The forced Atlantic crossing of captive Africans to the Americas, the deadliest leg of the transatlantic slave trade.
The Middle Passage was the transatlantic leg of the so-called triangle trade linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas: the voyage on which merchants carried captive Africans across the ocean as cargo. Between the 1500s and the 1800s roughly 12 million Africans were forced across the Atlantic. About 4.8 million were taken to Brazil and 4.7 million to the Caribbean; at least 388,000, about 4 percent of those who survived the crossing, landed in North America.
The voyage lasted roughly eighty days. Captives were packed below decks with no room to sit up or move, little ventilation, and too little water, and the National Park Service estimates that about 15 percent died on the way. Olaudah Equiano, who survived the crossing as a child, recalled that “the closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate” almost suffocated those confined in the hold. Ships ranged from small schooners to vessels built for the trade.
By 1808 both Britain and the United States had banned the transatlantic slave trade, but smuggling continued. In 1860 the schooner Clotilda carried 110 captives from Ouidah, in present-day Benin, to Mobile Bay, more than half a century after Congress outlawed the trade; its captain burned the ship to destroy the evidence. The survivors were enslaved for five years and after emancipation founded the settlement now called Africatown. One of them, Cudjo Lewis, later told his story to Zora Neale Hurston. The Alabama Historical Commission identified the wreck in May 2019.
The crossing stands at the root of Black American memory. Phillis Wheatley, the first African American to publish a book of poetry, arrived in Boston aboard the slave ship Phillis on 11 July 1761, and writers, artists, and historians have returned ever since to the Middle Passage as the rupture from which a new people was forged.
See also: Emancipation, Underground Railroad, Juneteenth
Sources
- National Park Service, “The Middle Passage.” Link
- Encyclopedia of Alabama, “Clotilda.” Link
- National Archives at Atlanta, “Cargo Manifest for the Clotilda.” Link
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