ABSTRACT
Malnutrition on board of slave ships importantly contributed to the mortality and the lasting impact of the Middle Passage on the enslaved. Scholars have investigated how different slave trading companies and empires fed the imprisoned population on board. This study offers both new data and a new methodology to approach this theme by using the extensive records found in Dutch archives. Despite the availability of detailed records, such a study has not been undertaken for the Dutch case before now. By combining quantitative data from the fifth voyage of the MCC’s Middelburgs Welvaren with medical knowledge, the extensity and severity of malnutrition on board can be reconstructed. The data details the daily food intake for the over 450 enslaved people that were bought and brought aboard. We found that the slavers bought food both at the port of departure and on the West African coast and distributed it aboard the ship. As this insufficiently fed the enslaved people, the latter part of this article discusses the consequences of the malnutrition the enslaved aboard suffered from. The results of this article show that the model of combining medical data and shipping data can be used to study the question of nutrition in other cases as well.
