believed that if captives en route were fed foods to which they were accustomed, mortality rates would improve (Carney and Rosomoff, 2011, p. 68-69).  
Other sources from New World plantation societies indirectly attest to the importance of African crops for the institution of Atlantic slavery. Peter Collinson (1766, pp. 278-80), writing about the early decades of the Carolina colony, attributed the introduction of rice there to a slave ship that arrived in the 1690s with leftover provisions: "About this time a Portuguese vessel arrived, with slaves from the east, with a considerable quantity of rice, being the ship's provision ... This unexpected cargo was distributed". Sorghum and millet played a similar role in seventeenth-century Curaçao. When the people in the Dutch colony's slave depot faced starvation in 1687, ships were dispatched to Dutch trading forts on the Gold Coast to procure food. Soon thereafter, records show that sorghum and millet were being cultivated on the island. By 1725, 'guinea corn' had become Curaçao's chief staple food (Postma, 1990, pp. 33 and 43-44; Postma, 1973, pp. 65-73).