atlantic voyage us history

The Transatlantic Slave Trade

16th Century–1867

The Transatlantic Slave Trade was a business in which the commodity was African men, women, and children. They were captured in Africa, transported across the Atlantic Ocean over the “Middle Passage,” and forced to work in the Americas. It was also part of the Triangular Trade System and the Mercantile System.

Detail from The Slave Trade by Auguste François Biard, 1840. Image Source: Wikipedia.

What was the Transatlantic Slave Trade?

The Transatlantic Slave Trade was a business network built to profit from the acquisition, transfer, and distribution of African men, women, and children who were forcibly removed from their homes. 

There were two major points of exchange in the network The first was in Africa; the second in the Americas. Bridging the gap between the two points of exchange was the Middle Passage — the horrific overseas route captive Africans were forced to travel as cargo, below deck in the dark holds of slave ships.

Those who survived the Middle Passage were forced to work in the Americas, primarily on plantations, growing and harvesting things like sugar, rice, and cotton. However, many were also put to work in mines and others worked as servants in homes.

The system was lucrative for just about everyone involved in it, especially those directly involved with the exchange of Africans. However, many others benefitted from the products that were produced from slave labor and the wealth it created.

Important Dates in the Transatlantic Slave Trade

16th Century — The Transatlantic Slave Trade begins.

1526 — The first voyage carrying enslaved people from Africa to the Americas is believed to have sailed.

1867 — The business was outlawed, however, the slave trade continued to operate outside of the law.

1700–1850 — More than eight out of ten Africans forced into the system crossed the Atlantic Ocean over the Middle Passage.

1720–1780 — The majority of Africans carried to British North America arrived.

1821–1830 — It is believed more than 80,000 people a year left Africa in slave ships.

By 1825 — Roughly 25% of the population of the Western Hemisphere was made up of Africans who had been enslaved and their ancestors, many of whom were born into slavery.

Transatlantic Slave Trade Statistics 

The Transatlantic Slave Trade lasted for approximately 366 years.

It is estimated that 12.5 million African men, women, and children were taken as captives in Africa, sold to merchants, and shipped across the Middle Passage. Roughly 11 million arrived in the Americas. The rest died in some way.

90% of the enslaved Africans were delivered to South America and the Caribbean.

6% of the enslaved Africans were delivered to the American Colonies. The largest number of them entered through Sullivan’s Island, just outside of Charleston, South Carolina.

Roughly 70% of the Africans were forced to work on plantations that produced molasses, sugar, and rum.

Brief History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

The Transatlantic Slave Trade was started by the Portuguese and Spanish. They were followed by other European nations, including the Netherlands, England, and France.

The business increased with the establishment and expansion of plantations in South America and the Caribbean. This also led other nations and colonies to participate in the business, including the American Colonies.

Slave labor was eventually expanded to plantations that produced valuable goods, including tobacco, cotton, and rice.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade was a key component of Mercantilism, the economic theory that drove European nations to establish colonies in the New World . Cheap labor became a cornerstone of the system and carried over into the Colonial Era in America, particularly in the Southern Colonies where tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton were vital to the economy.

Transatlantic Slave Trade Facts

The Transatlantic Slave Trade was a lucrative business and benefitted slavers, traders, merchants, plantation owners, and anyone else who was involved.

There were risks involved that could easily reduce profitability — rough weather on the seas, inexperienced crews, outbreaks of disease, uprisings organized by the Africans, and attacks by privateers and pirates.

Over time, the system was modified and streamlined. 

Spain essentially outsourced its slave acquisition operation by creating agreements with other nations — Asiento — to supply its colonies with Africans.

Eventually, two significant companies controlled the Transatlantic Slave Trade — the Royal African Company (Britain) and the Dutch West India Company (Netherlands).

The ports where slave traders and merchants operated prospered, due to the influx of wealth. The first ports to prosper were in Europe — Liverpool, Liston, Nantes — and spread to South America — Rio de Janeiro — and North America — Boston, Newport, and Charleston.

The routes traveled by slave ships also allowed the transfer of goods and products from one region to another. This led to the development of the Triangular Trade System which was part of the English Mercantile System that the American Colonies were part of. 

After American merchants became involved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the routes their ships sailed allowed them to trade with ports in places like the French West Indies. This violated Britain’s maritime laws, the Navigation Acts . Although Americans considered it good business, Britain considered it smuggling. However, during the time of Salutary Neglect , when Britain failed to strictly enforce the Navigation Acts, American merchants prospered.

The Role of Captains, Crews, and Ships of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Merchants and investors hired ships to transport cargo from one location to another. The cargo could include Africans, along with raw materials, goods, and finished products that could be traded in various ports.

The goods and products that were traded were often seasonal in nature. A number of things affected the business, including growing seasons, the spread of disease, and the weather on the high seas.

Despite the dangers of the voyages, it was in the best interest of the ship’s crew to ensure the safety of the Africans on board. However, Africans were often subjected to violence and brutal conditions that led to many of them dying on the journey across the Atlantic Ocean. Some estimates say as many as 20% of Africans died.

When ships arrived at their port of destination, the captain and crew were responsible for preparing the Africans to be delivered to their owners or to be sold at auctions.

John Hawkins and the English Slave Trade

John Hawkins (c. 1532–1595) was one of the most prolific sailors and commanders of his time. He is most well-known for his role as a “Sea Dog” and for involving England in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Born in Plymouth, England, Hawkins followed in the footsteps of his father, who was a prominent merchant.

During his early years as a merchant, Hawkins traveled to the Canary Islands, where he saw the use of enslaved Africans. Believing he could profit from the slave trade, he formed a business partnership that was responsible for funding three major slave trading expeditions.

In 1562, he captured and traded for captive Africans along the coast of Africa, and sailed to the Caribbean, where he traded them for pearls, animal hides, and sugar. The expedition was so lucrative that a coat of arms was designed for him, which included a crude drawing of an enslaved African. The first trip is considered by some to be the first implement and profit from the Triangular Trade Route.

Hawkins carried out two more slave expeditions and helped fund another. He was one of the Sea Dogs, a group of privateers who were hired by Queen Elizabeth I to attack Spanish ships. 

The others were Sir Francis Drake, Sir Martin Frobisher, and Sir Walter Raleigh, all of whom had connections to the establishment of English colonies in North America. Hawkins and the others were so successful that King Philip II sent the Spanish Armada to invade England, however, most of the fleet was destroyed at the Battle of Gravelines (August 8, 1588). Hawkins served as Vice Admiral of the English Navy during the conflict.

Although Hawkins is praised for his role as a naval commander, he is also identified as the founder of Triangular Trade, which was largely based on the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Trade Routes in the Transatlantic Slave Trade

The Transatlantic Slave Trade Trade consisted of three main routes along which Africans were acquired, transported, and distributed.

First Route — Acquisition in Africa

Historians indicate that slavery was practiced in Africa in various forms long before the continent was exposed to Europeans. However, the practice was not unique to Africa and was found in every inhabited continent at some time.

When Europeans started trading for captive Africans, it transformed the system of slavery and gave rise to the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

There were three distinct groups involved in the acquisition of Africans for the Transatlantic Slave Trade:

1. Local Slavers — Local slave traders were responsible for kidnapping people and subjugating tribes living in the African interior and then transferring them to the West Coast of Africa. The work of local slavers made large numbers of captives available to the kingdoms on the coast.

2. African Coast Slave Traders — Local slavers delivered their captives to the African kingdoms on the coast, who held them and then traded them to Europeans. The desire for the coastal kingdoms to acquire European goods and products incentivized them to provide more captives for trade.

3. European Slave Traders — Europeans formed business alliances with the kingdoms on the coast and then traded goods and products for the captive Africans. Europeans built forts and factories — trading posts — on the African coast, which were used to acquire and then hold people before they were loaded onto ships.

Second Route — Transportation Across the Middle Passage

The Middle Passage was the route that transported captive Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas and the West Indies, where they were sold into slavery, often to work on large tobacco and sugar plantations.

The conditions on the ships were horrible, as Africans were usually confined below deck in cramped quarters. Many were marked with brands and men were chained together. Many Africans died during the journey and many more suffered from illness or harsh treatment from the crewmembers.

From 1619 to 1860, it is believed roughly 475,000 Africans were abducted and sent to North America, where they landed in a port and were auctioned off as slaves. It is believed that 18-20 percent of the slaves that crossed the Middle Passage died during the journey.

Third Route — Distribution in the Americas

After arriving in the Americas, Africans were forced to travel to their destination, which could be to a plantation deep in the South American forests, the Carolina Backcountry, or slave auctions in large cities like New York, Charleston, and Savannah.

Enslaved Africans in the Americas

The majority of captive Africans were enslaved in the Caribbean and South America. However, enslaved Africans in the American Colonies and the practice of chattel slavery became a key point of disagreement in the United States, eventually leading to the Civil War.

The Age of Exploration led to significant growth in European exploration, as nations and merchants looked for new trade routes and sources of gold and other precious metals. 

Christopher Columbus first arrived in the Caribbean in 1492, leading to a massive cultural exchange that was felt worldwide. Initially, the Spanish enslaved the indigenous populations, but eventually moved away from that, replacing them with Africans. 

In the Caribbean, Africans were forced to work in mines and on plantations in various locations, including Barbados, Saint-Domingue — present-day Haiti — and Jamaica.

South America

Portuguese explorers followed in the footsteps of Columbus and other Spanish expeditions in exploring the New World and establishing colonies. 

The Portuguese arrived in present-day Brazil in the early 1500s and, like the Spanish, enslaved the indigenous population and then transitioned to an African workforce.

By the middle part of the 16th Century, the Portuguese were establishing Sugar Plantations in Brazil and imported Africans to work on them.

