Middle Passage

Over 33,000 slave ships embarked on the Middle Passage journey to the Americas during the more than 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade. The Middle Passage commonly refers to this intermediate phase of the slave trade in which slaving vessels loaded with shackled, enslaved Africans crossed the Atlantic Ocean and arrived at various trade ports in the New World. The transatlantic voyage followed the first stage of the slave trade: the forcible removal of Africans, considered less than human, from the African continent, where they were sold, kidnapped, or lured into captivity. The Middle Passage and the slave ships provided the vehicle for the involuntary transportation of 12.5 million captive Africans to the New World from the 16th to the 19th centuries.

The slave trade is often referred to as the triangular trade to illustrate the movement of people, raw materials, and money from Europe to Africa to the Americas and back to Europe. Although the triangular trade simplifies the complexities of the multiple slave routes traveled, it provides a useful visual tool for understanding the large-scale distribution of African captives.

According to this geometric analogy, the Middle Passage forms the base of the “triangle,” bridging Africa and the Americas. Once delivered to the Americas, enslaved Africans were traded and sold as chattel for goods and raw materials. Depending on their final destination, these African captives toiled in deplorable conditions, cultivating sugar, coffee, tobacco, cotton, and other crops. Others were forced to work in domestic settings. Many formed maroon communities, or separate, independent settlements like the powerful Palmares quilombo (maroon settlement) in 17th-century Brazil. It was in the Americas where Europeans, Africans, and indigenous peoples collided, clashed, fought, and reproduced, forming the foundations of the multicultural Americas.