The Middle Passage was the stage of the Atlantic slave trade in which millions of Africans sold for enslavement were forcibly transported to the Americas as part of the triangular slave trade. Ships departed Europe for African markets with manufactured goods (first side of the triangle), which were then traded for captive Africans. Slave ships transported the African captives across the Atlantic (second side of the triangle). The proceeds from selling these enslaved people were then used to buy products such as furs and hides, tobacco, sugar, rum, and raw materials, which would be transported back to Europe (third side of the triangle, completing it).
The Atlantic slave trade developed through European slave-raiding, commerce, and expanding networks connecting European traders with African societies. European actors directly seized Africans at the beginning of the Atlantic trade: in 1441, Portuguese raiders captured people from coastal communities in Senegambia and transported them across the Atlantic. Portuguese forceful capture was later resumed in west-central Africa following the establishment of Portuguese Angola. The expansion of European-controlled plantation economies in the Americas created a rapidly increasing demand for enslaved African labor, transforming the scale and character of the Atlantic trade. European traders subsequently obtained large numbers of captives through relationships with African political and commercial authorities, while European demand contributed to warfare, raiding, and other forms of coercion in parts of Africa. The processes by which people were enslaved and transported to Atlantic ports varied by region and period. African rulers and communities also resisted the seizure and export of people, including through laws and treaties prohibiting the slave trade and the removal of people for enslavement.
The Final Passage was the journey from the port of disembarkation in the Americas to the plantation or other destination for enslavement into forced labor. The Middle Passage across the Atlantic joined these two. Voyages on the Middle Passage were large financial undertakings, generally organized by companies or groups of investors rather than individuals.
The first European slave ship transported African captives from São Tomé to New Spain in 1525. Portuguese and Dutch traders dominated the trade in the 16th and 17th centuries, though by the 18th century they were supplanted by the British and French. Other European nations involved were Spain, Denmark–Norway, Sweden, Prussia, and various Italian city-states as well as traders from the United States. The enslaved Africans came mostly from the regions of Senegambia, Upper Guinea, Windward Coast, Gold Coast, Bight of Benin, Bight of Biafra, and Angola. With the growing abolitionist movements in the United Kingdom and in the United States, the transatlantic slave trade gradually declined until being fully abolished in the second half of the 19th century.
Most contemporary historians estimate that between 9.4 and 12.6 million Africans were forcefully taken to the New World.Eltis, David and Richardson, David. "The Numbers Game". In: Northrup, David: The Atlantic Slave Trade, second edition, Houghton Mifflin Co., 2002.Basil Davidson, The African Slave Trade (1961), p. 95. During the Middle Passage, an estimated two million enslaved Africans died (about 14%). Ship logs indicate a mortality rate of up to 47-58% on some voyages. Captive Africans were transported in wretched conditions, men and women separated, across the Atlantic. The Middle Passage was considered a time of in-betweenness where captive Africans forged bonds of kinship, which then created forced transatlantic communities.
New World destinations
Caribbean
The first slaves to arrive as part of a labour force in the New World reached the island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in 1502. Cuba received its first four slaves in 1513. Jamaica received its first shipment of 4,000 slaves in 1518. "Between the 1490s and the 1850s, Latin America, including the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and Brazil, transported the largest number of African slaves to the New World, generating the single-greatest concentration of black populations outside of the African continent." About 4 million enslaved Africans were transported to the Caribbean by way of the transatlantic slave trade. Cuba, the largest slave colony in Hispanic America, transported 800,000 enslaved Africans and participated in the illegal slave trade longer than any other. Enslaved Africans worked about 16 hours a day on the sugarcane plantations. They brought their traditional religions from West Africa; these developed in the new world as religions that scholars call African diaspora religions.
Central America Slave exports to Honduras and Guatemala started in 1526. Historian Nigel Bolland writes of the slave trade in Central America: "The demand for labor in the early Spanish settlements of Hispaniola, Cuba, Panama, and Peru resulted in a large-scale Indian (Indigenous people) slave trade in Central America in the second quarter of the 16th century. Indeed, the first colonial economy of the region was based on slave trading."
In the 16th century, the majority of Africans transported to Central America came from present-day Senegambia and other West African regions. Between 1607 and 1640, Portuguese slave traders transported Africans from Angola to Honduras and were sold in Santiago de Guatemala to work in the sugar and indigo plantations. The majority of the Africans working in the plantations were from the Luanda region in Central Africa.
