The Atlantic Slave Trade and Forced Migration

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, compiled by historians David Eltis and David Richardson and published in book form as the Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (2010), documents more than 36,000 individual voyages and estimates that roughly 12.5 million Africans were forcibly embarked on slave ships between 1501 and 1866. Of these, an estimated 10.7 million survived the transatlantic crossing known as the Middle Passage - implying a mortality rate of roughly fifteen percent during the voyage itself, a figure that excludes the additional deaths incurred during initial capture, forced marches to the coast, and confinement in coastal holding facilities before embarkation.