The voyage usually took six to eight weeks, but bad weather could increase this to 13 weeks or more. This engraving (a type of print) of the slave ship the Brookes, from Liverpool, shows the slaves packed into the hold of the ship. It shows 295 enslaved Africans, this was the legal number the ship could carry after a change in the law. The Dolben Act of 1788 regulated the number of slaves according to the size of the ship. On a previous voyage the Brookes had carried 609. If you look carefully at the Brookes picture, you can see the leg irons shackling the men together at the ankle. There are a very few accounts of the Middle Passage, written by enslaved Africans who had experienced conditions on a slave ship at first-hand. This was because many Africans who made the crossing would not have known how to write, or had the chance to learn later in life. One well known African writer who did experience the crossing wrote, was Olaudah Equiano. He wrote, ‘The shrieks of the women and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable’, in his autobiography The Interesting Narrative…, published in 1789.
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