'Eve' was a young woman sold to the captain of the Ruby. We do not know her real name - it was traditional to name the first woman bought Eve. We rarely hear the voice of the enslaved themselves - we only hear her story secondhand. It is clear that Eve was enslaved by deceit, and that her options were limited: compliance, suicide or revolt. We do not know if she died, or survived to be sold in Barbados or Grenada.

The second leg of the triangular trade was the 'middle passage', the journey across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean islands or the Americas. The 2,018+ Bristol slave ships carried over 500,000 Africans into slavery. The European total was over 11,000,000. Few of those Africans were able to describe their physical and emotional experience as they were forcibly removed from their homeland and families. For every enslaved African landed alive in the Americas, historians estimate that at least one died in Africa, and that 10% or 20% died on board the ships. The figures show the scale of the trade, the loss to Africa, and the workings of a trade that meant the death of so many people whether 'tight' or 'loose' packed into the hold of a ship. The image of the slave ship the Brookes has become an icon of the the largest forced migration of people ever known.