Brazil was one area that continued to participate in the Transatlantic Slave Trade into the latter half of the 19th Century.

North America and the American Colonies

In North America, there was a mix of French, Spanish, and English colonies. In the interior of North America, the colonies were largely divided by major geographical landmarks, including the Mississippi River, the Appalachian Mountains, and the Great Lakes.

French colonies formed along the north of the Atlantic Coast, although French territory stretched south to Louisiana, along the Mississippi River. The entire region was known as New France.

New Spain, the Spanish colonies, were located in the Caribbean, South America, and stretched north into the present-day American Southwest, up the coast into the upper regions of present-day California.

The English Colonies developed south and east of New France, along the Atlantic Coast. They went as far south as present-day Georgia. Originally called “Virginia,” the region was eventually divided into 13 Colonies. Colonies in the Chesapeake Bay and further south enjoyed a long growing season due to the climate, which allowed certain crops, including tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton, to flourish.

Over time, England transformed into Great Britain and a Domestic Slave Trade emerged in the British Colonies, encouraging the exchange of enslaved Africans between colonies and geographical regions.

Following Queen Anne’s War , Great Britain was granted Asiento by Spain and authorized to sell slaves to New Spain.

By the middle of the 18th century, the colonies experienced the First Great Awakening, and the seeds of abolition were planted in the minds of many Americans.

Following the American Revolution and the American Revolutionary War, the institution of slavery still drove the economy in many states. By then, production was so high — and dependent on cheap labor — that it was difficult for many merchants and plantation owners to conceive of any other way to continue their operations.

Although the Transatlantic Slave Trade was abolished in the United States in 1808, the Domestic Slave Trade continued to thrive.

In the wake of the Second Great Awakening , the Abolition movement grew, led by former slaves like Harriet Tubman , Sojourner Truth , and Federick Douglass , journalists like William Lloyd Garrison , politicians like Abraham Lincoln , and religious leaders like Henry Ward Beecher . 

Impact of the Headright System on the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Several colonies, including Virginia, needed to increase their population and workforce.

The Headright System was developed to encourage settlement . In that system, wealthy landowners paid for settlers to move to America. 

In return, the settler agreed to work for the landowner as an Indentured Servant. The company that ran the colony also gave the landowner more land. 

However, when servants finished their contracts, they were freed, leaving the landowner with no way to replace the worker.

Eventually, landowners realized that they could use the Headright System to a greater advantage. If they paid to have captive Africans imported into their colony, they received land — and they also created a more permanent, reliable workforce for their plantations.

Transatlantic Slave Trade Significance

The Transatlantic Slave Trade is important to United States history for the role it played in transporting captive and enslaved Africans to the American Colonies. Over time, American merchants, especially in the South, replaced indentured servants with slaves, boosting profits and ensuring a sustainable workforce. However, the institution of slavery was divisive, contributing to decades of disagreement between the North and South, eventually leading to the Civil War.

Transatlantic Slave Trade APUSH Notes and Study Guide

Use the following links and videos to study the Colonial Era, the New England Colonies, the Middle Colonies, and the Southern Colonies for the AP US History Exam. Also, be sure to look at our Guide to the AP US History Exam .

Transatlantic Slave Trade APUSH Definition and Simple Explanation

The Transatlantic Slave Trade was a system of commerce that operated for more than 350 years. It involved the forced movement of millions of Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, where they were exploited as forced laborers in various industries, particularly the agrarian economies of the Southern Colonies.

Transatlantic Slave Trade Video for APUSH Notes

This video from Heimler’s History discusses the history of slavery in the British Colonies, including the impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Pre-Columbian Transatlantic Voyages

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• Pleistocene Transatlantic Contacts? Archaeological and Anthropological Arguments
• Ancient European Traditions about Atlantic Crossings
• Documented Transatlantic Voyages before Columbus
• Pitfalls of Documented History: The Vinland Map

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Pre-Columbian Transatlantic Voyages by Gesa Mackenthun LAST REVIEWED: 25 October 2017 LAST MODIFIED: 25 October 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199730414-0276

Indians discovered America. Perhaps as long as forty thousand years ago, humans began to settle the hemisphere from a northern direction (coming across the Bering Strait) as well as a western direction (coming across the Pacific Ocean). Yet despite this knowledge, the “discovery” of America is generally credited to Columbus, in part because only his voyages produced an ever-enlarging flow of knowledge about America in the rest of the world—a fact that cannot be granted to either the first settlers or the Viking seamen. This general consensus notwithstanding, since the beginnings of European expansion to the Americas, colonizers and historians sought to construct a European presence on the continent that preceded Columbus’s voyage. The Norse voyages to the early-21st-century Maritime Provinces of Canada remain to be the only securely documented pre-Columbian contacts; yet, the search for other migrations, some even reaching back to the Pleistocene Age, has never ended. The reasons for the persistence of, at times, highly fanciful theories of an earlier European presence in America include the desire for strengthening the legitimacy of the morally difficult conquest, presumably by weakening the territorial claims of Native Americans, as well as the desire for stories about the mythical past of the Atlantic world that harbor an aesthetic value in themselves. This article discusses both mythical and academically documented pre-Columbian voyages across the Atlantic Ocean, including examples of academic mythology.

There are very few book-length studies on the historical “gap” between the Norse voyages of the early 1000s and the early modern voyages beginning around 1500. The academic field is generally divided between studies dedicated to the medieval Norse settlements, studies on imaginary medieval voyages (see section on Ancient European Traditions about Atlantic Crossings ), and studies on the Mediterranean and early Atlantic prehistory of the Columbian voyages. Seaver 1995 is the most knowledgeable exploration of both the Norse contacts with the Western Hemisphere and the period between the Viking voyages and Cabot’s voyages. Fernández-Armesto 1994 approaches the problematic from the perspective of the medieval and early modern Mediterranean and tries to reconstruct the intellectual legacy informing the Columbian moment. Kupperman 2012 concentrates on the period after 1600 but includes up-to-date speculations about pre-Columbian Mediterranean contacts. Earlier studies are Sauer 1968 , written in the light of the Ingstads’ discovery of Norse settlement remains at L’Anse aux Meadows, and Quinn 1977 in which an eminent authority of Atlantic history discusses the “mythical” dimension of the American desire to obtain evidence for a continuous transatlantic relationship—a dimension that the title of the book strengthens by suggesting a “Norse” continuity between the Viking encounters and those of the Columbian period.

Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonisation from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229–1492 . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

A survey of the expansionist and the more general intellectual itinerary that prepared Europe for the transatlantic Voyages of the early modern period, guided by the critical approach of the history of ideas.

Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. The Atlantic in World History . New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

General survey whose first chapter makes reference to pre-Columbian voyages into and possibly across the Atlantic Ocean (voyages to the Canaries, the Cape Verdes, the Azores, and Madeira).

Quinn, David Beers. North America from Earliest Discovery to First Settlements: The Norse Voyages to 1612 . New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

Reads the Norse voyages from the perspective of a leading scholar of early modern Atlantic settlement and exploration, with the term “Norse” referring neither to a geographical area nor to the nationality of the explorers but rather suggesting a continuity between the travels of the Vikings and those of early modern explorers and settlers.

Sauer, Carl O. Northern Mists . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.

An early classic investigation, by a renowned scholar of Atlantic and Early American history, of the possibility of pre-Columbian Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Breton, Norse, English, and Irish transatlantic voyages. The book is celebrated for its poetic presentation of the facts as they were then known and for indicating the line between reconstruction and speculation.

Seaver, Kirsten A. The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America, ca. 1000–1500 . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.

Discusses the historical gap between the Viking voyages and the voyage of Columbus.

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Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database

Solving 'the greatest mystery in the history of the west'.

Map from the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database

Courtesy of Voyages

Until very recently, many African Americans were unable to trace their ancestors’ first steps in America because so few credible records were available.

That absence constitutes “the greatest mystery in the history of the West,” according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University professor and producer of the PBS documentary African American Lives. “Their ancestries, their identities, their stories were lost in the ships that carried them across the Atlantic.”

Or so it seemed. Often records did exist – but they were isolated in scores of locations in a number of countries. The NEH-supported "Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database" has allowed those records to be combined and collated so that the public can follow for the first time the routes of slave ships that transported 12.5 million Africans across the Atlantic from the 16th through the 19th century.

The free online database, housed at Emory University, incorporates 40 years of archival research and brings together images, maps, voyage logs and other records of about 35,000 transatlantic slave ship crossings. Records of trade routes offer historians a fuller picture of the economic and political dimensions of the slave trade. For example, users can search for information about a specific voyage or a large subset of data, such as all voyages under the Portuguese flag.

The site’s African Names Databases identifies 67,000 Africans, bound for slavery in North and South America, but liberated after their ships were stopped by the Royal Navy. These records are sortable by name, gender origin, and place of embarkation.

Professor Gates has credited the “Voyages” project with shedding important light on the history of 12.5 million slaves. "The multi-decade and collaborative project that brought us [the Voyages] site has done more to reverse the Middle Passage than any other single act of scholarship possibly could," he said.

Read more about the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database in Humanities magazine: " Gross Injustice: The Slave Trade by the Numbers ."

Funding information

Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database is supported by grants from NEH's Division of Preservation and Access .

Documenting Slave Voyages

Led by Emory, a massive digital memorial shines new light on one of the most harrowing chapters of human history

Published in The Illustrated London News on June 20, 1857, this image depicts the capture of the slave ship "Zeldina" and the conditions of the enslaved people who were onboard. Reproduced courtesy Emory's Rose Library.

For African American families seeking clues to their ancestry, the task is too often stymied by a history that defies documentation.

