It was slave ships' unparalleled demand for food that hastened the importation and adoption of Amerindian crops along the West African coast. African sorghum, which took six months to ripen, could be replaced by maize, which yielded a harvest in half that time. The peanut provided a versatile protein-rich food that could be consumed raw, boiled or roasted, making it an ideal slave-ship provision. As in previous eras of crop introductions, Africans quickly recognized the potential of the Amerindian staples and incorporated them into farming systems old and new. So quickly did the peanut infiltrate the commercial system that was unfolding in the Atlantic world that some naturalists in tropical America were unaware of its New World origin. Hans Sloane (1707-1725, vol. I, p. 194) wrote of the peanut's importance as provision on seventeenth-century slave ships bound for the English colony of Jamaica, even though it was not then known by that name: 'The Fruit, which are call'd by Seamen Earth-Nuts, are brought from Guinea in the Negroes Ships, to feed the Negroes withal in their Voyage from Guinea to Jamaica'. The Amerindian crops introduced to Africa served the burgeoning trade in human beings and were among the food crops planted in the agricultural fields flanking the European forts established along the Guinea coast (Figure 2). When the coffles arriving from the interior found no slave ships in port, the captives were at times put to work in these fields while awaiting deportation, thus cultivating the very crops that would feed them during the Middle Passage (Kea, 1982, p. 45). Slave-ship captains kept the demand for African dietary staples steady, as they
![img-29.jpeg](img_ref_30)
figure 2. Dixcove Fort, Gold Coast, 1727.
Source: William Smith, Thirty different drafts of Guinea (London, 1727), plate 10.  
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).