The Voyage
This was the second leg of the triangular trade, a brutal sea voyage that carried millions of enslaved Africans from Africa to the Americas.
What is the Middle Passage?
These two diseases were the most common and deadly causes of death aboard slave ships, one spreading through contaminated food/water and the other being highly contagious.
What are dysentery and smallpox?
Name one of the other forms of resistance used by captives during the Middle Passage.
What are shipboard revolts, jumping overboard, refusing food, slowdowns/sabotage, or cultural/spiritual resistance (songs, prayers, stories)?
This economic system, built on racial slavery and forced labor, used cash crops like sugar, cotton, and tobacco for maximum profit.
What is the plantation economy?
This is the term for the blending of African traditions with European and Indigenous elements to create new cultures, such as Vodou or Santería.
What is cultural syncretism?
The Middle Passage voyage typically lasted between this minimum and maximum number of days...
What is 21 to 90 days?
$200: The average mortality rate for enslaved Africans during the Middle Passage was in this range, though some voyages saw rates as high as 50%.
What is 15–20%?
These independent, self-governing communities of escaped Africans, such as those in Jamaica and Brazil's Palmares, often formed alliances with Indigenous nations.
What are Maroon communities?
These were laws that strictly controlled every aspect of an enslaved person's life, making literacy illegal and preventing large gatherings of more than 3–4 people.
What are slave codes?
This is the term for the long-term psychological, emotional, and cultural harm passed down through generations as a result of the extreme violence of the Middle Passage and slavery.
What is intergenerational trauma?
This is the term for the forced "exercise" where crew members brought captives on deck to move around, though most of the journey was spent in darkness, filth, and chains.
What is forced dancing?
According to historians, approximately this many Africans were loaded onto slave ships between the 16th and 19th centuries, with roughly 1.8 to 2 million dying during the Middle Passage itself.
What is 12.5 million?
Name two of the three specific forms of active resistance listed in the lesson, besides escape or armed revolt.
What are poisoning enslavers, sabotaging crops/equipment, and individual escapes? (any two)
This form of labour required constant supervision by overseers and drivers
What is gang labour?
Enslaved Africans introduced these four specific foods (name any two) to the Americas, which became staples of Southern and Caribbean cuisine.
What are okra, yams, peanuts, and black-eyed peas?
Name three of the five European nations whose ships participated in the transatlantic slave trade, with the British becoming dominant in the 18th century.
What are Portugal, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Spain? (Any three)
On a sugar plantation in the Caribbean or Brazil, an enslaved worker could expect to live only this many years due to the brutal labor conditions.
What is 5–7 years?
The famous 1839 revolt on this ship, along with the revolt on the Zong, are among the over 300 documented shipboard uprisings during the Middle Passage.
What is the Amistad?
This type of slavery treated enslaved people as property with no rights to wages, family, or personal freedom, and children born from sexual assault remained enslaved.
What is chattel slavery?
This region of the Sea Islands (South Carolina/Georgia) is known for retaining African languages, hairstyles, basket-weaving, and spiritual practices well into the 20th century.
What is Gullah Geechee culture?
Captives who suffered from this deep depression caused by the loss of everything familiar often refused to eat, leading crews to use a tool called the speculum oris to force-feed them.
What is "fixed melancholy"?
During the 1781 Zong massacre, why did the captain order 132 sick enslaved Africans to be thrown overboard?
What is to collect insurance money.?
Vodou (Haiti) – a fusion of West African spiritual traditions with Catholicism is an example of what?
What is cultural syncretism)?
What were one of the typical living conditions of enslaved people on plantations?
What is one-room log or dirt-floor cabins shared by entire families. What is a diet of mostly cornmeal, salt pork, and very little vegetables or protein. What is one set of rough clothing per year. (just one)
In 1793, this Canadian colony passed the first gradual abolition law in the British Empire, and slavery across all British colonies ended in this year.
What is Upper Canada (or Ontario)? and What is 1834