Captives were chained below deck in crowded holds for voyages that lasted weeks or months. Disease, starvation, dehydration and violence killed many. The SlaveVoyages database estimates that of about 12.5 million Africans put on ships, about 10.7 million arrived alive. Captives resisted through hunger strikes, revolts and jumping overboard.
The name comes from the shape of the trade. Ships carried goods from Europe to Africa, people from Africa to the Americas, and slave-grown products such as sugar, tobacco and cotton back to Europe. The crossing was the middle of that loop.
The Middle Passage is remembered as a founding trauma of the African diaspora. It cut people off from their families, languages and homelands. Scholars and artists, including the historian Marcus Rediker and the writer Toni Morrison, have worked to recover the stories of the people who survived and died on these ships.