Editing Middle Passage (section)

===Sailing technologies===
The desire for profits in the 18th-century Atlantic market economy drove changes in ship designs and in managing human cargo, which included enslaved Africans and the mostly European crew. Improvements in air flow on board the ships helped to decrease the infamous mortality rate that these ships had become known for throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. The new designs that allowed ships to navigate faster and into rivers' mouths ensured access to many more enslaving posts along the West African coast.<ref name="Klein">[[Herbert S. Klein]], ''The Atlantic Slave Trade'' (Cambridge: The University of Cambridge, 1999), pp. 143–146.</ref>  The monetary value of enslaved Africans on any given American auction-block during the mid-18th century ranged between $800 and $1,200, which in modern times would be equivalent to $32,000–48,000 per person ($100 then is now worth $4,000 due to inflation). Therefore, ship captains and investors sought technologies that would protect their human cargo.<ref>Ron Soodalter, "Hell on the water" (''Civil War Times'', 2011), p. 1.</ref>

Throughout the height of the Atlantic slave trade (1570–1808), ships that transported the enslaved people were normally smaller than traditional cargo ships, with most ships that transported the enslaved, weighing between 150 and 250 tons. This equated to about 350 to 450 enslaved Africans on each slave ship, or 1.5 to 2.4 per ton. The English ships of the time normally fell on the larger side of this spectrum and the French on the smaller side. Ships purposely designed to be smaller and more maneuverable were meant to navigate the African coastal rivers into farther inland ports; these ships therefore increased the effects of the slave trade on Africa. Additionally, the ships' sizes increased slightly throughout the 1700s; however the number of enslaved Africans per ship remained the same. This reduction in the ratio of enslaved Africans to ship tonnage was designed to increase the amount of space per person and thus improve the survival chances of everyone on board. These ships also had temporary storage decks that were separated by an open [[latticework]] or grate [[Bulkhead (partition)|bulkhead]]. Ship masters would presumably use these chambers to divide enslaved Africans and help prevent mutiny. Some ships developed by the turn of the 19th century even had ventilation ports built into the sides and between gun ports (with hatches to keep inclement weather out). These open deck designs increased airflow and thus helped improve survival rates, diminishing potential investment losses.<ref name="Klein"/>

Another major factor in "cargo protection" was the increase in knowledge of diseases and medicines (along with the inclusion of a variety of medicines on the ships). First the [[Dutch East India Company]] in the 18th century, followed by some other countries and companies in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, realized that the inclusion of surgeons and other medical practitioners aboard their ships was an endeavor that proved too costly for the benefits. So instead of including medical personnel they just stocked the ships with a large variety of medicines. While this was better than no medicines, and given the fact that many crew members at least had some idea of how disease was spread, without the inclusion of medical personnel the mortality rate was still very high in the 18th century.<ref>{{cite journal|doi=10.1111/1468-0289.00160|title=Explaining the mortality decline in the eighteenth-century British slave trade|year=2000|last1=Haines|first1=Robin|last2=Shlomowitz|first2=Ralph|journal=The Economic History Review|volume=53|issue=2|pages=262}}</ref>