revolt broke out aboard the brig Bons Amis, which had only five white sailors on board (Declaration of arrival of the Bons Amis, Port Louis, 26 December 1790. MNA, OB/28, No. 549).  
In the course of French slaving expeditions, twenty-four revolts were recorded and, in five of these, the ship was abandoned. This is equivalent to only 0.01 per cent of all slaving expeditions combined. At least twelve revolts occurred during seventy-one Dutch expeditions, a proportion of 16.9 per cent. There were also a number of revolts on British ships (De Silva Jayasuriya, 2010, pp. 35-36; De Kock, 1950, pp. 18-19; Bialuschewski, 2011; Allen, 2015, pp. 55-56; Sleigh and Westra, 2013, pp. 53-54). There is no reason to believe that revolts were more common on the vessels of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). It is possible that we only have information on the more significant revolts and that minor incidents went unreported.  
By way of comparison, revolts broke out on ten per cent of expeditions in the transatlantic slave trade (Richardson, 2003, pp. 204-218). According to the slavevoyages.org database, captives purchased in the western region of the Indian Ocean revolted in 2.7 per cent of cases, but accounted for 4.3 per cent of enslaved people traded. The percentage of insurrections on slave ships in Madagascar is higher than in the transatlantic slave trade, which may be explained by the ease of communication between Malagasy captives, who spoke the same language.
![img-12.jpeg](img_ref_13)  
Figure 2. Decade-by-decade breakdown of revolts on slave ships.
Source: Thiébaut, 2020.