# Slave ships and the introduction of African food  
The forced migration of Africans to the New World occurred continually over a period of 350 years and more than 35,000 transatlantic slave voyages have been documented (Eltis et al., 2000). Slave ships landed more than 11 million Africans at the auction blocks of the Americas. A little-explored facet of the transatlantic trade in human cargo is the food system that sustained it. Food had to be in such quantity as to feed a ship's captives - often numbering in the hundreds - during lengthy Atlantic crossings, which could last several months. Slaving thus generated a constant demand for food at a scale unprecedented in global commerce. Some provisions were carried from Europe, notably salted meat and fish, biscuits, wheat flour and beer - intended mostly for the crew - and horse (fava) beans for the African captives. A further consideration was the trade's surprising dependence on food grown in Africa. Jean Barbot, a seventeenth-century trader who made several transatlantic slave voyages, offers an indication of the scale of the demand for food: 'A ship that takes in five hundred slaves, must provide above a hundred thousand yams'. The captain of a slave ship that left Sierra Leone in 1693 recorded buying five tons of rice for the voyage; another seventeenth-century slaver purchased eight tons of rice and a larder of blackeye peas to feed the ship's 250 captives. Provisions sold along the Upper Guinea Coast included sorghum and millet, along with Amerindian maize and peanuts. Farther south along Africa's Atlantic coast, tropical tubers such as yams and plantains, along with sweet potatoes and taro, were among the food supplies sold to slavers. One ship's logbook noted the purchase of 1,000 plantains for the ship's transatlantic crossing (Hair, Jones and Law, 1992, vol. II, pp. 699-700; Carney, 2001, p. 72; Carney and Rosomoff, 2009, p. 67).