[4] Slave traders used the term "seasoning" to refer to the process of adjusting the enslaved Africans to the new climate, diet, geography, and ecology of the Americas.
Atlantic creoles were often mixed-race, integrated into and familiar with European society and gained freedom at higher rates prior to the eighteenth century.
A "Dr. Collins" writing in 1803 attributed the high mortality rates to disease, change in climate, diet, labor, "severity", and suicide.
[13] In Brazil, an estimated 25 percent of enslaved people died during the seasoning process, where the law also required that slaves be baptized during their first year in the country.
[15] Battered by this inadequate diet, enslaved people often suffered "dropsies" (edema) and "fluxes" (diarrhea), compounding their severe and widespread malnutrition.
During the Middle Passage, slave traders forced enslaved Africans to live in tight quarters without ventilation, sufficient food, or water, and with no opportunity for hygiene.
Weakened by the voyage and immediate brutality of slavery, many enslaved people died of smallpox, measles, influenza, and unidentified diseases at high rates in the first several years after arrival.
In one particularly cruel practice, the slaveholder would whip a naked woman, often pregnant, and pour salt, pepper, or wax into her open wounds.
Enslaved people were also taught the language of the colony either by other slaves who had already undergone the seasoning process or by the white overseers of the plantation.
Runaway attempts were common, though these recently enslaved arrivals rarely escaped successfully, as they had little familiarity with their surroundings and were isolated on the major plantations of the Americas.