The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

1441-?

The “Triangle Trade”

The Middle Passage

Enslaved Africans being Carried to a Slave Ship, Gold Coast, late 17th c.

Image source: University of Virginia

The Brooks Slave Ship (1789)

Aboard a Slave ship (1829)

• “The space between decks was divided into two compartments 3 feet 3 inches high; the size of one was 16 feet by 18 and of the other 40 by 21; into the first were crammed the women and girls, into the second the men and boys: 226 fellow creatures were thus thrust into one space 288 feet square and 336 into another space 800 feet square, giving to the whole an average Of 23 inches and to each of the women not more than 13 inches. “

Walsh, Robert, Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829 (1831).

Body Positions of Slaves on the Slave Ship Aurore, 1784

• French Slave Ship Vigilante, 1822

• The manuscript caption at the top of the drawing reads: "The representation of the brig Vigilante from Nantes, a vessel employed in the slave trade which was captured by Lieutenant Mildmay in the River Bonny, on the coast of Africa, on the 15th of April 1822. She was 240 tons of burden and had on board at the time she was taken 345 slaves. The slaves were found lying on their backs on the lower deck, as represented below; those in the centre were sitting, some in the posture in which they are there shown and others with their legs bent under them, resting upon the soles of their feet.”

• London Maritime Museum

Bicentenary Recreation of the Brooks ship (1789)

Slave Deck on the Bark 'Wildfire,' 1860

• The captives were "in a state of entire nudity, in a sitting or squatting posture . . . . They sat very close together, mostly on either side . . . . About fifty of them were full-grown young men, and about four hundred were boys aged from ten to sixteen years”

• (Harper's Weekly, June 2, 1860

Iron shackles used in slave trade

Firsthand Accounts: Olaudah Equiano

1789 Advertisement

Ottobah Cuguano • And when we found ourselves at last taken away, death was

more preferable than life, and a plan was concerted amongst us, that we might burn and blow up the ship, and to perish all together in the flames; but we were betrayed by one of our own countrywomen, who slept with some of the head men of the ship, for it was common for the dirty filthy sailors to take African women and lie upon their bodies; but the men were chained and pent up in holes. It was the women and boys which were to burn the ship, with the approbation and groans of the rest; though that was prevented, the discovery was likewise a cruel bloody scene.

Ali Eisami (1818)

• The people of the great vessel were wicked: when we had been shipped, they took away all the small pieces of cloth which were on our bodies, and threw them into the water, then they took chains and fettered two together. We in the vessel, young and old, were seven hundred, whom the White men had bought. We were all fettered round our feet, and all the oldest died of thirst, for there was no water. Every morning they had to take many, and throw them into the water.

Once landed…

Demographic impact of Slave Trade

Source: Africanholcaust.net