard to stop the spread of disease.

(A diagram of the layout of how people were chained up during the voyage)

People were kept in the worst conditions imaginable, with the slavers having no concern for anything other than their own profit, which meant packing as many people onto the ship as possible. After being chained in place, they would stay there for the entire journey, which between West Africa and the United States would take between 4 and 12 weeks, depending on the size of the ship and the weather.

The Arrival

After being chained in a lying down position for a couple of months, the captives would be unloaded and usually taken to a fort or a large town where there would be enough people to control them. They would be checked over and held there until they were sold to a slaver, after which the long walk to their land or plantation would begin. At this stage, if a slave was healthy enough to be sold, then they had a reasonably high chance of being able to survive the journey to their site of captivity.

(An old photo of typical slave quarters on a plantation)

Life expectancy of a slave

At birth, a child born into slavery would not be expected to live past 25 years old. In comparison, the white colonists had an average life expectancy of 45 years, with the low estimates being due to a complete lack of effective medicine and poor diet, combined with a very dangerous living environment. The kind of people who kept slaves were only concerned with their own well-being and just wanted to make money, which meant providing the cheapest living spaces and food possible. This increased the chances of malnourishment and getting sick, with the sympathy of the slave owner usually consisting of committing murder to stop the chance of an outbreak.

The chances of survival by location

There were less than 400,000 slaves transported to the United States, which was the best of a series of bad options. Over 11.5 million people were captured and taken to Central and South America, where they faced much lower chances of survival due to tropical diseases and excessive workloads. The Central Americas weren’t as desirable to live for the European colonists due to the weather and various sicknesses they could catch, so instead they were used as production zones to mass produce things like sugar, tobacco, and tropical fruits. These plantations had a much lower survival rate than the US, and records on how long people lived there are extremely hard to find, but for every slave that was sent to the US, there were around 25 sent to Central and South America.

The Chances of Escape

Unfortunately, there was no chance of escape for someone who had been taken from Africa of ever getting back. None of the African nations on the western side had ships capable of sailing across the Atlantic, so none of the people taken from there would be able to man a ship even if they could steal one. There was also nowhere to go on land because it was all claimed by people who engaged in slavery and escaped slaves were often taken back to the people they escaped from, so the slaver could make an example of them to scare the others from trying to flee.

The first hope – The underground railroad

As more and more people began to understand slavery, more of them began hating it. When the American Civil War began in 1861 to end slavery, it didn’t take long before enough people made an effort to help people escape, and the most notable of these was called the Underground Railroad.

It consisted of many stop houses owned by white people who wouldn’t raise suspicion to the slave owners but risked their own lives to help people escape. They would provide somewhere for escaped slaves to stay, give them food and water, and then give them directions to the next stop house and how to get there without being seen. There were hundreds of stops on the Underground Railroad, with many people going as far as taking people by coach or boat, and many of the whites helping people escape were also killed by the bounty hunters hired to find escaped slaves.