Describe the map. Examine the chances of an African slave to survive the transatlantic journey. Explain

Q1 LK Englisch Background Information on the Civil Rights Movement (1) VR 2017-18

A recently published interactive graphic demonstrates in stark manner the sheer scale of the transport of slaves from Africa to the Americas, between about 1550 and about 1860. Over this period of little more than 310 years, more than ten million Africans were seized, transported under terrible conditions across the ocean to the “Western Hemisphere” and forcibly traded into slavery.
The trans-Atlantic trade in humans had begun in the 16^th century. Sailing ships were packed to the brim with African men and women who had been seized from their communities in Africa by a variety of different slave-traders, some European, some Arab and some themselves African.
The trade gathered pace over the succeeding 300 years, before the practice of trading in humans was finally abolished in the middle of the 19^th century. By the time it was brought to an end, more than 20,500 trans-Atlantic voyages had moved many millions of Africans to the shores of the North American and South American continents.

When considering the slave trade, it is natural to think mainly of the United States of America, because slavery continued there until relatively recently. Even after the American Civil War brought an end to the official institution of slavery in the 1860s, some historians and sociologists have argued that the so-called Jim Crow laws in the USA, which imposed racial segregation and inferior status on African Americans from 1888 until they were finally abolished in 1965, represented a form of economic, mental and social slavery.

However, it is misleading to think only of the USA in connection with the slave trade. In numerical terms, other regions in both of the American continents received and enslaved more Africans than the USA. The USA received about 400,000. Central America, mainly under Spanish control, received about 1,300,000. The Caribbean colonies, controlled by France, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Denmark, together received about 4,000,000. Brazil, under Portuguese rule, received a whopping 4,800,000.
The journey from Africa to those far-off lands was fraught with great peril and cruelty. Sailing ships were packed to the brim with African men and women who had been seized from their communities in Africa by slave-traders. People died of sickness, maltreatment and sheer exhaustion en route. Those who survived the hazardous crossing were condemned to a life of bondage and slavery, never to see their communities, families and home countries again.
The trans-Atlantic slave trade has been documented by many educational and academic establishments and institutions over the years.* It is striking how the number of ships grows ever greater, until by the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there is a frenzied acceleration in the numbers of ships pouring forth out of Africa, to deliver their valuable human cargoes. All in all, at least 12,500,000 Africans were enslaved and it is estimated about 2,000,000 died on the high seas.

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/01/19/the-atlantic-slave-trade-315-ignominious-years-of-plunder-and-misery/

* One such programme is that of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database: http://www.slavevoyages.org/