The Middle Passage

node · earth · Atlantic Ocean — West and West-Central Africa to the Americas

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.