Oroonoko Explored
The Middle Passage
Even though few pages are spent on Oroonoko's experience in traversing the Atlantic, it is a crucial transitioning point in the novel from his life in Africa to his life in Surinam. In much the same way, the Middle Passage also identities one of the key moments in the experience of salt water slaves as they transitioned from being the traditional African slave to becoming a New World plantation slave. The experience was obviously horrible, and in Oroonoko the slaves “were lash’d fast in irons” and put below decks (Behn 31). Then they all refused to eat or drink, and therefore slowly began to die. Indeed, without the aid of Oroonoko after he is given permission to walk freely about the ship, the narrator suggests that the entire crew of slaves would have perished enroute to their destination. The details about being put into irons below decks for extended periods of time is also accurate. Even the account of the Africans refusing to eat, and preferring to die slowly, is grounded in historical truth. In Jean Barbot’s account A Collection of Voyages and Travels, many African slaves fear their upcoming death, often by cannibalism, and that they “fall into a deep melancholy and despair, and to refuse all sustenance, tho never so much compelled and even beaten to oblige them to takes some nourishment: notwithstanding all which they will starve to death: whereof I have had several instances in my own slaves aboard and at Guadeloupe (Lipking 118).”
Middle Passage Diagram from an "Abstract of Evidence," 1790
Barbot also notes that frequently the English lost large portions of their slaves in the same way, anywhere from one hundred to four hundred lost out of five hundred. In Behn’s account, the experience of the slaves enroute appears to be quite accurate, with only two minor exceptions. The first is that Oroonoko, himself, is given permission to walk freely. Perhaps any wise captain would have done the same thing considering the possibility of losing his whole lot of slaves. Secondly, the way in which these Africans became slaves is also odd. Even though many Africans were put into slavery without warfare, such as kidnapping, an entire ship’s worth of elite noblemen being captured through treachery was certainly not a regular occurrence.