Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua could see the slave ship from the beach.

Around him were many other men, women, and children. How long they had been there it was hard to say, but they were brought from various regions of the hinterland of the Bight of Benin.

Many historians have tried to explain the Middle Passage, the term referring to the voyage of slave ships carrying enslaved persons across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to the Americas. Their descriptions account for the number of enslaved people who were forcibly boarded onto slave ships, the tonnage of the vessels, their various compartments, the goods they transported, the winds and sea currents that drove the ships during the Atlantic crossing. Ship manifests and journals of slave ship captains (or shipmasters) and surgeons (or ship doctors) provide other scarce information about these deadly voyages marked by death, disease, sexual violence, and also slave uprisings. But neither the descriptions of the physical features of slave ships nor the crew members’ accounts capture the experience of physical and emotional pain lived by enslaved Africans during these crossings.

Although the Portuguese led the first slave voyages to the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth century, it was after the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas in 1492 that the trade in enslaved Africans intensified. Overall, though, more than 80 percent of enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas in the holds of slave ships between 1700 and 1850. Therefore, most existing accounts of slave voyages cover the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing from multiple accounts documenting the Atlantic crossing aboard slave vessels, this chapter discusses this dreadful segment of the slave trade from Africa to the Americas. I explore the Middle Passage in the North Atlantic system, in which slave ships sailed from Africa to North America and the West Indies. Because nearly 50 percent of enslaved Africans who were forcibly transported to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade were brought to Brazil and not to the United States, I also focus on the experiences of crew members and captives who crossed the South Atlantic region. Although the conditions of transportation of enslaved men, women, and children varied in the North Atlantic and the South Atlantic systems, and changed over time, the systems also bore many similarities.

Unlike their French and British counterparts, Portuguese and Brazilian slave merchants left scarce records of their slave-trading journeys. Most of what we know about their voyages dates to the first half of the nineteenth century and results from the British anti-slave-trading activities starting in 1807. As a result, it is hard to examine these journeys without bias because even though most enslaved Africans were captured in West Central Africa and transported to Brazil, the majority of the surviving records that tell us the horrors of these Atlantic crossings belong to slave vessels that sailed from West Africa (and sometimes from the Loango coast in West Central Africa) to the British and French colonies in the West Indies and North America. The slave vessel that carried African human cargo across the Atlantic Ocean is the quintessential link in a long chain of violent actions that attempted to transform human beings into things. Despite being regarded as assets, African men, women, and children were deliberately killed during the dreadful journeys on board slave vessels. Contradictorily, they were treated as both economically valuable and yet, at a human level, utterly, brutally dispensable.