By the turn of the nineteenth century, the idea that the slave trade constituted a humanitarian outrage was not really in doubt. Few if any educated minds believed the fate of the African trafficked as a slave to be an attractive or even benign one; certainly no strong argument was being made that it was so. Aside from the obvious upheaval of forcible transportation from freedom on one continent to slavery on another, the cruelty and inhumanity of the slave dealers engaged in the Atlantic slave trade was infamous. Newspaper reports in Britain and on the Continent portrayed the so-called ‘Middle Passage’ as an unqualified horror. Even aside from specific instances of violence such as rape and punishment beating, the day-to-day logistics of the trade were harrowing enough: hundreds of people shackled together and crammed into impossibly confined spaces without adequate nutrition, drinking water, ventilation, drainage or even space to stand upright. Many, many thousands died on these voyages, often children.