There were literally hundreds of rebellions and attacks against slave ships up and down the West African coast carried out by organised guerrilla groups much like the Maroons of the Caribbean. As many as 483 of these rebellions are recorded in British, French and Dutch records alone. The average death toll in these skirmishes seems to have been about twenty-five and the historian David Richardson estimates that a million fewer people had to go through the middle passage because of this one form of resistance alone.
