The Middle Passage -- Horror of the Slave Trade
The Middle Passage was the Atlantic crossing of the triangular trade, and around 1.8 million people died on it. The triangle ran from European ports with manufactured goods — textiles, iron bars, firearms, brandy, cowrie shells — to the West African coast, where they were exchanged for captives; from Africa to the Americas with the captives; and home with sugar, tobacco, coffee and cotton. The crossing took six to twelve weeks depending on winds and the point of departure. Ships were fitted with a slave deck of about a metre and a half of headroom, sometimes divided again so that a person could not sit upright. Men were shackled in pairs by wrist and ankle and stowed on their sides in rows; women and children were usually kept separately and were more exposed to the crew. Captains chose between loose packing, which reduced mortality, and tight packing, which raised the number carried, and insurance made the arithmetic explicit. Mortality averaged around fifteen per cent and was much higher on bad voyages — dysentery, which the crews called the bloody flux, smallpox, measles, dehydration and suicide. Crew mortality was often comparable, which is one of the arguments abolitionists used on Parliament. Resistance was constant. Revolts are documented on roughly one voyage in ten, and captives went overboard in numbers sufficient for ships to rig netting. The Zong case of 1781, in which 132 people were thrown into the sea and the owners claimed on the insurance, put the trade in an English courtroom as a question of cargo. Some 12.5 million people were embarked; about 10.7 million arrived.
- Year: 1650 CE
- Category: Social