In fact, the drive toward discovery frequently ends abruptly with the scant record-keeping that surrounds the American slave trade — people kept as property with names simply lost to history.

So when Henry Louis Gates Jr. works with guests on the acclaimed PBS program “ Finding Your Roots ” whose family stories have been obscured by slavery, he routinely looks for clues in Emory University’s “Slave Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database .”

“And it’s a gold mine,” says Gates, director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University — an early supporter of the Slave Voyages project — who calls it “one of the most dramatically significant research projects in the history of African studies, African American studies and the history of world slavery itself.”

When the Washington Post recently covered the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first known enslaved Africans upon “Jamestown’s muddy shores” in colonial Virginia, the article relied upon maps and chart data sourced directly from Emory’s Slave Voyages database to help illustrate a moment that would open centuries of subjugation for millions of people.

And when work began on a new  International African American Museum  in Charleston, South Carolina, curators knew they could turn to Slave Voyages for definitive data on the slave trade that once ran through the very site of the project, Gadsden’s Wharf — once a point of entry for nearly half of all slaves brought to the U.S.

Ten years ago, when Emory created a website dedicated to data that provided a broader, more complete portrait of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, there was nothing quite like it in the world.

Today, the updated and expanded database has become one of the most utilized resources in the digital humanities.

Recognized as a preeminent resource for the study of slavery across the Atlantic, the project has won acclaim for consolidating data from archival resources across five continents, unifying diverse threads of scholarship, and shining new light upon a harrowing chapter of human history.

“If there were a Pulitzer Prize given for historical databases, the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database would win it, hands down,” says Gates, Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard.

“It’s the first time in the history of human enslavement that scholars have been able to count the enslaved human beings trapped in the nightmare of human bondage.” — Henry Louis Gates Jr.

New website showcases new data

With a focus on advancing public scholarship and collaboration, the newly redesigned site can attract more than 1,000 visitors a day, including educators, scholars, scientists, artists, genealogists and curators with national museums and history centers.

But cataloguing data covering more than three centuries of voyages from Africa to the New World — among the largest slave routes in human history — captured only part of the picture.

Once across the Atlantic, up to 20 percent of enslaved Africans were then dispatched on yet another voyage to their final destinations within the Americas, from Boston to Buenos Aires, even Pacific ports or hundreds of miles inland, especially in Brazil.

Now, with support from the National Endowment of the Humanities, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Board, a team of international scholars — many with Emory roots — has partnered with Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) to update and expand slavevoyages.org.

Hear Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., host/producer of the PBS series “Finding Your Roots," discuss the impact of the redesigned SlaveVoyages.org.

Significantly, the redesign incorporates a trove of new data on the lesser-explored intra-American slave trade, effectively redrawing the map of slavery throughout the Americas and opening staggering new vistas of research.

“The trans-Atlantic slave trade marked the largest long-distance coerced movement of people in history and, prior to the mid-nineteenth century, formed the major demographic well-spring for the re-peopling of the Americas,” notes Emory historian David Eltis, Robert W. Woodruff Professor Emeritus of History and co-director of the Slave Voyages project.

From the late fifteenth century, the Atlantic Ocean became a “commercial highway” that integrated the histories of Africa, Europe and the Americas for the first time. And slavery and the slave trade formed the linchpins of the process, Eltis says.

Visitors to the website can now explore the involvement of the entire Atlantic world in the slave trade, histories of regions, the relationship between slavery and freedom, commercial factors that supported the slave trade, and why it came to an end, he says. 

“There isn’t a single port of any size anywhere in the Atlantic that wasn’t connected to the slave trade in some way,” he says. “Now, we can track systematic connections between Africa and the Americas in a way that people have been doing for years between Europe and the Americas.”

Bringing history to life through big data

Mapping history: See 14,289 slave voyages cross the Atlantic in a few minutes, or hone in on specific years, by viewing the full timelapse video on SlaveVoyages.org.

The Slave Voyages site now provides resources detailing more than 36,000 slave trading voyages between Africa and the New World, another 11,400 intra-American voyages from one part of the Americas to another, and data on some 92,000 Africans forced to make those journeys.

A smoother, expanded user experience features even more data about those voyages, identifying specific slave vessels — along with those who sailed them — route maps and timelines, as well as the names of many enslaved Africans.

The result? Consolidated information that reveals patterns and connections once obscured by barriers of language and geography.

The databases on SlaveVoyages.org are the culmination of several decades of independent and collaborative research by scholars drawing upon data in libraries and archives around the Atlantic world.

Interactive features allow users to analyze a vast volume of data, sample estimates of the slave trade, view videos, maps and 3-D animation, consult research essays and lesson plans, and contribute new discoveries, says Gates, who narrates an  introductory video  to the site.

Animated  maps  trace the routes of more than 14,000 slave voyages across the Atlantic in minutes. And a sweeping new 3D video provides both a drone’s-eye-view and a fly-through of the 18 th -century slave vessel L’Aurore, reproduced from original architectural plans.

For the first time, visitors can see how enslaved men and women were physically separated, how they were shackled and packed together like cargo to sleep, and explore the cramped, cruel spaces that the ship’s approximately 600 captives had to endure on their two-month passage from Africa to the Caribbean.

In the future, the website will afford an even more complete picture, with expanded biographical data on individuals caught up in the slave trade, both the enslaved and their enslavers. The initiative,  People of the Atlantic Slave Trade (PAST) , is funded by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation .

Features that will add both details and dimension to the story of slavery in the Americas — a history now brought to life through the power of big data.

Take a 3-D look inside the slave vessel L'Aurore, reconstructed using actual blueprints of the ship. Get a glimpse here, or watch the full video on SlaveVoyages.org.

Emory historian David Eltis has overseen the database's transition from punch cards to CD-ROM to today's interactive website.

The vision behind ‘Slave Voyages’

For years, the vast, collaborative scope of the Slave Voyages project has been nurtured and guided by Eltis, who envisioned a resource rooted in shared scholarship.

In the early 1960s, when he was an undergraduate, slavery was just emerging as an academic discipline, still considered “a fringe topic” among most historians, recalls Eltis.

However, its study would be advanced through the trailblazing scholarship of American historian Philip Curtin, one of the first researchers to estimate the number of enslaved Africans to cross the Atlantic between the 16th and 19 th  centuries, where they were captured, how many perished during the Middle Passage and where they disembarked.

Though his projections are now considered low by today’s estimates, the work was groundbreaking. It also established what would become the nascent beginning of a database, which Curtin eventually shared with Eltis.

But with voyages that embarked on one continent and ended on another, “there were so many different kinds of records, thousands of miles apart across the Atlantic world,” Eltis recalls.

Development of a single, multi-source dataset was kindled by fate, when Eltis happened to meet historian Stephen Behrendt while waiting in line at the British Public Record Office in 1990. The project was quickly enriched by the collaborative scholarship of historian David Richardson, former director of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull, in Yorkshire, England.

Over time, the data grew and evolved with advancing technology. Eltis would oversee its migration from punch cards to laptop computer to “The Transatlantic Slave Trade,” a CD-ROM released in 1999 with the backing of a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities showcasing maps and data on more than 27,000 slave voyages.

But the format carried limitations, and Eltis knew they were missing an important chapter.

“The big hole was the South Atlantic trade,” he acknowledges.

"The trans-Atlantic slave trade was the largest long-distance coerced movement of people in history."  

— emory historian david eltis.

Titled "Ménagerie," this engraving from 1667 illustrates enslaved people processing tobacco in the yard of a large farm or plantation. A copy of the image is housed at the John Carter Brown Library of Brown University.

Historical images: The Brig “Vigilante” was a French slaver captured in 1822. She departed from France and carried 345 slaves from the coast of Africa, but she was intercepted by anti-slave trade cruisers before sailing to the Americas and taken to Freetown, Sierra Leone. Learn more about the Viglante on SlaveVoyages.org.

International collaboration

By 2008, the database found a home at Emory as a free, open-access website examining the forced migration of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic world.

From its inception, collaboration has been a hallmark of the project, which encourages researchers to contribute their own new discoveries and correct errors, Eltis says.

For the past five years, for example, Marial Iglesias Utset, a historian of the Cuban slave trade and visiting research scholar at the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard’s Hutchins Center, has worked closely with Eltis to add the numbers of Africans sent to Cuba, consulting the site almost daily.

In fact, Eltis finds it difficult to identify an international project devoted to preserving and reconstructing history that has been more dependent upon collaboration — a model foundational to future growth.

Across the years, the database has been guided by a multi-disciplinary team of international scholars and historians, librarians, cartographers, computer programmers, designers and digital experts. Now a major digital publishing project, the website is physically tended by ECDS, which manages logistics, coding and technical support.

“This involves some of the newest technology applied to some of the world’s oldest questions and primary sources,” says ECDS Co-Director Allen Tullos, Emory history professor and senior editor of  Southern Spaces .

“How did the Spanish, the British and the Dutch engage in larger questions of slavery, forced migration and colonialism? Now you can look at maps, charts and tables that provide a broader picture of history across centuries, making big comparisons across time and space.”

For Tullos and the ECDS team, helping redesign and relaunch the website has been an opportunity “to really contribute to knowledge about some of the worst dimensions of human history, bringing this information forward so it won’t be forgotten.”

Scholars who once studied with David Eltis at Emory have become the next generation of slave trade researchers

‘A landmark of crowd-sourcing’

Over the past decade, primary responsibility for supporting the site has been shouldered by Emory. But to help ensure sustainability, a new consortium of universities is coming together to help maintain the site, update it and guide it for future generations.

Each Monday, behind-the-scenes collaborators connect across multiple time zones for weekly Skype meetings. Many are alumni of Emory’s Laney Graduate School,  PhD students who once studied with Eltis, now emerging as the next generation of slave trade scholars.

