The 'Middle Passage' was the name given to the part of the journey made by slave ships across the Atlantic ocean from West Africa to North and South America and the West Indies.

The middle passage was part of a system of trade which historians now describe as the 'triangular trade'.

Cheap goods from Europe were loaded onto boats and sent to West Africa. By the 1700s, Britain was one of the leading slave trading countries. Cities like Bristol, Liverpool and London began very rich because of the trade.

When the ships arrived in West Africa, the cheap goods they carried were sold for profit or traded for slaves. The slaves, many of whom had been traded by other black Africans, were then loaded onto slave ships and sent across the Atlantic to work on huge plantations (farms); this was the part known as the 'Middle Passage'.

Conditions on board the slave ships on the middle passage were awful. Because the slave traders realised that so many of the slaves may die on the journey (sometimes up to a third!), they packed as many slaves on board as they could. The slaves were forced to lie or sit in cramped conditions. The holds of the ships were often dark and airless. Slaves would be kept in the hold of the ship for as long as possible to avoid the possibility of any trouble. To prevent this from happening slaves were chained and shackled together for almost all of the journey.

Conditions onboard the ships would have been awful and very difficult to imagine. The lack of air and cramped conditions would have helped spread diseases easily and the heat would have been unbareable. Slaves would have been unable to go to the toilet privately; they would have had to go where they lay. A dead slave could go unoticed for days. To make matters worse, slaves were often fed European food which caused stomach upsets. Most slaves would not understand what was happening to them. They would be afraid, confused and upset, with no idea where they were going and if they would ever see their loved ones again.

The journey across the Atlantic could last many weeks. Eventually, the slaves would arrive in America or the West Indies. Here they would be herded into slave market and sold for profit and sent to work on sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations, again often in terrible conditions. The empty slave ships could then be loaded with the goods grown by slave labour on the plantations and these goods were sent back to Europe and sold for even more profit.    

WHY WERE SLAVES NEEDED IN THE FIRST PLACE?

• In the 1490s Spain and Portugal 'discovered' America and the West Indies.
• They realised that they could grow crops that people in Europe really wanted, especially sugar.
• Unfortnately, not enough people from Spain and Portugal wanted to go to America or the West Indies to work on the plantations where these crops were grown and the local populations often died from diseases brough by the Europeans.
• Instead, they took advantage of the slave trade that already existed in Africa.
• Gradually greed and the need for cheap labour saw the slave trade develop. In the 1560s England began transporting slaves from Africa to America for the Spanish and Portuguese.
• In 1655 England captured Jamaica and needed slaves of their own to grow sugar and coffee. Slaves were also used in England's North American colonies (the future USA) to grow crops, particularly tobacco.
• In 1807, the trade in slaves was abolished in the British empire. By the end of the 1830s slavery itself was abolished in the British empire. Slavery still continued in the USA until the 1860s.
• During the 1800s, the British navy helped to stop the transportation of thousands of slaves across the Atlantic. The last country in the western world to allow slavery, Brazil, finally abolished it in 1888.