Triangles of Trade and Slavery
Use your US History “Making Thirteen Colonies” book to answer the
following in your notebooks …remember to glue this question sheet into
your notebook!!!!
Use the picture at the top of p.144to answer the following questions.
1. What do you see in this picture?
A slave ship that is designed to hold as many slaves as possible
2. From the point of view of the slave trader, why did they do this?
The more slaves they carried, the more they stood to gain – greater profit
3. From the point of view of a slave, what would this experience be like?
Deplorable conditions…worked, slept, ate, beaten in the same cramped
space…suffered disease and fatigue
Use Chapter 38 (pages 142-148) to answer these questions.
Define or describe the following people, places or key terms.
4. Middle Passage: The middle leg of the triangular trade route that began
in Europe (to Africa) and went from Arica across the Atlantic to North
America
5. Brookes: Slave ship drawing
6. Olaudah Equiano: African child kidnapped and sold into slavery, wrote
his autobiography
7. Triangular trade: The route of trading of goods and slaves that began in
Europe and headed to Africa, then left Africa and headed to North
America, then back to Europe
8. Mercantilism***take an educated guess if you can’t find this one***!!!!:
An economy where a parent company gains wealth from a colony
Triangles of Trade and Slavery
Use Chapter 38 (pages 142-148) to answer these questions.
9. Why did England make it difficult for the colonies to produce many
manufactured (man-made) goods? England did not want to compete with
colonists over manufactured goods.
10. List some specific items traded in the Triangular trade, and the
continental direction they took. Tobacco, sugar, codfish, lumber, guns,
clothing
11. What was the impact of the Brookes drawing of 1788? (see blue text
on page 144) It led to a law that limited the number of passengers
allowed on a ship
12. Using the primary source material, what were the experiences of
Olaudah Equiano, use quotes from his text to support your answer.
 Never saw people so brutally treated – blacks and whites
 Saw a white man flogged so badly that he died
 The ship’s masters through the dead man overboard like some kind
of animal
 The slaves lived in constant fear
13. Why do you think the author refers to the triangular trade as “terrible”
and “nasty”? Slaves were traded and treated in deplorable conditions.
They were treated no better than the tobacco and rice on board.
14. Between the early to late 1700s, what happens to the black population
of the American colonies? The black population in 65 years grew 10X
larger…from 75,000 to 750,000 in 65 years