Although most slave ships arrived at New World destinations with little food remaining in their stores, on some occasions there were abundant leftovers. As Collinson reported, that was sometimes the case in the Carolina colony. Henry Barham, one of Sloane's correspondents in Jamaica, unintentionally reveals the significance of leftover provender for the cultivation of pindalls (peanuts) in the colony. In the late seventeenth century he observed: 'The first I ever saw of these growing was in a negro's plantation, who affirmed, that they grew in great plenty in their country; and they now grow very well in Jamaica' (Barham, 1794, pp. 145-146). Boarding an American slave ship that had stopped in Barbados, Dr George Pinckard saw a meal being prepared: captives were milling rice from the ship's stores in the African way, with a handheld pestle in a wooden mortar. As the grain's husks were red, this was undoubtedly African rice. These details are important since they show that not only did slave voyages occasionally end with leftover provisions, but also some of the cereals were purchased in the husk and needed milling on board the ship prior to cooking. Such unhusked grains could be used for seed if the conditions were favourable (Pinckard, quoted in Dow, 1927, pp. xxiii-xxiv).  
African food staples thus arrived in plantation societies as seeds and tubers left over from some of the slave voyages. Slave ships proved to be the conveyor of Old World tropical staples to the New World tropics. These inadvertent seed transfers originated in the cold business calculus of slave trade logistics. Once the captains of slavers had sold their human cargoes, they showed little interest in the provisions that had fed their prisoners. However, these food staples held  
a deeper significance for the now expatriated captives; preserved within the seeds and cuttings from ships' stores were familiar dietary staples - foods that recalled lives now lost.