The Middle Passage: Captivity, Crossing and Resistance

A name before the crossing

Before he was called Venture Smith, he was Broteer. In the account of his life published in 1798, he recalled being captured as a child, carried towards the West African coast and taken aboard a vessel from Rhode Island. A ship’s steward bought him for rum and cloth and renamed him Venture, treating the child’s purchase as a personal investment. His narrative preserves the name and history that this transaction attempted to replace. ¹

Broteer’s story gives the Middle Passage a human starting point. The term describes the forced sea journey that carried captive Africans towards enslavement in the Americas. For those transported, it was one stage in a much longer assault on freedom: captivity and separation preceded embarkation, while sale and forced labour followed arrival. Smith remembered reaching Barbados before being carried onwards to Rhode Island. An Atlantic crossing could therefore lead into another journey, rather than end at the first American port. ¹

Millions of lives across many routes

Historians estimate that approximately 12.5 million captive Africans were embarked in the transatlantic slave trade, and about 10.7 million survived to disembark. These are different measures. The first counts departures; the second counts people brought ashore alive. The gap indicates the extraordinary scale of death during transportation, but it does not include all those who died during capture, confinement or journeys towards the African coast. Even the largest numerical account cannot encompass the whole human cost. ²

These totals are estimates assembled from incomplete evidence, including customs records, ships’ logs and merchants’ correspondence. SlaveVoyages distinguishes documented voyages from calculations intended to account for missing ones. The records also preserve striking inequalities: an owner or captain may be identifiable while hundreds of people transported on the same ship remain unnamed. Counting makes the scale visible, but the surviving paperwork was largely produced by the people organising the trade. ²³

The familiar triangle linking Europe, Africa and the Americas is useful only as an introduction. Actual commercial connections were more varied. SlaveVoyages research traces direct links between Brazil and African trading regions, alongside voyages financed and operated through European and North American ports. Routes, languages, seasons and destinations differed. The Middle Passage was a connected system of forced transportation, rather than one standard itinerary repeated unchanged. ³

Captivity before the open sea

Ottobah Cugoano’s published account of 1787 described transfers between captors, imprisonment and removal aboard a ship near Cape Coast. He remembered remaining within sight of the African shore while being unable to tell his family where he was. His testimony places the coast between two forms of confinement: the journey that brought him there and the voyage that would carry him away. The waiting mattered, as did the separation from people who could not know his fate. ⁴

Alexander Falconbridge, a surgeon who later published evidence against the trade, described captains remaining on the coast while purchases accumulated. He recorded intrusive examinations of captives’ bodies and judgements about their age and health. Such accounts reveal how commercial calculation entered the process before a vessel sailed. They must also be read critically: Falconbridge observed events from within the trading system and subsequently wrote to persuade an abolitionist readership. His descriptions provide evidence, without giving him access to every captive’s experience. ⁵

Confinement aboard ship

Falconbridge described men secured in pairs with iron restraints, with women and boys confined in separate spaces. Shelves increased the number of people who could be forced between decks. In some vessels the available height prevented captives from standing upright, while crowding left little room to change position. The ship’s arrangement made ordinary bodily needs difficult to meet. Movement, rest and access to sanitation depended on decisions made by the crew. ⁵

Weather could intensify these conditions. When openings were shut against rough seas, ventilation deteriorated. Falconbridge associated the heat and foul air with serious illness, recording fever and severe bowel disease. His account also described inadequate access to necessary tubs and the difficulty of caring for people in cramped spaces. These were conditions created by the organisation of the voyage. The ocean posed dangers, but imprisonment made those dangers harder for captives to escape or endure. ⁵

Food was another instrument of control. Falconbridge listed provisions such as beans, rice and yams, with supplies varying between voyages. Royal Museums Greenwich records how refusal to eat could bring force feeding. The need to keep captives alive for sale did not produce safety or humane treatment; it existed alongside coercion. Illness, dehydration and overcrowding killed people whose survival had supposedly been in their captors’ commercial interest. ⁵⁷

