How long did the triangular trade route take

It was a journey of three stages. A British ship carrying trade goods set sail from Britain, bound for West Africa. At first some people were captured and enslaved directly by the British traders. They ambushed and captured local people in Africa.

Most slave ships got their enslaved people from British 'factors', who lived full-time in Africa and bought enslaved people from local African chiefs. The chiefs would raid a rival village and sell their captured enemies as slaves.

The enslaved people were marched to the coast in chained lines where they were held in prisons called 'factories'. Novel and instantly prized goods that only existed in the New World seemed to blink into existence: sugar, tobacco, hemp.

European merchants could command high prices for selling these goods to other Europeans, just as New World merchants could command high prices from their customers for manufactured items from Europe. But a direct exchange of these goods, between Europe and the colonizers in the New World, required start-up money. Transporting goods by sea was not cheap. A solution to this economic problem appeared in the form of the transatlantic slave trade, which began operating as early as the 15th century, at the very beginning of the colonial period.

European ships would travel to West Africa carrying manufactured goods to which Africans had no access: worked metal, certain types of clothing, weapons. Once there, as payment they would demand people captured for slavery, who would be loaded onto crowded ships and transported to the Americas.

This leg of the trade scheme is usually called the "Middle Passage," a term that has become a byword for suffering. Upon arrival, the enslaved Africans who survived the voyage were sold to landowners looking for cheap labor. With the money derived from these slave sales, European merchants would then purchase the cotton, sugar and tobacco their customers back home were demanding, and the cycle continued. The triangular trade was not a route, but a strategy for making trade among distant markets easier and more profitable.

At the same time, a different triangular trade route arose between New England, West Africa, and Central America and the Caribbean islands that lay east of it. The islands of the Caribbean Sea served as sources for cane sugar and molasses, which New World merchants would distill into rum, while the mahogany veneer on the mixing table probably came from Guatemala or Honduras.

Rum and manufactured goods taken by New World merchants to Africa were sold in exchange for enslaved people. These slaves were taken to the New World and sold.

Slavers used the proceeds to buy mahogany and molasses, and the cycle continued onward. It is obviously not necessary that one leg of a triangular trade route should consist of enslaved people.