Middle Passage: The Atlantic Crossing of Enslaved Africans

The Middle Passage was the forced crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by enslaved Africans, carried in European and American ships from the coasts of Africa to the Americas. From about 1525, when ships began to sail directly from Africa to the Caribbean, until the last voyages in the 1860s, an estimated 12.5 million people were embarked, and around 1.8 million died at sea. The voyage became a central experience of the African diaspora and a lasting symbol of the cruelty of the Atlantic slave trade.

Origins of the term and the trade

The phrase “Middle Passage” comes from the shape of many slaving voyages. A ship would leave a European port with trade goods, sail to Africa to buy captives, cross the Atlantic to sell them, and return home with sugar, tobacco or other produce. The Atlantic crossing was the middle leg of this voyage, often described as the triangular trade.

Portuguese ships carried enslaved Africans to Europe and to Atlantic islands from the 1440s. After the Spanish settlement of the Caribbean, captives were at first shipped via Spain or the Portuguese island of São Tomé. In the 1520s Spain began to license direct voyages from Africa to its American colonies, and the transatlantic trade grew steadily from then on.

The trade reached its peak in the 18th century, when British, Portuguese, French and Dutch ships carried between 50,000 and 100,000 people a year at the height of the traffic. Brazil was the largest single destination throughout its history.

Capture and the African coast

The Middle Passage began long before the ships sailed. Most captives were taken in wars, raids, kidnappings or as punishment for crimes or debts, and many walked for weeks or months to the coast. African rulers and merchants sold them to European traders in exchange for textiles, metal goods, firearms, alcohol and other wares.

On the coast, captives were held in forts, barracoons (enclosures) or aboard ships for weeks or even months while a cargo was assembled. Death rates during this waiting period could be high. Ships often moved along the coast for long periods, buying a few people at a time.

Conditions on board

Slave ships were usually ordinary merchant vessels adapted for the trade, with temporary decks built in the hold. Men were commonly shackled in pairs, wrist to wrist and ankle to ankle, and kept below deck for much of the voyage. Women and children were usually held in separate areas and were less often chained, but were exposed to sexual abuse by crew members.

Space was extremely limited. In many ships, captives had less room than a person lying down needs, with headroom so low that they could not sit upright. In good weather they were brought on deck during the day, fed and sometimes forced to “dance” for exercise. In storms they could remain below for days in heat, darkness and filth.

Food usually consisted of beans, rice, yams or maize with small amounts of water, often given twice a day. Disease spread easily. Dysentery, known to sailors as the “bloody flux”, was the leading cause of death, along with smallpox, measles, fevers and dehydration. Ship surgeons, where they existed, had little effective treatment.

The British surgeon Alexander Falconbridge, who served on slave ships in the 1780s, described these conditions in a pamphlet of 1788 used by the abolition movement. The best-known first-hand account by an African is that of Olaudah Equiano, whose autobiography of 1789 describes the terror of his first sight of a slave ship and the stench and suffering below deck, although some historians have questioned whether he was born in Africa.

Mortality on the Middle Passage varied greatly with the length of the voyage, the season, the health of the captives when they boarded and the spread of epidemics. Across the whole history of the trade, roughly 12 to 15 percent of those embarked died at sea. In the 16th and 17th centuries average death rates were often 20 percent or more; by the late 18th and 19th centuries they had generally fallen, though individual voyages could still lose a third or more of those on board.

The bodies of the dead were thrown into the sea. Contemporary accounts describe sharks following slave ships across the Atlantic for this reason.

Crews also died in large numbers, mostly from tropical diseases on the African coast. In the late 18th century British slave ships lost a higher share of their sailors than ships in most other trades, a point stressed by abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson.

Resistance at sea

Enslaved Africans resisted in many ways. Some refused to eat, and ships carried instruments to force-feed them. Others jumped overboard, preferring death to captivity; slave ships often had netting along the sides to prevent this.

