ABSTRACT
During the past ten years historians have written several new studies on the mortality of non-slave shipboard populations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The passenger groups examined include European emigrants to colonies and to the United States, British convicts to North America and Australia, and African, Indian, Chinese, and Pacific islander indentured labour to the Americas, South Africa, Mauritius, Australia, and Fiji.1 By comparison, there have been only two recent studies which present new information on crew mortality in the transatlantic slave trade. Using voyage details from surgeons' logs, Steckel and Jensen analysed crew mortality rates on the African coast and middle passage for 92 British slave voyages in 1792-96.2 From examination of muster rolls, Behrendt calculated the mortality losses of captains in the Bristol and Liverpool slave trades between 1785 and 1807.3 Several earlier studies of crew mortality on slave ships relied on Rinchon's pioneering research of the major French slaving port of Nantes more than fifty years ago4 and Unger's examination of selected slave voyages organized by the Dutch Middelburg Commercial Company.5 Other works include Mettas' examination of crew mortality on 24 slave voyages from Honfleur in 1763-88 and 452 French slave voyages to the Angolan coast in 1714-91 and Stein's analysis of crew mortality on 130 slave voyages from Nantes in 1715-78.6
As mentioned in the introductory paper by Eltis and Richardson in this volume, in the 1970s Jean Mettas collected and organized slave voyage data for Nantes and other French ports; in 1978 and 1984 the Dagets published the data in the Répertoire des Expéditions Négrières Françaises au XVIIIe Siècle. These French slave voyage data, which have been scanned into the Du Bois Institute data set, contain information on the number of crew at the outset of the voyage and the deaths of sailors on each of the five stages of slaving voyages - namely, the outward passage, the stay at the African coast, the middle passage, the time in the Americas, and the homeward passage.7 There is crew mortality information for 1,792 of the 3,343 French slave
voyages between 1691 and 1793 contained in the Mettas-Daget catalogue. In this large sample, there are also dates of departure and arrival on select voyage legs which permit analysis of crew mortality by time and place.
