January 1700

Between 1700 and 1750, mortality rates on slave ships averaged 15–20% per voyage. Enslaved Africans were chained below decks in spaces less than 18 inches high. Dysentery, smallpox, and dehydration were primary killers. Captives resisted through hunger strikes, suicide by jumping overboard, and insurrection. Ship crews were instructed to shoot those attempting suicide, revealing how common the act of self-liberation through death was.

By 1700 the transatlantic slave trade had transported an estimated 1.5 million Africans to the Americas since 1500. In the first half of the eighteenth century volume surged: approximately 2 million more were transported between 1700 and 1750. English, Portuguese, French, and Dutch merchants competed for supremacy, transforming West African politics and depopulating entire coastal regions.

Between 1700 and 1750, mortality rates on slave ships averaged 15–20% per voyage. Captives resisted through hunger strikes, suicide by jumping overboard, and insurrection. Crews were instructed to shoot those attempting suicide, revealing how common self-liberation through death had become.

Colonial court records document cases of enslaved women accused of infanticide — killing newborns to prevent them from being born into slavery. Other documented acts include self-mutilation to avoid sale and hunger strikes. These acts were simultaneously individual resistance and tragic evidence of the depth of slavery's violence. Colonial courts executed women for infanticide even as they enslaved their children by law.

Colonial court records document cases of enslaved women accused of infanticide — killing newborns to prevent birth into slavery — alongside self-mutilation to avoid sale and hunger strikes. Colonial courts executed women for infanticide even while their living children were enslaved by law.

The English slave ship Henrietta Marie completes what is believed to be its last voyage, transporting approximately 190 enslaved Africans to Jamaica and Barbados. The ship subsequently sank off Florida. When recovered by archaeologists in the 1970s–80s, its cargo of shackles, trade goods, and artifacts became the most complete physical record of the English slave trade ever recovered.

For generations, self-emancipated people build hidden communities deep in the Great Dismal Swamp, living beyond the reach of slaveholders.