“It’s been an amazing example of generosity and collegiality, a passing of the baton,” notes Tullos.

Meet the next generation of scholars: Nafees Khan, an assistant professor of social foundations at Clemson University, holds a PhD in educational studies from Emory.

Take, for example, Nafees Khan, an assistant professor of social foundations at Clemson University who holds a PhD in educational studies from Emory and now serves as the project’s curriculum advisor, helping others teach about slavery.

His work ranges from creating lesson plans for grade school teachers to consulting on the development of the new  International African American Museum  in Charleston.

“Any time I present this information, the interaction has been meaningful — for many, this is so new,” Khan says. “When it comes to the legacies of race, it’s definitely pushed the conversation.”

Meet the next generation of scholars: Alex Borucki, who also earned his PhD at Emory, is now associate professor of history at University of California – Irvine.

Much of the new intra-American slave trade data arose from the research of Emory PhD alumnus Alex Borucki, associate professor of history at University of California Irvine, and Greg O’Malley, associate professor of history at University of California Santa Cruz. 

“Through the scope of international collaboration, you find yourself working with people from every corner of the world,” Borucki says. “It’s been a landmark of crowd-sourcing and longstanding research collaboration, and also of trust between research teams.”

Meet the next generation of scholars: Emory PhD alumnus Daniel Domingues da Silva is assistant professor of African history at Rice University and a Voyages executive board member.

Since the database was first published, Eltis credits the contributions of more than 50 scholars and researchers. Ongoing discoveries help make the database feel organic, “in the sense that it’s always growing,” says Emory PhD alumnus Daniel Domingues da Silva, assistant professor of African history at Rice University and Voyages executive board member.

Now, Voyages is being replicated, inspiring similar projects around the world.

Gates points to scholarship in England directed by historian Catherine Hall, who is compiling data about the practice of compensating slaves owners — but not enslaved Africans —  for the loss of “property” when slavery was abolished in the British colonies in 1833.

Meet the next generation of scholars: Jane Hooper earned her PhD at Emory and is now associate professor of history at George Mason University and a Voyages executive team member.

Or consider the work of Emory PhD alum Jane Hooper, associate professor of history at George Mason University and a Voyages executive team member, who researches the Indian Ocean slave trade, which substantially predates the trans-Atlantic trade and lasted much longer. 

Using the Slave Voyages model — scholars working together, sharing data — the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam is now in talks to create a similar database examining slave trade in the Indian Ocean and maritime Asia.

European colonizers turned to Africa for enslaved laborers to build the cities and extract the resources of the Americas, forcing millions of Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas.

— slavevoyages.org.

"Cutting the Sugar-Cane," an image originally published in 1833 by the Infant School Society Depository in London. Original housed in the John Carter Brown Library of Brown University.

Understanding the scope of the slave trade

Why is it so important to preserve and understand this data?

Register from The Brigantine "Virtude": The register was kept as a formal record of emancipation that helped protect people from subsequent re-enslavement. The image is reproduced courtesy of the British National Archives and is one of many catalogued on SlaveVoyages.org .

"The contributions of this website to the self-knowledge of African Americans, not just in the U.S. but throughout the New World, cannot be overestimated," Gates says.

When an African American guest on "Finding Our Roots" receives their African admixture results from DNA testing, which tells them the various regions that their collective black ancestors came from in Africa, his team then compares those results to statistics in the database.

"For example, if a DNA test says 20 percent of their ancestors came from what is now Angola, we then see what ships were coming in to the U.S. from Angola at about the time we estimate their ancestor might have arrived," he explains.

As importantly, it helps enlighten a public that still doesn’t always grasp the massive scope of forced human migration.

“I speak all over the country about genealogy, genetics and the slave trade," Gates says. "My favorite rhetorical device is to ask the audience ‘How many Africans were shipped directly from Africa to the United States?’”

“We know 12.5 million Africans got on the boats, 10.8 million Africans survived the Middle Passage and got off boats throughout the New World,” Gates says.

The guesses roll in: 2 million, 5 million — all wrong.

“The answer is 388,000 — no one can believe it,” he adds. “And we didn’t know this for sure, this surprisingly counter-intuitive fact, until David Eltis and David Richardson compiled the statistics in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database.”

It’s remarkable, illustrating how much is still misunderstood about the slave trade, “because we as Americans were raised to think that slavery was all about us … In point of fact, Haiti, Cuba and Brazil got many, many more Africans in the slave trade than the United States did,” he says.

Frustrated by reading wildly fluctuating estimates of African captives shipped through the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the New York Times, Gates recently wrote Editor-in-Chief Dean P. Baquet asking him to establish as official policy the authority of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database’s numbers. 

And he agreed, Gates says.

“Now, if you read an article in the Times and it will say that approximately 12.5 million Africans   were shipped to the New World, it’s by the authority of Transatlantic Slave Trade Database,” he says. “It’s all because of David (Eltis) and his colleagues.”

ABOUT THIS STORY:

Written by Kimber Williams. Videos courtesy of SlaveVoyages.org and the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. Historical images courtesy of SlaveVoyages.org. Photos of researchers by Kay Hinton. Design by Elizabeth Hautau Karp and Laura Douglas-Brown.

Want to know more?

Please visit the emory news center and emory university ..

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3 First English Voyage (1497)

Giovanni Caboto (c. 1450-c. 1500) was a Venetian navigator and explorer. He was commissioned by King Henry VII in 1496 to sail for England, partly in hope of finding an alternate route to Asia, similar to Columbus. In 1497, John Cabot (as the English called him) sailed to Newfoundland. His son, Sebastian Cabot, sailed south along the Atlantic coast in the following decade as far as the Chesapeake and north to Hudson’s Bay, seeking a Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean. Although every explorer hoped to find cities of gold, some of the commodities the English hoped access were a dye-wood believed to come from the mythical land of Hy-Brasil and Cod, which had likely been fished by the Vikings and more recently in the fifteenth century by the Basques and Portuguese on the Grand Banks, adjacent to Newfoundland. These fisheries were so valuable that access to them was typically mentioned in treaties between nations (including the Treaty of Paris that concluded the American Revolution). Cabot recorded that when he reached the Banks, he saw over a thousand fishing boats from Iberia.

(Pasqualigo was a Venetian, resident in London. Soncino was Ambassador of the city-state of Milan.)

A LETTER FROM LORENZO PASQUALIGO TO HIS BROTHERS ALVISE AND FRANCESCO

London, 23rd August, 1497.

Our Venetian, who went with a small ship from Bristol to find new islands, has come back and says he has discovered, 700 leagues off, the mainland of the country of the Grau Cam [Tartary, ie. China] and that he coasted along it for 300 leagues and landed but did not see any person. But he has brought here to the king certain snares spread to take game and a needle for making nets. And he found some notched trees, from which he judged that there were inhabitants. Being in doubt, he came back to the ship. He has been away three months on the voyage, which is certain. And in returning he saw two islands to the right but he did not wish to land, lest he should lose time for he was in want of provisions. This king has been much pleased. He says that the tides are slack and do not make currents as they do here. The king has promised for another time, ten armed ships as he desires and has given him all the prisoners except such as are confined for high treason to go with him as he has requested. And has granted him money to amuse himself till then. Meanwhile he is with his Venetian wife and his sons at Bristol. His name is Zuam Talbot and he is called the Great Admiral, great honor being paid to him and he goes dressed in silk. The English are ready to go with him and so are many of our rascals. The discoverer of these things has planted a large cross in the ground with a banner of England. And one of St. Mark, as he is a Venetian; so that our flag has been hoisted very far away.

DISPATCH OF RAIMONDO DI SONCINO TO THE DUKE OF MILAN

18th December, 1497.

My most illustrious and most excellent Lord,

Perhaps amidst so many occupations of your Excellency it will not be unwelcome to learn how his Majesty has acquired a part of Asia without drawing his sword. In this kingdom there is a certain Venetian named Zoanne Caboto, of gentle disposition, very expert in navigation. Who seeing that the most serene Kings of Portugal and Spain had occupied unknown islands, meditated the achievement of a similar acquisition for the said Majesty. Having obtained royal privileges securing to himself the use of the dominions he might discover, the sovereignty being reserved to the Crown, he entrusted his fortune to a small vessel with a crew of 18 persons and set out from Bristol, a port in the western part of this kingdom. Having passed Hibernia [Ireland] which is still further to the west and then shaped a northerly course, he began to navigate to the eastern part, leaving (during several days) the north star on the right hand. And having wandered thus far a long time, at length he hit upon land where he hoisted the royal standard and took possession for this Highness. And having obtained various proofs of his discovery, he returned. The said Messer Zoanne being a foreigner and poor, would not have been believed if the crew, who are nearly all English and belonging to Bristol, had not testified that what he said was the truth. This Messer Zoanne has the description of the world on a chart and also on a solid sphere which he has constructed and on which he shows where he has been. And proceeding towards the east, he has passed as far as the country of the Tanais. And they say that there the land is excellent and temperate, suggesting that brasil [dye-wood] and silk grow there. They affirm that the sea is full of fish which are not only taken with a net but also with a basket, a stone being fastened to it in order to keep it in the water. And this I have heard stated by the said Messer Zoanne.

The said Englishmen his companions say that they took so many fish that this kingdom will no longer have need of Iceland, from which country there is an immense trade in the fish they call stock-fish [Cod]. But Messer Zoanne has set his mind on higher things for he thinks that, when that place has been occupied, he will keep on still further to the east where he will be opposite to an island called Cipango [Japan] situated in the equinoctial region where he believes that all the spices of the world as well as the jewels are found. He further says that he was once at Mecca, whither the spices are brought by caravans from distant countries. And having inquired from whence they were brought and where they grow, they answered they did not know but that such merchandise was brought from distant countries by other caravans to their home and they further say that they are also conveyed from other remote regions. And he adduced this argument, that if the eastern people tell those in the south that these things come from a far distance from them, presupposing the rotundity of the earth it must be that the last turn would be by the north towards the west. And it is said that in this way the route would not cost more than it costs now and I also believe it.