United States The first enslaved Africans to reach what would become the United States arrived in August 1526 as part of a Spanish attempt to colonise San Miguel de Gualdape. By November, the 300 Spanish colonists were reduced to 100, and their slaves from 100 to 70. The enslaved people revolted in 1526 and joined a nearby Native American tribe, while the Spanish abandoned the colony altogether (1527). The area of the future Colombia received its first enslaved people in 1533. El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Florida began their stints in the slave trade in 1541, 1563, and 1581, respectively. According to research, about 40 percent of enslaved Africans arrived at Gadsden's Wharf, which was the largest slave port in the United States.
In the 17th century in colonial Boston in Massachusetts, about 166 transatlantic voyages embarked out of Boston. Boston transported enslaved people from Africa and exported rum. Peter Faneuil organised and profited from the trans-Atlantic voyages out of Boston and transported manufactured goods from Europe, and transported enslaved people, rum, and sugar from the Caribbean. Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island were the three New England states with the largest slave populations. The enslaved population in South Kingston, Rhode Island was thirty percent, in Boston the slave population was ten percent, in New London it was nine percent, and in New York it was 7.2 percent. The earliest documentation of enslaved people in New England was 1638. In Northern American British colonies, Massachusetts Bay colonies was the center for slave trading and colonial Boston was a major slave port in the North importing slaves directly from Africa.
The 17th century saw an increase in shipments. Africans were brought to Point Comfort – several miles downriver from the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia – in 1619. The first kidnapped Africans in English North America were classed as indentured servants and freed after seven years. Virginia law codified chattel slavery in 1656, and in 1662 the colony adopted the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, which classified children of slave mothers as slaves, regardless of paternity. Under British law, children born of white male slave owners and black female slaves would have inherited the father's status and rights. The change to maternal inheritance for slaves guaranteed that anyone born with any slave ancestors was a slave, with no regard to the nature of the relations between the white father and the black mother, consensual or not.
In addition to African persons, Indigenous peoples of the Americas were trafficked through Atlantic trade routes. The 1677 work The Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians, for example, documents English colonial prisoners of war (not, in fact, opposing combatants, but imprisoned members of English-allied forces) being enslaved and sent to Caribbean destinations. Captive Indigenous opponents, including women and children, were also sold into slavery at a substantial profit, to be transported to West Indies colonies.
South America
The Spanish and Portuguese colonised South America and enslaved the Indigenous people. They later enslaved Africans brought from West and Central Africa in ships by way of the Atlantic slave trade. Brazil transported 4.8 million enslaved Africans. Africans who escaped slavery there formed quilombos, maroon communities with degrees of self-governance. Palamares, a quilombo community, lasted for 100 years while other communities were quickly removed by the Dutch and Portuguese. The Africans transported to Brazil were Yoruba, Fon, Bantu and others. Their religions from Africa developed into new world religions in Brazil called Candomblé, Umbanda, Xango, and Macumba.
Historian Erika Edwards writes of the slave trade in Argentina: "In 1587 the first slaves arrived in Buenos Aires from Brazil. From 1580 to 1640, the main commercial activity for Buenos Aires was the slave trade. More than 70 percent of the value of all imports arriving in Buenos Aires were enslaved Africans. Slaves came primarily from Brazil via the Portuguese slave trade from Angola and other western states in Africa. Once arriving in Buenos Aires, they could be sent as far as Lima, Peru; slaves were provided to Mendoza, Tucumán, and Salta Jujuy as well as to Chile, Paraguay, and what is today Bolivia and southern Peru."
Russia By 1802, Russian colonists noted that "Boston" (U.S.-based) skippers were trading African slaves for otter pelts with the Tlingit people in Southeast Alaska.
+ Distribution of slaves (1519–1867)Stephen D. Behrendt, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research, Harvard University. Based on "records for 27,233 voyages that set out to obtain slaves for the Americas". Destination Percent Portuguese America 38.5% British West Indies 18.4% Spanish Empire 17.5% French West Indies 13.6% English/British North America / United States 9.7% Dutch West Indies 2.0% Danish West Indies 0.3% Notes: Before 1820, the number of enslaved Africans transported across the Atlantic to the New World was triple the number of Europeans who reached North and South American shores. At the time this was the largest oceanic displacement or migration in history, eclipsing even the far-flung, but less-dense, expansion of Austronesian-Polynesian explorers. The number of Africans who arrived in each region is calculated from the total number of slaves transported, about 10,000,000.Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 1972, p. 88. Includes British Guiana and British Honduras
Journey Conditions Typical slave ships contained several hundred slaves with about 30 crew members. Some voyages had as many as 450-700 enslaved Africans. Deaths directly attributable to the Middle Passage voyage are estimated at up to two million; a broader look at African deaths directly attributable to the institution of slavery from 1500 to 1900 suggests up to four million deaths.