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Content: The triangular trade functioned as follows: European merchant ships carried European manufactured goods, such as guns and cloth, to Africa where they were traded for enslaved people. The enslaved Africans were then sent to the Americas and sold. European merchants then bought tobacco, molasses, sugar, and raw cotton in the Americas and shipped them back to Europe. As a result of this triangular trade, as many as 10 million enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas between the early sixteenth century and the late nineteenth century. Their journey from Africa to the Americas became known as the 
Middle Passage
, the middle portion of the triangular trade route. Many enslaved Africans died on the journey. Those who survived often died from diseases to which they had little or no immunity. Death rates were higher for newly arrived enslaved Africans than for those born and reared in the Americas. Sources of Enslaved Persons 
Before Europeans arrived in the fifteenth century, most enslaved persons in Africa were prisoners of war.