And what is more, this Majesty who is wise and not prodigal reposes such trust in him because of what he has already achieved that he gives him a good maintenance, as Messer Zoanne has himself told me. And it is said that before long his Majesty will arm some ships for him and will give him all the malefactors to go to that country and form a colony, so that they hope to establish a greater depot of spices in London than there is in Alexandria. The principal people in the enterprise belong to Bristol. They are great seamen and now that they know where to go, they say that the voyage thither will not occupy more than 15 days after leaving Hibernia. I have also spoken with a Burgundian who was a companion of Messer Zoanne, who affirms all this and who wishes to return because the Admiral (for so Messer Zoanne is entitled) has given him an island and has given another to his barber of Castione, who is a Genoese. And both look upon themselves as Counts, nor do they look upon my Lord the Admiral as less than a Prince. I also believe that some poor Italian friars are going on this voyage, who have all had bishoprics promised to them. And if I had made friends with the Admiral when he was about to sail, I should have got an archbishopric at least, but I have thought that the benefits reserved for me by your Excellency will be more secure. I would venture to pray that in the event of a vacancy taking place in my absence, I may be put in possession and that I may not be superseded by those who being present can be more diligent than I, who am reduced in this country to eating at each meal ten or twelve kinds of victuals and to being three hours at table every day, two for love of your Excellency, to whom I humbly recommend myself. London, 18 Dec. 1497, your Excellency’s most humble servant.

Source: “John Cabot and the First English Voyage to America” (1497), Lorenzo Pasqualigo and Raimondo di Soncino (Translated by Clements R. Markham, 1893), “Documents relating to the Voyages of Discovery of John Cabot”, in Hakluyt Society, Works (London, 1893), 201-206., American History Told By Contemporaries , Alfred Bushnell Hart, ed., 1897. 69-72. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.45493/page/n89/mode/2up

American History Told By Contemporaries Copyright © by Dan Allosso is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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6b. "The Middle Passage"

The "packing" was done as efficiently as possible. The captives lay down on unfinished planking with virtually no room to move or breathe. Elbows and wrists will be scraped to the bone by the motion of the rough seas.

Some will die of disease, some of starvation, and some simply of despair. This was the fate of millions of West Africans across three and a half centuries of the slave trade on the voyage known as the "middle passage."

Two philosophies dominated the loading of a slave ship. " Loose packing " provided for fewer slaves per ship in the hopes that a greater percentage of the cargo would arrive alive. " Tight packing " captains believed that more slaves, despite higher casualties, would yield a greater profit at the trading block.

Doctors would inspect the slaves before purchase from the African trader to determine which individuals would most likely survive the voyage. In return, the traders would receive guns, gunpowder, rum or other sprits, textiles or trinkets.

The " middle passage ," which brought the slaves from West Africa to the West Indies, might take three weeks. Unfavorable weather conditions could make the trip much longer.

Slaves were fed twice daily and some captains made vain attempts to clean the hold at this time. Air holes were cut into the deck to allow the slaves breathing air, but these were closed in stormy conditions. The bodies of the dead were simply thrust overboard. And yes, there were uprisings.

Upon reaching the West Indies, the slaves were fed and cleaned in the hopes of bringing a high price on the block. Those that could not be sold were left for dead. The slaves were then transported to their final destination. It was in this unspeakable manner that between ten and twenty million Africans were introduced to the New World.

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A Digital Archive of Slave Voyages Details the Largest Forced Migration in History

An online database explores the nearly 36,000 slave voyages that occurred between 1514 and 1866

Philip Misevich, Daniel Domingues, David Eltis, Nafees M. Khan and Nicholas Radburn, The Conversation

Between 1500 and 1866, slave traders forced  12.5 million  Africans aboard transatlantic slave vessels. Before 1820, four enslaved Africans crossed the Atlantic for every European, making Africa the demographic wellspring for the repopulation of the Americas after Columbus’ voyages. The slave trade pulled  virtually every port  that faced the Atlantic Ocean – from Copenhagen to Cape Town and Boston to Buenos Aires – into its orbit.

To document this enormous trade – the largest forced oceanic migration in human history – our team launched  Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database , a freely available online resource that lets visitors search through and analyze information on nearly 36,000 slave voyages that occurred between 1514 and 1866.

Inspired by the remarkable public response, we recently developed an animation feature that helps bring into clearer focus the horrifying scale and duration of the trade. The site also recently implemented a system for visitors to contribute new data. In the last year alone we have added more than a thousand new voyages and revised details on many others.

The data have revolutionized scholarship on the slave trade and provided the foundation for new insights into how enslaved people experienced and resisted their captivity. They have also further underscored the distinctive transatlantic connections that the trade fostered.

Records of unique slave voyages lie at the heart of the project. Clicking on individual voyages listed in the site opens their profiles, which comprise more than 70 distinct fields that collectively help tell that voyage’s story.

From which port did the voyage begin? To which places in Africa did it go? How many enslaved people perished during the Middle Passage? And where did those enslaved Africans end the oceanic portion of their enslavement and begin their lives as slaves in the Americas?

Working with complex data

Given the size and complexity of the slave trade, combining the sources that document slave ships’ activities into a single database has presented numerous challenges. Records are written in numerous languages and maintained in archives, libraries and private collections located in dozens of countries. Many of these are developing nations that lack the financial resources to invest in sustained systems of document preservation.

Even when they are relatively easy to access, documents on slave voyages provide uneven information.  Ship logs  comprehensively describe places of travel and list the numbers of enslaved people purchased and the captain and crew. By contrast, port-entry records in newspapers might merely produce the name of the vessel and the number of captives who survived the Middle Passage.

These varied sources can be hard to reconcile. The numbers of slaves loaded or removed from a particular vessel might vary widely. Or perhaps a vessel carried registration papers that aimed to mask its actual origins, especially after the legal abolition of the trade in 1808.

Compiling these data in a way that does justice to their complexity, while still keeping the site user-friendly, has remained  an ongoing concern .

Of course, not all slave voyages left surviving records. Gaps will consequently remain in coverage, even if they continue to narrow. Perhaps three out of every four slaving voyages are now documented in the database. Aiming to account for missing data, a separate  assessment tool  enables users to gain a clear understanding of the volume and structure of the slave trade and consider how it changed over time and across space.

Engagement with Voyages site

While gathering data on the slave trade is not new, using these data to compile comprehensive databases for the public has become feasible only in the internet age. Digital projects make it possible to reach a much larger audience with more diverse interests. We often hear from teachers and students who use the site in the classroom, from scholars whose research draws on material in the database and from individuals who consult the project to better understand their heritage.

Through a  contribute function , site visitors can also submit new material on transatlantic slave voyages and help us identify errors in the data.

The real strength of the project – and of digital history more generally – is that it encourages visitors to interact with sources and materials that they might not otherwise be able to access. That turns users into historians, allowing them to contextualize a single slave voyage or analyze local, national and Atlantic-wide patterns. How did the survival rate among captives during the Middle Passage change over time? What was the typical ratio of male to female captives? How often did insurrections occur aboard slave ships? From which African port did most enslaved people sent to, say, Virginia originate?

Scholars have used Voyages to address these and many other questions and have in the process transformed our understanding of just about every aspect of the slave trade. We learned that shipboard revolts occurred most often among slaves who came from regions in Africa that supplied comparatively few slaves. Ports tended to send slave vessels to the same African regions in search of enslaved people and dispatch them to familiar places for sale in the Americas. Indeed, slave voyages followed a seasonal pattern that was conditioned at least in part by agricultural cycles on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The slave trade was both highly structured and carefully organized.

The website also continues to collect  lesson plans  that teachers have created for middle school, high school and college students. In one exercise, students must create a memorial to the captives who experienced the Middle Passage, using the site to inform their thinking.  One recent college course  situates students in late 18th-century Britain, turning them into collaborators in the abolition campaign who use Voyages to gather critical information on the slave trade’s operations.

Voyages has also provided a model for other projects, including a  forthcoming database  that documents slave ships that operated strictly within the Americas.

We also continue to work in parallel with the  African Origins  database. The project invites users to identify the likely backgrounds of nearly 100,000 Africans liberated from slave vessels based on their indigenous names. By combining those names with information from Voyages on liberated Africans’ ports of origin, the Origins website aims to better understand the homelands from which enslaved people came.

Through these endeavors, Voyages has become a digital memorial to the millions of enslaved Africans forcibly pulled into the slave trade and, until recently, nearly erased from the history of not only the trade itself, but also the history of the Atlantic world.

Philip Misevich, Assistant Professor of History, St. John's University

Daniel Domingues, Assistant Professor of History, University of Missouri-Columbia

David Eltis, Professor Emeritus of History, Emory University

Nafees M. Khan, Lecturer in Social Studies Education, Clemson University

Nicholas Radburn, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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5.2 Crossing the Atlantic

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Explain how technological innovations in the fifteenth century made transatlantic journey s possible
• Discuss the motives for Spanish and Portuguese exploration in the Americas
• Analyze the impact of the Treaty of Tordesillas on the Atlantic World
• Describe the physical and cultural ramifications of the Columbian Exchange

During the European Middle Ages, the Middle East and North Africa entered a golden age of learning. As Europeans increasingly made connections with peoples across the Mediterranean and in Central and East Asia, ideas from this golden age trickled back to them that influenced sailors, explorers, and shipbuilders. Then, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, innovators in navigation and exploration pushed Europeans to expand their trade networks across the globe and connect with new places and peoples. The most notable voyages of this period, known as the Age of Exploration , were the transatlantic voyages of Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus in the 1490s, underwritten by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain.

