The Middle Passage

Conditions aboard slave ships during the Middle Passage were deliberately brutal. Some ships held as many as five to six hundred people, packed into the hold with men separated from women and children and chained side by side, sometimes with only a few inches of space above them. In 1713, the British Royal Africa Company instructed captains to allot each enslaved person a space just five feet long, eleven inches wide, and twenty inches high, and evidence suggests actual conditions were often even more cramped. Captains knew that 10 to 20 percent of captives would likely die during the voyage, yet they packed ships as tightly as possible anyway, calculating that enough people would survive to still turn a profit.

Sailors provided food and water only once a day, with no facilities for bathing, leaving captives to relieve themselves in buckets that frequently overturned in rough seas. Ventilation was poor and the heat unbearable. Occasionally crews brought captives on deck for exercise, since buyers paid less for people who appeared weak, but this created the greatest opportunity for resistance: revolts were most likely to occur when captives were above deck, and some captains strung nets below the ship's rails specifically to catch people who chose to jump overboard rather than continue the voyage. Illness, especially trachoma, an eye infection that caused blindness, terrified captains, since blind captives could not be sold and, if the disease spread to the crew, could leave an entire ship adrift and starving.

The human cost of the Middle Passage extended into calculated cruelty. Slave voyages were often heavily insured against loss, and in 1781, the captain of the ship Zong exploited this system in the worst possible way: when illness began killing his crew and captives during a slow crossing, he realized the insurance policy covered captives lost at sea but not those who died of sickness, and ordered 132 enslaved people thrown overboard to drown. Despite this brutality, enslaved people resisted throughout the voyage in every way available to them, from organized uprisings to individual refusals to eat, and many maintained bonds of solidarity and identity that would shape African diaspora communities in the Americas for centuries to come.

Adapted from Studio Aletheia's World Builders Academy curriculum library, drawing on classical world history resources on conditions and resistance during the Middle Passage.