Middle Passage

The Middle Passage was the central, transatlantic leg of the triangular slave trade, carrying enslaved Africans from the West African coast to the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Packed into the holds of slave ships for voyages of weeks to months, an estimated 1.8 million of the roughly 12.5 million embarked died of disease, abuse, and suffocation before landfall. The horrors of the passage drove the abolition movement and were documented in the Brookes ship diagram and survivor accounts such as that of Olaudah Equiano.