The Rise of Maritime Nations

Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage did not represent the first contact between European explorers and Indigenous peoples on the North America n continent. Through archaeological and historical research, historians can now date that contact to nearly five hundred years before Columbus reached his first stop in the Caribbean.

In the early 1000s, Leif Erikson , a Viking explorer living in Greenland, heard from fellow explorer Bjarni Herjólfsson that another land lay only a few hundred miles to the west. In a journey during which he was blown off course, Erikson found a land to the west that he called Vinland, for the grapes that grew near its shores. He stayed there only through the winter, never making direct contact with the Indigenous peoples and returning to Greenland in the spring. His brother Thorvald was the first to make contact, which ended in violent conflict and the deaths of several Native Americans and Thorvald himself. In a third exploration, men and women of Erikson’s family encountered the Indigenous people of Vinland again but maintained peace, creating a small but steady relationship with them based on trade ( Figure 5.6 ).

The Viking explorers referred to these Indigenous peoples as Skraelings . Scholars are not sure which Indigenous group they belonged to, but twentieth-century archaeological digs in Nova Scotia have verified much of the information found in the Icelandic sagas of Vinland. In the 1960s, explorers Helge and Anne Ingstad discovered in Newfoundland , Canada, the buried ruins of a Viking camp from around the time of Erikson’s explorations, in a place called L’Anse aux Meadows. This find definitively proved at last that the Norse had traveled to the Americas before Columbus. Over the years, it has been suggested that other people besides the Vikings also discovered the Americas before Columbus, including Irish monks, African sailors, and Chinese members of Admiral Zheng He’s treasure fleet. There is no widely accepted proof of any of these voyages, however.

Link to Learning

Learn how archaeologists found evidence of Viking settlers in Canada and were able to determine the year the Norse were in North America.

The settlements in Newfoundland never became permanent, likely because Indigenous groups developed an increasing hostility toward the often-violent Vikings. By the 1400s, the frontier colonies of Greenland populated by Norse peoples had also all but disappeared. But knowledge of a land farther west survived in the Norse sagas, and it is possible that it trickled across Europe into Italy and Spain and eventually into the mind of a young Christopher Columbus.

In the meantime, with the collapse of Constantinople and the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Ottomans in 1453, many Europeans felt a sense of doom. Not only had they lost a bastion of Christian power, but Muslims now controlled their tenuous overland connections to South and East Asia. As a result, they now had to go through Muslim intermediaries to purchase valuable spices such as cinnamon, pepper, cloves, and nutmeg that grew in only a few key locations. European nations, therefore, wanted to find an all-water passage to India and the chain of sparsely populated Indonesian islands known as the Spice Islands.

In the fifteenth century, Europe experienced a timely navigational revolution as a result of adopting new non-Western maritime technologies. In the first millennium CE, Arab sailors in the Middle East had created the lateen sail , a triangular sail that allowed ships to travel against the wind. The square European sail gave ships power, but the lateen sail increased their ability to maneuver. When Europeans combined the two kinds of sail on three-masted ships, they could navigate confidently in any direction. The sternpost rudder , created in China in the thirteenth century, also allowed for steering against the currents. For directional guidance, the ancient Greek astrolabe , which used constellations as a guide and enabled mariners to find their north–south position on the earth’s surface, came to Europe after being refined in the Middle East ( Figure 5.7 ). The magnetic compass also came to Europe in the fifteenth century, making its way from China where it was guiding ships by 1100 CE. The adoption of these inventions allowed Europeans to abandon their long-standing practice of navigating by sailing along a coastline. Now they could venture into the open ocean, beyond sight of land.

Learn how an astrolabe works in this video, “How to use an astrolabe,” by William Greenwood of the British Museum, a short but thorough explanation of the mechanics of an incredible navigational tool.

However, technological advancements and a desire for expanded trade and territory could take explorers only so far without financial backing. The commercial empire that funded European overseas exploration began in the Italian city-states of the Middle Ages, but the investment system on which it was based did not originate there. This system, called commenda , established a sort of financial patronage by which investors funded merchants to expand their trading enterprises and earned a more extensive business network in the process. Like many of the technologies that drove European ships, the commenda was first developed by Muslim merchants.

By the late fifteenth century, Italian city-states were supporting a variety of small family-owned businesses and large companies. Capital was concentrated in land and commerce rather than in industrial pursuits, but credit was widely used. Across Europe, risk-sharing business ventures and joint investment schemes were already commonplace among merchants. Spain, which Muslim rulers had conquered and settled, had connections across the Mediterranean to Africa and the Middle East, while northern and central Europe wielded a sprawling maritime exchange across the North and Baltic Seas.

Portuguese Exploration

In the late 1400s, both Portugal and Spain were emerging from centuries of rule by North Africa n Muslim states. Portugal had become an independent country by the twelfth century ( Figure 5.8 ). At the beginning of the fifteenth century, it was a small country with poor soil. However, it did have one advantage—a geographical location that lent itself to exploration, specifically down the African coastline and across the Atlantic. Portugal also had plenty of coves and natural harbors suited for shipping, and speedy crosswinds and currents that gave it a shipping superhighway of sorts between northern and southern Europe. Various nearby islands such as the Azores also teemed with untapped fishing potential.

In the 1340s, King Afonso IV of Portugal raised public funds to build a commercial fleet that by the fifteenth century had transformed the nation into a maritime power. In 1341, the Portuguese sailed to the Canary Islands in the Atlantic. This was only the beginning of their exploration and conquest. In 1415, John I , grandson of Afonso IV, dispatched Portuguese forces to capture the city of Ceuta in Morocco. John hoped that control of a port on the North African coast would open that continent to both conquest and trade. To further cement his control of the region, he requested papal recognition of his efforts. In April 1418, Pope Martin V granted the Portuguese king the right to all African lands taken from Muslim rulers.

Under John’s son Prince Henry , dubbed “the Navigator” by historians, Portuguese explorers claimed the Madeira Islands, the Azores, and the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa. They also sailed down the western coast of Africa as far as today’s Sierra Leone. Eventually, Portuguese expeditions reached the southern tip of Africa, and in 1488, Bartolomeu Dias, who had participated in the Battle of Ceuta, sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to reach the eastern side of the continent.

The Portuguese were driven by both religious fervor and a desire for wealth. Since the Middle Ages, they, like other Europeans, had been intrigued by stories of a lost Christian kingdom somewhere in Africa or Asia, ruled by a legendary king named Prester John ( Figure 5.9 ). By the 1400s, they had come to believe his lands were located in Africa, and their hope of forming an alliance with him to defeat the forces of Islam helped motivate their exploration there.

The Portuguese also hoped to gain access to the wealth of Africa. As they moved southward along the continent’s coast, they established citadels on land leased from local rulers, like the fortress of Elmina , located on the coast of present-day Ghana . From there, they bartered for gold, ivory, and enslaved people . The first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in Portugal in 1441. To further its economic interests, Portugal also established relations with the African kingdoms of Benin and Kongo . Its connection to Kongo, in what is now Angola, was particularly close. Members of Kongo’s ruling family and nobility converted to Roman Catholicism and adopted Portuguese names. Kongo became an important source of enslaved laborers, and its kings readily assisted the Portuguese in taking captives from enemy tribes. The Portuguese claim to the riches of African trade was affirmed in 1455 in the Romanus Pontifex , a papal decree issued by Pope Nicholas V that granted Portugal exclusive rights to trade in Africa south of Cape Bojador, on the coast of Morocco. The interests of the Africans who controlled these lands were not considered.

Spanish Exploration

Despite the Romanus Pontifex , the Spanish monarchs Isabella I of Castille and Ferdinand II of Aragon were not willing to allow Portugal to take the lead in establishing maritime trade with places outside Europe. By 1492, the final Muslim stronghold on the Iberian Peninsula had been defeated, and, no longer worried about the threat posed by the Muslim presence, Isabella and Ferdinand could turn to matters beyond the peninsula. In 1486, the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus approached them with a request for funds for exploration. Columbus proposed that he could reach Asia by sailing westward across the Atlantic Ocean. Eager to find an all-water route to Asia to compete with the Portuguese, Isabella and Ferdinand agreed to his request. Like the Portuguese monarchs, they were also dedicated to spreading Christianity and combating the spread of Islam. Indeed, they regarded themselves as Europe’s foremost defenders of Roman Catholicism .

On August 3, 1492, Columbus set sail from Spain with three ships. After stopping briefly in the Canary Islands , he set off again on September 6. Five weeks later, he reached the Bahamas, which he believed were a part of Southeast Asia called the Indies. From there, he sailed to Cuba and an island Columbus named Hispaniola (meaning “little Spain”), the island now divided between the Dominican Republic and Haiti . Columbus made contact with the inhabitants of Hispaniola, whom he called “Indians.” Some welcomed the Europeans, who attempted to learn whether the inhabitants had gold, but one group, perhaps mistrusting the newcomers, engaged them in battle.

Leaving behind a handful of men to found a settlement on Hispaniola, Columbus and his crew departed for Europe, taking with them some Arawak people they had kidnapped. They arrived in Spain in 1493, with Columbus believing he had succeeded in reaching the Indies. He returned to the Americas three more times ( Figure 5.10 ). On the third voyage, he explored the coast of Venezuela, which he was certain was part of the Asian mainland.

The Past Meets the Present

Columbus day vs. indigenous peoples’ day.

