According to Porticities Bristol "The Atlantic crossing", the Middle Passage, also known as the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, is the term used for the trafficking of slaves from Africa to the new world. From 10 to 15 million Africans were kidnapped from the Western and the Southern part of Africa. According to Darlene, William and Stanley, Traders from the Americas, Caribbean, and Europe took part in this trade. Mortality rates were estimated at 15% during the Middle Passage at the sea and a total of two million deaths contributed to the slave trade; for every 100 Africans that had made it to the Western Hemisphere, 40 would have died either from the Passage or in Africa. This duration usually lasted between one to six months varying on the
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Slaves were usually shoved into spaces that did not even offer enough room to stand up and slaves did not have any personal space; they had to literally sleep on top of each other. The slaves received adequate food and water, such as beans, corn, wheat, yams, or riced boiled with fat to keep them alive and maintain them for when they arrived to their destination. Death rates on the ships were around 25% in the seventeen and eighteen centuries, but dropped down to about 10% during the nineteen century. What contributed to the death rate was diseases and dehydration. Resistance to the enslavers was an act that was recurrent, examples of this is the refusal to eat, jumping over board, and attempted suicide. The captain’s solutions for the resistant to eat was to either break the slaves teeth, force feed, beat and flog the slaves; this was to teach the slaves that with refusal to commands equals a beating. Many slave narratives accounted their experiences in The Middle Passage. One of these narrators was Olaudah Equiano, he wrote about his experiences in the middle in his autobiography “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vasa, the
Slaves were usually shoved into spaces that did not even offer enough room to stand up and slaves did not have any personal space; they had to literally sleep on top of each other. The slaves received adequate food and water, such as beans, corn, wheat, yams, or riced boiled with fat to keep them alive and maintain them for when they arrived to their destination. Death rates on the ships were around 25% in the seventeen and eighteen centuries, but dropped down to about 10% during the nineteen century. What contributed to the death rate was diseases and dehydration. Resistance to the enslavers was an act that was recurrent, examples of this is the refusal to eat, jumping over board, and attempted suicide. The captain’s solutions for the resistant to eat was to either break the slaves teeth, force feed, beat and flog the slaves; this was to teach the slaves that with refusal to commands equals a beating. Many slave narratives accounted their experiences in The Middle Passage. One of these narrators was Olaudah Equiano, he wrote about his experiences in the middle in his autobiography “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vasa, the