Often, they were packed together as closely as possible. The enslaved people were then packed onto the slave ships. They might have to wait in these forts, which were like prisons, for months before slave ships arrived. There they were sold to European and American slave traders. (From an Abstract of Evidence delivered before a select committee of the House of Commons in 17.)Īfter being kidnapped, African slaves were usually forced to walk to forts along the coast of western Africa. He later gained his freedom and wrote and published an autobiography, titled ‘The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano’, which discussed his experiences aboard the slave ships on the Middle Passage.Diagram of a slave ship from the Atlantic slave trade. Olaudah Equiano was enslaved as a child in western Africa and shipped to the Caribbean. This is best evidenced by the Olaudah Equiano. For instance, the tropical heat and the smell of human waste and sweat, made the slave quarters nearly unbearable for the slaves. What made this situation event worse was the terrible smell of the slave quarters. For example, the Brookes slave ship from Britain was legally allowed to hold 454 slaves, but there is evidence that it carried as many as 740 slaves on some trips. In fact, some ships famously overcrowded the slaves on the ships. For instance, the Brookes Print famously showed the cramped conditions faced by the slaves. In fact, on some slave ships, the slaves were given so little space that they could only lay down. For instance, while on board the slave ships, the slaves were commonly chained together and held in very small spaces in the ship’s hull. As stated previously, the route from Africa to the Americas was commonly known as the Middle Passage.Īs mentioned in the previous paragraph, there were many elements that made the Middle Passage so terrible for the African slaves. In general, the Trade Triangle formed a cycle that saw raw materials, manufactured goods, and people transported all across the Atlantic Ocean. The most notable of these raw materials included: sugar, cotton, coffee, metals, and tobacco. The final stage of the Trade Triangle involved European traders taking the harvested raw materials from the plantations back to Europe where they were processed into goods in European factories. This journey from Africa to the Americas was referred to as the 'Middle Passage'. Here the slaves would be put to work on plantations in order to harvest raw materials. Next, the African slaves were put aboard European slave ships and taken to the Americas to be sold for huge profits. The European goods were manufactured in European factories and shops. European traders exported manufactured goods (metal tools, textiles, tobacco, beads, etc.) to the societies of west coast Africa in exchange for African slaves. In general, it was a set of three routes that saw goods and people travel between Europe, Africa and the Americas. The Trade Triangle is the term used by historians to refer to the form of trade that occurred across the Atlantic Ocean during much of the Age of Exploration and the years that followed. As stated above, the Middle Passage was a major route of the Trade Triangle.
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