Local governments across the United States have recently begun replacing the federal holiday honoring Christopher Columbus with one honoring the role of Indigenous peoples in the nation’s past and present. South Dakota began the trend as far back as 1989, but Columbus’s place in history remains controversial. While some believe he should be honored, others, including many Native Americans, believe that as a known enslaver of Africans and Native Americans, he should not be glorified.

The adoption of Columbus as the original “American son” who “discovered America” was once meant to humanize immigrants and minority populations, particularly Italian Catholics who had come to the northeastern United States in the late 1800s. (Columbus was Italian and Catholic.) But at the same time, the U.S. government continued to exile Indigenous peoples from their homelands and suppress their religion and culture. Many historians also argue that Columbus opened the door not just to European settlement but also to disease, oppression, and genocide. The debate about whether the holiday named for him is culturally insensitive continues.

• How might the continued celebration of Columbus Day affect Indigenous communities?
• How should U.S. citizens decide whether and how to change federal holidays? Who should or should not be honored by such holidays? Why?

Soon, however, Europeans came to realize that the lands Columbus had found were new continents, which were then named the Americas after the Italian mapmaker Amerigo Vespucci , who accompanied later Spanish and Portuguese voyages to South America. This was the beginning of European colonialism in the Americas. Colonialism is a practice in which one group of people attempts to establish control over another, usually for purposes of economic exploitation. The lands in the Americas to which the Spanish, Portuguese, and other European nations laid claim in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were incorporated into the colonial empires these countries were beginning to build.

Columbus’s expeditions did not produce the riches the Spanish monarchs had hoped for. Nevertheless, Spain ’s exploration of the new continents continued, led by conquistadors . Some of these explorers were nobles or had military training and had fought against the Muslims in Spain; others were landless and wished to improve their lot in life. One instrument by which the Spanish government compensated conquistadors was the encomienda , a hereditary grant that entitled the holder, called an encomendero , to the labor of a specified number of conquered people, or to a tribute of precious metals or agricultural produce. Although the Crown forbade the enslavement of Indigenous peoples, the encomienda system enabled their abuse at the hands of Spanish settlers who hoped to profit from their labor ( Figure 5.11 ).

The great prizes the Spanish hoped to find were soon discovered in Mexico. In 1519, the conquistador Hernán Cortés landed at Potonchan on the Yucatán Peninsula and marched north to the interior of Mexico, where he encountered the powerful Aztec Empire. The wealth of the Aztecs and the sophistication of their capital city of Tenochtitlán dazzled the Spanish. At first the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II welcomed them and presented them with gifts. Cortés, however, took Moctezuma prisoner and used him as a puppet to attempt to control his people. Conflict erupted in 1520 when the Spanish killed participants in an Aztec religious ritual, and the residents of Tenochtitlán attacked the conquistadors. In the chaos Moctezuma II was killed, possibly by his own people who felt he had betrayed them, and the Spanish, facing destruction, fled Tenochtitlán for the nearby city of Tlaxcala, a rival of Tenochtitlán ( Figure 5.12 ).

In Their Own Words

Massacre in the temple.

The Aztec s rose against the Spanish following their attack on worshippers at an Aztec religious ritual at the Great Temple in Tenochtitlán . One of the gods to be honored there was Huitzilopochtli, a god of war. The uprising was briefly successful, and the Spanish were temporarily driven from the city. The following excerpt is an Aztec account of the Spanish attack.

During this time, the people asked Motecuhzoma how they should celebrate their god’s fiesta. He said: “Dress him in all his finery, in all his sacred ornaments.” During this same time . . . . The Spaniards hanged a chief from Acolhuacan named Nezahualquentzin. They also murdered the king of Nauhtla, Cohualpopocatzin, by wounding him with arrows and then burning him alive. For this reason, our warriors were on guard at the Eagle Gate . . . . But messengers came to tell them to dress the figure of Huitzilopochtli. They left their posts and went to dress him in his sacred finery: his ornaments and his paper clothing. When this had been done, the celebrants began to sing their songs. That is how they celebrated the first day of the fiesta. On the second day they began to sing again, but without warning they were all put to death. The dancers and singers were completely unarmed. . . . The Spaniards attacked the musicians first, slashing at their hands and faces until they had killed all of them. The singers—and even the spectators—were also killed. This slaughter in the Sacred Patio went on for three hours. Then the Spaniards burst into the rooms of the temple to kill the others: those who were carrying water, or bringing fodder for the horses, or grinding meal, or sweeping, or standing watch over this work. The king Motecuhzoma, who was accompanied by . . . those who had brought food for the Spaniards, protested: “Our lords, that is enough! What are you doing? These people are not carrying shields. . . . Our lords, they are completely unarmed!” —Miguel Léon-Portilla, The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico

• What may have motivated this attack? Why might the Spanish have chosen to attack people at a religious festival?
• Do the Aztecs seem to have had any idea of what was going to happen? Explain your answer.

Cortés and his Tlaxcalan allies returned to Tenochtitlán in May 1521. By this time, the Aztecs were beginning to suffer from infectious disease s brought by the Spanish. Smallpox was a likely culprit, but other diseases may have been spreading as well. (For example, evidence exists that an outbreak of salmonella in 1540 also took many Aztec lives.) Badly weakened, the Aztecs could not defeat Cortés and his Indigenous allies. After a siege of three months, Tenochtitlán fell to the Spanish, who began converting the Aztecs to Christianity. Although some Aztecs converted voluntarily, many were forced. Aztec temples were destroyed, and Catholic Churches were built on top of them. The Spanish renamed Tenochtitlán Mexico City, and it became the capital of the colony of New Spain . The colony eventually provided Spanish monarchs with the wealth they craved in the form of rich silver deposits.

Cortés’s exploits in Mexico were soon matched by those of another Spanish adventurer, Francisco Pizarro , who conquered the Inca Empire in South America. In January 1530, Pizarro sailed from the Canary Islands on an expedition to conquer Peru , which he had heard was rich in precious metals. His conquest had been authorized in 1529 by Queen Isabella of Portugal, the wife of Holy Roman emperor Charles V, who was also king of Spain. The Inca ruler had recently died of smallpox, and rival heirs to the throne were at war. Pizarro took advantage of the chaos and the fact that the Inca forces had been depleted by years of fighting. In 1532, he captured Atahualpa, one of the parties in the civil war; the following year, the Spanish executed him, despite his promises to fill an entire room with gold and two with silver if Pizarro set him free. Pizarro then seized control of Cuzco , the Inca capital. Peru, which like Mexico had extensive silver deposits, was reduced to a Spanish colony.

The Inca did not passively accept Spanish rule. Under the leader Manco Inca, about 100,000 Incas lay siege to Cuzco in 1536. They lacked the gunpowder weapons of the Spanish, however, and could not drive the Europeans out. The Spanish divided the Inca Empire into four regions, each with a Spanish governor, and Pizarro was given the territory that corresponds to the modern country of Peru.

The Treaty of Tordesillas

Word of Columbus’s discoveries on behalf of the Spanish alarmed and angered the Portuguese. Under the terms of the 1479 Treaty of Alcáçovas , Portugal had renounced any claim to the Spanish throne and granted Spain control of the Canary Islands . In exchange, Portugal received the coast of Guinea in Africa, which was rich in gold, and all islands in the Atlantic south of the Canaries. This included not only those territories Portugal already controlled (Madeira, the Azores, and Cape Verde) but also any that might be discovered in the future. In 1481, the pope also issued a decree that granted Portugal territories in the Atlantic.

Spain’s claim to the Caribbean islands Columbus had explored thus seemed to violate both the treaty and the pope’s decree. The Portuguese king announced his intention to send an armed fleet to take control of them. Unable to challenge Portugal’s dominance at sea, Isabella and Ferdinand asked Pope Alexander VI to intercede. The pope, who was Spanish, decreed that all lands belonged to Spain that fell west of a line drawn one hundred leagues west of any of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands.

Portugal accordingly began negotiations with Spain, which consented to move the line dividing Spanish from Portuguese possessions farther to the west. The new line cut across the eastern bulge of the South American continent (now part of Brazil) but left the rest of the Americas to Spain. This agreement, the Treaty of Tordesillas , was signed in 1494 and endorsed in 1506 by a decree of Pope Julius II ( Figure 5.13 ). Thus, when the explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral landed on the eastern coast of South America in 1500, he was able to claim it for Portugal.

By the time Cabral made landfall in Brazil in 1500, Portuguese sailors had already rounded the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of southern Africa and sailed up that continent’s eastern coast and on to India. Hoping to lay claim to the riches of Asia, Spain then argued that the line dividing the Atlantic continued to the other side of the globe, bisecting the Pacific and giving the Spanish the right to territories in Asia as well. Portugal objected and turned to the Vatican again for help. In 1514, Pope Leo X declared that the line described in the Treaty of Tordesillas allocated territories in the Atlantic but not the Pacific. Spain had no claim to the lands of Asia.

Spain renewed its argument in 1522 when an expeditionary fleet that had been captained by Ferdinand Magellan returned to Europe after circumnavigating the globe. Magellan had been in the employ of Spain when he found a means of reaching Asia by sailing around the southern tip of South America. The expedition had reached the Maluku Islands (or the Moluccas, in modern Indonesia), the source of valuable spices , and Spain wished to claim this territory, which Portugal had already explored in 1512. To settle their claims to the islands, in 1529 Portugal and Spain signed the Treaty of Zaragoza , dividing the Pacific Ocean between them. The treaty awarded the Maluku Islands to Portugal with the understanding that should Spain wish to claim them it could, but it would have to compensate Portugal for its loss. Spain did not have the money to do so, and this fact, along with a convenient marriage of the Spanish and Portuguese kings to one another’s sisters, led Spain to abandon its claim to the Malukus.

