7. The voyage became known as the Middle Passage
In reference to the transatlantic slave trade, the Middle Passage refers to the actual voyage, not a region of the ocean itself. The First Passage was the capture and forced march to the factor where the Africans were held until boarding ship. Usually, the Middle Passage ended with the ship discharging the Africans in a Caribbean port. There other traders purchased slaves for shipment to North American ports such as New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile, and Richmond. For some though the Middle Passage ended at the docks of Charleston, Baltimore, and other American East Coast ports. For the arriving Africans, it made little difference. They had no idea where they were. Often their families were split up in the process. Nearly all were weak from hunger and thirst, and few, if any, understood one word of the language being shouted at them.
One of the worst recorded Middle Passages took place in 1781, aboard the British slave ship Zong. A former Dutch slave ship captured by the British, Zong operated as part of a Liverpool-based syndicate. It assigned a surgeon by training as its captain, a man with little experience in navigation and less in controlling a ship’s crew. The crew consisted of 17 sailors, far too few for the mission on which the vessel departed. Zong arrived in Accra, in modern-day Ghana, in the summer of 1781. There the captain, Luke Collingwood, used his experience as a surgeon to evaluate the physical conditions of the Africans offered for trade. On August 18, 1781, Zong departed Accra on a voyage to complete the Middle Passage for 442 Africans, more than twice the safe number on a vessel of its tonnage.