During the voyage, the enslaved Africans were typically fed only once or twice a day and brought on deck for limited times.
The men were chained together and forced to lie shoulder to shoulder, while women were usually left unchained. Men and women were separated, with men usually placed toward the vessel's bow and women toward the stern. The Middle Passage usually took more than seven weeks. Urine, vomit, mucous, and horrific odors filled the hold. Inside the hold, slaves had only half the space provided for indentured servants or convicts. One observer said that slaves were packed together "like books upon a shelf.so close that the shelf would not easily contain one more." Conditions within the slave ships were unspeakably awful. Once on shipboard, slaves were chained together and crammed into spaces sometimes less than five feet high. By 1750, slavers usually contained at least 400 slaves, with some carrying more than 700. The level of slave exports to the New World grew from about 36,000 a year in the early eighteenth century to almost 80,000 a year during the 1780s. It is imaginable that as many as 60 million Africans died or were enslaved as a result of these various slave trades. In addition, it now seems clear that during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, many and perhaps most of the enslaved were kept in Africa. Islamic traders probably exported 10 million slaves into north Africa, Arabia, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, and India. to 1900 as were shipped across the Atlantic. Nearly as many Africans were exported across the Sahara Desert, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean from 650 a.d. The Atlantic slave trade, however, was not the only slave trade within Africa. Altogether, for every 100 slaves who reached the New World, another 40 had died in Africa or during the Middle Passage.
Another 15 to 30 percent died during the march to or confinement along the coast. At least 2 million Africans-10 to 15 percent-died during the infamous "Middle Passage" across the Atlantic. But this figure grossly understates the actual number of Africans enslaved, killed, or displaced as a result of the slave trade. Between 10 and 15 million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic between 15. The trans-Atlantic slave trade was the largest movement of people in history. Digital History Printable Version The Middle Passage