Revolts were common enough to shape the whole design of the trade. Historians studying the voyage records estimate that roughly one in ten slaving voyages experienced an uprising, most often while the ship was still near the African coast. Most were crushed with great violence, but some succeeded in taking the ship. Fear of revolt explains why slave ships had larger crews than other merchant ships, and why they carried guns, chains and barricades across the deck.

One of the most famous revolts took place in 1839 aboard the Spanish schooner La Amistad, off Cuba, led by Sengbe Pieh, known as Joseph Cinqué. The captives were eventually freed by the United States Supreme Court in 1841 and returned to Sierra Leone.

Captives also built bonds on board. People who had crossed together often treated one another as kin for life, a relationship known by special words such as “shipmate” in Jamaica and “malungo” in Brazil.

The Zong, the Brookes and abolition

Two episodes in the 1780s made the horrors of the Middle Passage widely known in Britain. In the Zong massacre of 1781, the crew of a Liverpool-owned ship threw around 130 or more sick and dying Africans overboard, and the owners then claimed insurance for them as lost cargo. The resulting court case of 1783 shocked many readers and helped spark the abolition movement.

In 1788 abolitionists in Plymouth and London published the diagram of the slave ship Brookes, showing 454 people packed into its decks according to new legal limits. The Brookes had reportedly carried around 600 people on earlier voyages. The image became one of the most widely copied pieces of campaign material in history.

Britain’s Slave Trade Act of 1788, known as Dolben’s Act, limited the number of captives a ship could carry in proportion to its size. Further laws followed, but the decisive change came with abolition. Denmark banned the trade from 1803, Britain from 1807 and the United States from 1808.

The trade nevertheless continued illegally for decades, especially to Brazil and Cuba. British naval patrols off West Africa captured many slave ships, but illegal voyages were often even more crowded and dangerous. Brazil effectively ended imports in 1850, and the last known voyages to Cuba took place in the mid-1860s. The last known ship to bring captives to the United States, the Clotilda, arrived in Alabama in 1860.

By the numbers

Figures from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (SlaveVoyages); all are estimates.

Myths and facts

• Myth: most enslaved Africans were taken to the United States. Fact: fewer than 4 percent of those who survived the crossing landed in mainland North America; most went to Brazil and the Caribbean.
• Myth: the triangle was the only route. Fact: much of the trade, especially to Brazil, ran directly between American and African ports, with no European leg.
• Myth: most captives died at sea. Fact: the large majority survived the crossing, but death rates were still far higher than for other ocean travellers, and many more died in capture, on the African coast and soon after arrival.

Memory and legacy

The Middle Passage is remembered across Africa, the Americas and Europe. Former slave forts on the African coast, such as those of Ghana and the island of Gorée in Senegal, attract visitors from the diaspora. The International Slavery Museum in Liverpool opened in 2007, the bicentenary of British abolition.

The United Nations marks 25 March as the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and UNESCO marks 23 August as the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition. Writers and artists have returned again and again to the voyage, and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has made the records of tens of thousands of voyages available to all.

Timeline

• 1440s: Portuguese ships begin carrying enslaved Africans to Europe and Atlantic islands.
• c. 1525: First direct voyages carry captives from Africa to the Spanish Caribbean.
• 1700s: The trade reaches its peak, with tens of thousands of people shipped each year.
• 1781, November–December: The crew of the Zong throws captives overboard.
• 1788: The Brookes diagram is published; Dolben’s Act regulates British slave ships.
• 1807–1808: Britain and the United States ban the slave trade.
• 1839: Captives seize the schooner La Amistad off Cuba.
• 1850: Brazil effectively ends the import of captives.
• 1860: The Clotilda, the last known slave ship to the United States, reaches Alabama.
• 1866: The last recorded transatlantic slave voyages end the trade.

Why it matters

The Middle Passage forcibly moved millions of people and created the African diaspora in the Americas, shaping the populations, cultures and economies of Brazil, the Caribbean and the United States. It caused immense suffering and loss of life, and its memory remains central to debates about racism, reparations and historical justice today.