Final answer:
The Middle Passage was part of the transatlantic slave trade with horrific conditions including extreme overcrowding, poor sanitation, and disease, leading to a high mortality rate among enslaved Africans.
Step-by-step explanation:
Conditions of the Middle Passage
The Middle Passage was a harrowing part of the transatlantic slave trade where millions of enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas. The conditions onboard the slave ships were inhumane, characterized by extreme overcrowding, with sometimes up to six hundred individuals held in a ship's hold, confined in minute spaces often not more than twenty inches high. Men, separated from women and children, faced the horror of being chained side by side in a minimal amount of space.
Sanitation was virtually non-existent, as individuals would lay chained in filth, exacerbating the spread of diseases such as dysentery, known colloquially as 'the bloody flux,' and infections caused by the unbearable conditions in the hold. Coupled with inadequate provisions, the atrocious environment led to illnesses like smallpox and conjunctivitis, with mortality rates on these journeys averaging around 12-13 percent. Despite the risks, occasionally slaves were brought onto the deck for exercise to maintain some degree of health, as ill or weak slaves would lower a captain's profit upon arrival in the Americas.
The journey did not conclude upon surviving the voyage across the Atlantic but served as a middle segment in a three-part ordeal, with an overland trek to the African coast preceding the oceanic trip, followed by a period of 'seasoning' or acculturation into the brutal slave societies of the Americas.
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