Women children and unequal dangers

The people confined aboard ship were not an undifferentiated group of adult men. Historian Sowande M Mustakeem’s research directs attention to women, children, infants, nursing mothers, older people and those already ill. Age, gender and physical condition shaped exposure to violence and the demands placed upon captives. Her work treats the vessel as a place where enslavement was actively imposed through bodily control, rather than merely a means of travel between African captivity and American plantations. The questions asked of the evidence consequently change. Accounts of food, sickness or discipline need to be read with attention to who was being described and who remained outside the writer’s concern. A description of men in irons cannot stand for everything that happened to a nursing mother or a young child elsewhere aboard the same vessel. ⁶

A different kind of surviving evidence comes from the petition presented in Belinda Sutton’s name to the Massachusetts legislature in 1783. Seeking financial support from the estate of the man who had enslaved her, it recalled childhood separation from her parents and transportation among people held in chains. Arrival across the ocean had brought further enslavement. The petition was a legal claim, written in a particular form for a particular audience, rather than an untouched transcript of memory. Even so, its account linked a woman’s later demand for support to the life and family taken from her. ⁸

Refusal and organised resistance

Captives resisted in ways that ranged from refusing food to attempting to take control of vessels. The surviving evidence can be difficult to interpret. A captain might record a threat to his authority where the people involved were trying to recover their freedom. Acts described as disobedience or insurrection in a ship’s record therefore require a change of viewpoint. The restraints, surveillance and punishment documented aboard slave ships also show how much effort crews devoted to preventing resistance. ⁷

Cugoano recalled a plan to burn the vessel carrying him. Women and boys were to act because the men were more tightly confined. The plot was discovered before it could be carried out. His account demonstrates collective planning under severe restrictions, as well as the importance of people whose roles can disappear when resistance is imagined only as armed men fighting on deck. It also records the extremity of the captives’ situation: destroying the ship would have endangered their own lives. ⁴

An entry in John Newton’s journal for the African, dated 11 December 1752, records another attempted challenge. After discovering two captives trying to remove their irons, Newton reported a search that uncovered knives, stones, shot and a cold chisel. His account credited information from three boys. It does not reveal every participant’s intentions or the pressures behind the information given. It does show captives gathering objects and seeking opportunities within a system designed to keep them powerless. The record survives in the language of the captain who stopped them. ⁹

Resistance after an Atlantic arrival

The Amistad case shows why different stages of forced transportation must be distinguished. The Africans involved had crossed the Atlantic to Cuba before being placed aboard the Amistad for a journey between Cuban ports in 1839. Led by Sengbe Pieh, also known as Joseph Cinqué, they seized control of that vessel. Their struggle continued through capture near Long Island, imprisonment and litigation in the United States. The Supreme Court eventually recognised their right to freedom. This was resistance during a subsequent sea journey, not an Atlantic crossing made aboard the Amistad itself. Its exceptional legal outcome should not obscure the many captives whose efforts ended without freedom or a surviving court record. ¹⁰

Arrival and the continuation of violence

Surviving the crossing did not mean escaping the trade. Falconbridge described sales in which buyers rushed to seize the people they wanted, as well as the sale of those made gravely ill during the voyage. His testimony connected conditions at sea with the market ashore. A person weakened by confinement could arrive only to face another examination, another separation and a new enslaver. To count a successful disembarkation is therefore to record survival at a particular moment, rather than the recovery of freedom. ⁵

Smith’s recollections make that distinction concrete. He reported that smallpox killed many people on the vessel that carried him, and that most survivors were sold in Barbados. He was among the few taken onward to Rhode Island. These figures belong to his later narrative, rather than a complete independently checked passenger list. What the account establishes particularly clearly is the sequence of removal, renaming, disease and resale through which he remembered entering slavery. ¹

