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While jewelry was likely confiscated in most cases, at least one account of the Middle Passage, by the British surgeon Alexander Falconbridge, notes that beads were furnished to captive women “for the purpose of affording them some diversion.” William Hugh Grove, an Englishman who visited Virginia in 1732, observed captives aboard a slave ship in Virginia and noted in his journal, “The Boyes and Girles [were] all Stark naked; so Were the greatest part of the Men and Women. Some had beads about their necks, arms, and Wasts, and a ragg or Peice of Leather the bigness of a fig Leafe.” ....
Hesketh, which sailed out of Liverpool and delivered slaves to Saint Kitts in 1761, to the 566-ton Parr, another Liverpool ship that sailed in the 1790s. Ships comparable in size to the Hesketh were designed to carry as few as six pleasure passengers; refitted as a slaver, the Hesketh transported a crew plus thirty Africans. The Parr, on the other hand, carried a crew of 100 and a cargo of as many as 700 slaves. Most ships nicknamed Guineamen, after the Gulf of Guinea on the west coast of Africa were sized somewhere in between, growing in tonnage over time as the Atlantic trade itself grew. American traders preferred somewhat smaller ships than their British counterparts: two-masted sloops (25 to 75 tons) and schooners (30 to 150 tons) required smaller crews and shorter stays on the African coast, where tropical diseases were a constant threat to crew and cargo alike. ....