Slave Ship

A slave ship is a large cargo ship, either purpose-built or converted, of a type used from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century specifically to transport enslaved people, most often across the Atlantic Ocean as part of the transatlantic slave trade; ships engaged in the West African leg of that trade were also called Guineamen, after the Guinea coast where much of their human cargo was purchased. Slave ships carried an estimated 20 million Africans across the Atlantic, and the Middle Passage, the transatlantic leg of the triangular trade route linking Europe, Africa and the Americas, was the most lethal stage of the journey: owners maximized the number of captives carried by dividing the hull into cramped holds with minimal headroom, where enslaved people were chained tightly to plank beds with little room to move, and average mortality on the crossing ran around fifteen percent, sometimes reaching a third of those aboard. The trade peaked in the late eighteenth century, and although Britain and the United States passed abolition laws in 1807 and 1808, illicit slave shipping continued for decades afterward, with traders adopting faster hull designs such as the Baltimore clipper specifically to outrun naval patrols enforcing the ban, and the trade did not fully end until around 1860. Slave ships form a well documented category of historical shipping, attested in surviving shipping logs, insurance records and marine archaeology, and the type is inseparable from one of history's largest forced migrations.