The image that shaped public memory

One of the best known representations of the Middle Passage is the plan of the Liverpool slave ship Brooks, often spelt Brookes. The image first appeared through the Plymouth abolition society in late 1788 and was adapted for wider campaigning in 1789. Royal Museums Greenwich explains its relationship to measurements of actual vessels and to the work of abolitionist publishers. Its ordered rows of bodies made crowding legible to readers who would never enter such a ship. Yet the plan remains a campaigning diagram, not a photograph or a complete account of every voyage. The neatness of the drawing cannot communicate movement, sickness, family relationships or the attempts at resistance taking place within that space. ¹¹

Recovering people from the records

Archaeology can connect shipping records with the material remains of a particular voyage. Smithsonian reporting on the São José describes research into a vessel wrecked near Cape Town in 1794 while carrying captive people from Mozambique towards Brazil. Archival documents and evidence from the wreck site were studied together. This route also extends the geographical picture beyond the West African coast. The ship’s history belonged to an oceanic system that drew people from southeastern Africa as well as the regions most familiar in British accounts of the trade. Researchers drew on Portuguese and Dutch archives, including the captain’s account of the loss, alongside the physical evidence. The Smithsonian account reports 512 captives aboard and 212 deaths in the wreck. Those figures attach the investigation to a particular group of people, while the combination of records and remains helps distinguish this vessel from other wrecks nearby. ¹²

The African Origins project approaches identity through names recorded after the interception of slave ships in the nineteenth century. Researchers combine registers with knowledge contributed by African language speakers and diaspora communities to investigate possible origins. The work faces real limits: clerks recorded unfamiliar names through their own languages and spellings, while a name does not automatically establish a person’s birthplace. Nevertheless, it creates ways of asking who people were beyond the categories assigned by traders and officials. Registers preserved in Freetown and Britain provide part of this evidence. The project also recognises that names passed through the hearing and writing of English or Spanish speakers. Its conclusions therefore concern possible linguistic and regional connections, rather than a simple recovery of an original identity without uncertainty. Consultation with people who know the languages is integral to that process. ¹³

The Middle Passage must be understood at both scales: millions forcibly transported and particular people whose names, memories or actions survive. Broteer’s account, Cugoano’s recollection of collective resistance and the petition presented for Belinda Sutton each resist the reduction of a life to a commercial entry. They leave different kinds of evidence, shaped by the circumstances in which they were recorded. Read carefully together, they restore people to the history of the ships that carried them. ¹⁴⁸

Sources

[1] Venture Smith / Project Gutenberg. A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture a Native of Africa; 1798.

[2] National Endowment for the Humanities. The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database; Undated project account.

[3] SlaveVoyages / David Eltis. The Trans Atlantic Slave Trade Database Methodology; 14 March 2024 reissue of methodology.

[4] American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning CUNY. Ottobah Cugoano account of captivity and resistance in Who Built America; 1787 original account reproduced in 1825 anthology.

[5] Alexander Falconbridge / University of Oregon teaching edition. An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa; 1788.

[6] University of Illinois Press / Sowande M Mustakeem. Slavery at Sea Terror Sex and Sickness in the Middle Passage; 2016 book and publisher description.

[7] Royal Museums Greenwich. The history of the transatlantic slave trade; Undated historical guide.

[8] US National Park Service. The Middle Passage including the petition of Belinda Sutton; 1783 petition reproduced in historical guide.

[9] Cowper and Newton Museum. John Newton Early Life and the Slave Trade including journal entry for 11 December 1752; 1752 journal entry reproduced in museum guide.

[10] US National Archives. The Amistad Case; Undated primary document teaching resource.

[11] Royal Museums Greenwich. Plan and Sections of a Slave Ship the Brooks sometimes Brookes; Catalogue entry for 1789 print.

[12] Smithsonian Ocean / Danielle Olson. Wood Under Sand The Search for a Slave Shipwreck; Undated research feature.

[13] SlaveVoyages. African Origins Methodology; 14 March 2024.

Sources checked on 22 October 2026.