Capture, the Middle Passage, and the Machinery of the Slave Ship

Most enslaved people were seized through warfare, raids, kidnapping, or judicial condemnation for debt or alleged crimes, and war captives taken between rival African states constituted the single most common source of people sold into the trade. Captives were then force-marched, sometimes for hundreds of kilometers, toward the coast — a march with an estimated mortality of 10 to 15 percent — before being branded and held in coastal "barracoons," dungeon-like holding pens at fortified trading posts such as Elmina, Cape Coast Castle, and Gorée, sometimes for weeks while a ship's human cargo was assembled. African merchants served as indispensable intermediaries in this system, since Europeans themselves rarely ventured into the interior, and demand varied sharply by age and sex, with young men commanding the highest prices for plantation labor and an overall gender ratio favoring men over women by roughly two to one.