How long middle passage

Of these, nearly 18 percent died during the transatlantic voyage from Africa to the New World. On large ships, several hundred slaves could be packed below decks.

Branded and chained together, they endured conditions of squalor, and disease and starvation claimed many lives. Boston was part of this global story. The first slave trade voyage from the American colonies sailed out of Massachusetts. When it returned with the first known Africans imported into the northern English colonies, Boston was its most likely port of return.

It is estimated that transatlantic voyages embarked out of Boston. Local newspapers carried over 1, ads for the sale of slaves during the 18 th century, which took place everywhere from ships to markets, warehouses, coffee houses, and homes. Boston was further complicit in the Triangle Trade as a major exporter of rum, which was made from sugar produced in the Caribbean and sometimes sold in exchange for slaves in Africa.

Ironically, commodities like sugar and molasses drove colonial Bostonians to revolution: leaders likened taxation on these goods to slavery even as the trade continued to prop up slavery itself. After the American Revolution, northern states confronted the hypocrisy of fighting a war for freedom while holding thousands of men, women, and children in bondage.

In , the Massachusetts Supreme Court decided that slavery was incompatible with the new state constitution. Olaudah Equiano, an African captured as a boy who later wrote an autobiography, recalled. When I looked round the ship too and saw a large furnace of copper boiling, and a mulititude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate and quite overpowered with horrow and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted.

I asked if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces and long hair? Their "living quarters" was often a deck within the ship that had less than five feet of headroom -- and throughout a large portion of the deck, sleeping shelves cut this limited amount of headroom in half. With to people packed in a tiny area5 -- an area with little ventilation and, in some cases, not even enough space to place buckets for human waste -- disease was prevalent.

According to Equiano, "The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died.

But even the choice of suicide was taken away from these persons. These doctors received bonuses according to the number of Africans who survived the journey. Conditions however remained appalling. Cross section of a slave ship. National 5 Subjects National 5 Subjects up.