The Barbarity of the Middle Passage
The horrific conditions of the Middle Passage meant that of more than 12.5 million Africans kidnapped and trafficked through the Transatlantic Slave Trade, only 10.7 million survived the journey. Eighty percent of the people who embarked for the Americas between 1500 and 1820 were kidnapped Africans, who far outnumbered European immigrants.
Almost two million Africans died during the Middle Passage nearly one million more than all of the Americans who have died in every war fought since 1775 combined. Numbers like this can help to quantify the scope of the harm, but they fail to detail the horrific and torturous experience of those who perished and the trauma that 10.7 million Africans who survived the weeks-long journey carried with them.
Some enslaved people were taken from the coast of West Africa and sold to European slave traders. For most captives the experience of Transatlantic trafficking began weeks, months, or even years before they ever saw the coast. Driven by the increasing external demand from white enslavers and traders, African kidnappers traveled inland and kidnapped people from their villages and towns. In the 18th century, 70% of Africans trafficked in the Transatlantic Slave Trade were free people who had been “snatched from their homes and communities. They were most often forced to walk, bound together in a coffle, for dozens or even hundreds of miles until they reached the coast.
At the coast, kidnapped Africans were forced into barracoons, slave pens, and dungeons within prison castles to await the ships that would take them across the Atlantic. Kidnapped Africans were forced to board slave trading ships that stayed docked sometimes for months until they had loaded enough human cargo to make the passage sufficiently profitable for the enslavers. Records do not establish an exact death toll, but scholars estimate the mortality rate among those confined in barracoons and on board docked trading ships equaled that of Europe’s fourteenth-century Black Death, which claimed at least 40% of Europe’s population.
Ottobah Cugoano was a young child when he was “snatched away from his native country, with about eighteen or twenty more boys and girls. The kidnappers brandished “pistols and cutlasses and threatened to kill the children if they did not come with them. For Ottobah and millions like him, the trauma of familial separation would be inflicted repeatedly in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Ottobah’s hopes of returning home again were all over as he was marched to the coast and placed in a prison until a white slave trader’s ship arrived three days later. It was a most horrible scene, Ottobah later recounted.
African captives were forced to undergo invasive and dehumanizing examinations before they boarded enslavers’ ships. Women, men, and children were stripped naked, prodded, and molested to determine if they were “prime slaves” capable of performing hard labor and having children.
Traders invasively groped the breasts, buttocks, and vaginal areas of women and young girls, allegedly to assess their childbearing ability. Men and boys were similarly molested around the groin, scrotum, and anus. One white trafficker later testified the process was similar to what he would do to a horse in this country, if I was about to purchase him.
Captives were then assigned a number and loaded onto ships, separated by gender and tightly packed into the holds under conditions that were noxious and extreme. Men were typically “locked spoonways” together, naked and forced to lie in urine, feces, blood, and mucus, with little to no fresh air. Alexander Falconbridge, a white surgeon who participated in the slave trade, later testified that captives had not so much room as a man in his coffin, neither in length or breadth, and it was impossible for them to turn or shift with any degree or ease.
rafficked Africans were forced to lie chained and manacled for weeks during the journey, unable to stretch out or stand except during limited time on deck. The foul conditions were a breeding ground for disease and vermin; some captives suffocated from the lack of air below deck. On some ships, the mortality rate was as high as 33%.
African women and girls suffered similarly horrific conditions in the hold and they were uniquely terrorized by the crew. Forced to be naked and segregated from the men, they lived in constant fear of being raped or assaulted by white sailors, who subjected them to sexual violence and flogged those who resisted.
Sexual assault of African women was so commonplace that Alexander Falconbridge later testified that sailors were permitted to indulge their passions among them at pleasure. Young girls were similarly subjected to violence. One surviving account details the experience of “a little girl of eight to ten years” who was repeatedly raped by a ship’s captain over three consecutive nights.
Some African women faced a second level of terror the inability to protect their small children who were brought on board with them or born during the voyage. Many African women were forcibly separated from their infants when they were kidnapped from their homes or when they were sold to white traffickers but some women carried small infants with them. Babies were of little value in the market across the Atlantic, and so abusive sailors used them to manipulate, control, and terrorize their mothers. One account details a sailor who “tore the child from the mother, and threw it into the sea” when the newborn would not stop crying.
Another account from a white trafficker reports that a woman and her nine-month-old were purchased and placed onboard a ship. The baby would not eat, so the captain flogged him with a cat o’ nine tails in front of his mother and other captives on the ship. When he noticed that the baby’s feet were swollen, the captain ordered his crew to submerge the baby’s legs in boiling water, causing “the skin and nails to come off. The baby still would not eat, so the captain flogged him at each meal time for several days before finally tying a log of mango, either eighteen or twenty inches long, and about twelve or thirteen pound weight, to the child by a string round its neck,” beating the baby again, and dropping the baby to the ground, killing him. His mother powerless to save her babywas beaten until she agreed to throw her baby’s body overboard. This act of terror was intentionally committed in view of other captives to strike fear and maintain control.
Cruelty and terrorism were common on trafficking vessels operated by Europeans. Sailors inflicted brutal punishments for even minor offenses as a reminder of their control. One account from a white sailor reported that eight to 10 captives were brought to the top deck one night “for making a little noise in the rooms. Sailors were then ordered to “tie them up to the booms horizontal poles extending from the base of the mast, flog them very severely with a wire cat a whip with multiple tails of wire, and afterwards clap the thumb-screws upon them, and leave them in that situation till morning. The same sailor said the use of the thumb-screws a device that crushed fingers via pressure was so violent and harmful that it resulted in fevers and even death on occasion.
For more serious offenses, sailors inflicted even greater violence. One captive woman who was accused of aiding (but not actively participating) in an attempted revolt against the kidnappers, was strung up on the deck by her thumbs in view of the other captives. As a warning to them, she was flogged and knifed to death.
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