Themes

• West African History
• Triangular Trade
• Middle Passage
  • Background information
• Slavery
• Resistance & Rebellion
• Abolition
• Emancipation
• Legacy
• Diaspora

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View Model of the 'Brookes', slave ship

Across the Atlantic

Ships carried enslaved Africans from their homelands to the Caribbean islands or North and South America, on a journey which is historically known as the Middle Passage ? the second stage in the transatlantic slave trade. The journey could take more than two months. Conditions on the slave ships were completely dehumanizing and oppressive.

The background information provides an overview of the Middle Passage from the point at which people were loaded into the holds of slave ships as cargo to the inevitable deaths on the journeys. The appalling conditions are documented as well as the inhuman attitudes of the British plantation owners.

Read more background information

Middle Passage (1 of 2)
    Conditions in the hold of a ship

Middle Passage (2 of 2)
    Basic reconstruction of a cramped space