The Middle Passage

Assembled from 51 blocks · 2 evidence · 41 related

1. Story
2. The ocean crossing itself — the leg of the transatlantic slave trade that carried embarked captives from the African coast to sale in the Americas, and the point at which almost everything material was stripped away. People were embarked in chains, held below deck in spaces too shallow to stand in, and landed weeks later at Brazilian, Caribbean and North American ports; on the SlaveVoyages estimates roughly 12.5 million people were embarked and about 10.7 million disembarked, the difference being deaths at sea. Music was present on the passage, and it was not consolation. Crews practised what the trade called "dancing the slaves": captives were brought on deck and made to move for exercise, because buyers paid for apparent health, and those who would not were flogged. Surviving testimony, including the surgeon Alexander Falconbridge's account given in the British abolition debates, describes the movement being driven by a drum or an iron kettle and sometimes by a fiddle or an African-descended plucked lute. What could not be carried was objects. What could be carried was in people: tuning, timing, technique, ensemble roles, the knowledge of how to make an instrument from a gourd and a skin. The Journey's entire organological argument rests on that distinction.
3. Knowledge
4. The transatlantic slave trade
5. The Middle Passage
6. West Africa
7. New Orleans
8. Havana
9. Rio de Janeiro
10. Connections
11. Banjo
12. West Africa
13. The transatlantic slave trade
14. Havana
15. New Orleans
16. Rio de Janeiro
17. The transatlantic trade in enslaved people operates
18. Hans Sloane records gourd lutes in Jamaica
19. Kora
20. Ngoni
21. Akonting
22. The West African drum ensemble
23. The Middle Passage
24. The trans-Saharan routes
25. The trans-Saharan routes
26. The Kru seafarers
27. Highlife
28. The transatlantic trade in enslaved people operates
29. Jefferson names the banjar and its origin
30. Sugar
31. The post-contact population collapse of the Americas
32. The transatlantic slave trade reaches its peak volume
33. The Middle Passage
34. The transatlantic trade in enslaved people operates
35. The Middle Passage
36. Son cubano
37. New Orleans
38. Son travels from Oriente to Havana
39. The Middle Passage
40. Congo Square, New Orleans
41. Jazz
42. Havana
43. New Orleans confines Sunday gatherings to Congo Square
44. The first jazz record is made
45. Alan Lomax records Jelly Roll Morton at the Library of Congress
46. The Middle Passage
47. Samba
48. "Pelo Telefone" is registered
49. Evidence
50. Roughly 12.5 million people were embarked in Africa for the Americas and about 10.7 million disembarked, across voyages conventionally dated 1501–1866. V55 verification basis: a retrieved search result attributed the figure of 12,520,000 embarked and 10.7 million disembarked explicitly to the database's own Estimates page, which is what this record cites; the database itself was not queried, and its estimates are periodically revised, so a curator should take current figures from it directly.
51. Captives were brought on deck and compelled to move for exercise, with those refusing flogged, the movement driven by a drum or iron kettle and sometimes a fiddle or an African-descended plucked lute. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary from secondary public-history sources; neither Falconbridge's account nor any parliamentary evidence volume was read, no passage is quoted verbatim here, and the practice's prevalence across the whole trade is not established.