In the treaties of Zaragoza and Tordesillas, two of the world’s nations divided the globe between them, never questioning their right to do so and turning repeatedly to the pope to give God’s sanction to their claims. Unsurprisingly, however, the world’s other nations ignored both treaties. England and the Netherlands, which had become Protestant nations during the Reformation, felt no need to abide by papal decrees, nor did France, though it remained Roman Catholic. As the French king Francis I explained, “The sun shines for me as it does for others.” As the fortunes of Spain and Portugal declined in the seventeenth century, England, France, and the Netherlands claimed territory in Asia and the Americas and established their own trading posts on the African coast. Spain and Portugal also failed to acknowledge the rights of the Indigenous peoples in the lands they claimed. Indeed, many Europeans believed that by conquering the inhabitants of the Americas and giving them no choice but to convert to Christianity, they were saving their souls.

The Columbian Exchange

The impact of Portuguese and Spanish exploration and settlement went far beyond the political and economic implications. The so-called Columbian Exchange began with the first contact between native peoples and Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean in 1492. This phrase refers to the back-and-forth flow of plants, animals, and diseases between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. Far more than physical products were traded, however. Ideas, religious practices, enslaved peoples, and cultural traditions also crossed the Atlantic to reshape, blend, and sometimes destroy various civilizations in the process.

The world into which Columbus stepped in 1492 was just as complex, diverse, and dangerous as the one he left behind. In the Americas, empires rose and fell, people married and raised families, individuals sought to better their lives by moving and innovating. But key differences shaped the collisions to come. One of the most fundamental was the perception of human nature and human origins. For Europeans, the world, its history, and its progression were linear. Just as the Christian Bible described, in the beginning there was darkness. Then God created light along with the world, and one day that world would come to an end. This belief influenced Europeans’ perception that time progressed in a straight line along which humans were always moving forward. All things had a beginning, a point or climax, and an ending.

But for many Indigenous peoples , the world was cyclical and infinite. The Aztec s, for example, believed that the world in which they lived was but the latest in a series of worlds that had been created and destroyed. Their world would continue to exist only so long as they fed the sun with the blood of sacrificial victims. In Indigenous concepts of the cosmos, no hard separations existed between humans and nature, or between spiritual and human realms. Many religious belief systems were animistic, meaning the spiritual world resided not just in humans but also in animals, plants, and even rocks. This belief was very different from monotheism, in which all spiritual power resided in one single divine being. Indigenous religions did not focus on sin or on the nature of good and evil. Instead, the spiritual world was a place full of power that humans could harness for either good or evil. Though their specific beliefs varied widely, all Indigenous groups in the Western Hemisphere held these basic views about their existence and their relationship to others and to the world.

Like humans, animals, and plants, the earth possessed sacred power; therefore, it could not be owned. The concept of owning land seemed nonsensical to many Indigenous groups, and their corresponding lack of emphasis on private property was one reason Europeans sometimes found it easy to lay claim to lands inhabited by native peoples.

Indigenous Americans also differed from Europeans of the 1400s in their approach to gender. While Indigenous women did complete some of the same tasks as European women, such as cooking, making clothing, and raising children, they also took part in activities that Europeans believed should be done by men and that in Europe usually were. For example, in many Indigenous societies, women were the principal farmers and built the family’s dwelling. In many groups, women were revered as imbued with sacred powers to heal and to create. This power also gave them a strong voice in the leadership of their communities, and in some of these, women sat on tribal councils. Among the Iroquois of North America, for example, women often attended tribal councils to advise male clan representatives, and women chose the tribe’s male leaders. Among the Wampanoag of southern New England, women could serve as tribal leaders.

In many tribes, individuals who did not accept the roles traditionally assigned to people of their sex had far more freedom to live as they desired than did such people in Europe. Women who wished to live as men and men who wished to live and dress as women did not necessarily face punishment or maltreatment as long as they contributed to society in other ways. For example, in some societies, women became hunters and warriors. In many societies, men who felt they had been born with the souls of women dressed as women, pursued women’s occupations, and became the second or third wives of other men. Such men were often regarded as possessing great spiritual power and were treated with respect.

When Columbus arrived, the Indigenous population of the entire Western Hemisphere likely numbered around seventy-five million (compared to Europe’s population of probably around seventy million), although historians’ estimates vary greatly. Indigenous peoples made up more than six hundred groups or tribes in North America alone. Some, such as the Inuit and the Dene , were mostly hunter-gatherers in cold climates inhospitable to farming. Others farther south, such as the Pueblo ans and the Creek , farmed extensively, growing maize as the staple of their food economies. These groups often adopted political organizations practical for their environment. Hunter-gatherers such as the Apache lived as small bands of unified family units with a designated leader. Among township societies such as the Iroquois, groups of towns joined to form political confederacies. In the Aztec and Inca empires, large urban populations were ruled by monarchs.

As part of the Columbian Exchange , Europeans introduced to the Americas the crops they were familiar with at home, including wheat; the Vitis vinifera species of grape; fruits such as pears, peaches, and many varieties of apples; and vegetables such as onions and garlic. The first two were especially important for the Spanish and Portuguese. Wheat was needed to make the communion wafers that were a necessary part of the Roman Catholic mass, and European grapes were needed to make wine for the same ceremony. For the most part, Native Americans had little interest in adopting European foods, but the arrival of nonedible resources created an immediate impact. Metal cookware and metal weaponry gave great power to those who chose to adopt them.

European, Asian, and African societies also changed as new plant life was brought eastward across the Atlantic. Indigenous peoples in North America had relied on maize (corn) for thousands of years, and varieties of potatoes, including sweet potatoes, had long been staples among Indigenous peoples in South America. Along with these foods, tomatoes, chili peppers , vanilla, manioc, pineapples, and peanuts were introduced to and became culinary staples of nations in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Chocolate, which had been consumed in liquid form by the Aztec and the Maya, and tobacco, another product from the Americas, became especially popular in Europe ( Figure 5.14 ).

Read “How the Chili Pepper Conquered China” to learn about the far-reaching effects on China of the introduction of chilies from the Americas.

Coffee and sugar cane, introduced to the Americas by Europeans, grew exceedingly well in the tropical climates of the Caribbean, Central America, South America, and the southernmost portions of North America. The widespread adoption of these foods in the rest of the world began a chain reaction of increased demand for them and for agricultural labor. This need for labor eventually led to the plantation-style slavery that took hold in parts of the United States, islands in the Caribbean, and areas of South America such as Brazil.

Plant life was not the only item exchanged across the Atlantic; a variety of animals accompanied Europeans as they journeyed across the ocean and back. Horses, cows, goats, sheep, pigs, and chickens all made the Atlantic crossing to the Americas. These animals transformed the life of many Indigenous communities. In North America, tribes such as the Lakota moved onto the Great Plains and created a way of life based on hunting bison following their adoption of the horse. The Navajo became sheep herders and expert weavers of woolen textiles. Tribes in Mexico and Central and South America began to raise chickens and goats, which provided valuable sources of protein.

Deadly pathogens also made the crossing to the Americas and caused one of the worst disease -based disasters in history. Given limited understanding of epidemic science, no one realized that native peoples had virtually none of the resistance and immunity Europeans had developed to infectious diseases, because the animals that originally spawned them (and from which they had jumped to humans) simply did not exist in the Americas ( Figure 5.15 ). When these diseases were brought by Europeans and the enslaved Africans who often accompanied them, native peoples without natural immunity who contracted them experienced a death rate that some scholars estimate was as high as 95 percent.

Lack of exposure to European livestock or European disease s is not the sole reason the Indigenous peoples of the Americas died in such large numbers, however. Smallpox, typhus, measles, bubonic plague, influenza, salmonella, and other diseases took the lives of millions of people throughout the Americas because of the destruction wrought by Europeans. European settlers often allowed their livestock to roam loose, and these animals, especially hogs, wreaked havoc on the crops planted by Indigenous peoples . In places where the Spanish conducted slave raids, Indigenous people often went into hiding, refusing to venture out to farm, fish, or tend their fields for fear of being captured. The resulting malnutrition weakened their immune systems, making it harder for them to fight off infectious diseases, even those with which their bodies were familiar. In heavily settled, densely populated regions, infectious diseases spread rapidly. Bodies weakened by one disease easily succumbed to subsequent infections.

Other factors also contributed to depopulation across the Western continents. Groups intent on colonizing, such as the Spanish in New Spain, wanted to establish economies that exported wealth and materials to the home country. To that end, the infrastructure they built intentionally depleted local environments and deprived Indigenous peoples of the natural resources within their lands, including fertile soil, water, timber, and precious metals. When Indigenous populations did not accept these economic conditions, they were met with violence against themselves and their families.

Given violence, exile, enslavement, and a high death rate from disease, the original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere experienced a cataclysm during the sixteenth century. They still resisted European incursions, however, beginning a centuries-long struggle with echoes in the present day. Within a few months of his exploring the Caribbean region, for example, Native leaders began directing Columbus to other islands, deflecting the negative consequences that followed the arrival of Europeans. Sometimes Indigenous groups chose violence to resist European violence.

Not all Indigenous peoples reacted with violence, however. During the often-brutal colonization of the Western Hemisphere, many systems of gender, religious beliefs, and societal organization that existed in the Americas did collapse, while others merged or changed, creating new hybrid societies across the American continents and the Caribbean islands. But many Indigenous groups chose to incorporate facets of European material culture, such as tools and weapons, into their own in ways that allowed for their survival. For example, the Comanche , a largely hunter-gatherer group, adopted the Spanish horses brought by the conquistadors ( Figure 5.16 ). Within a few generations, the combination of horses and metal weaponry transformed the Comanche into an empire that negotiated as equals with the Spanish, the British, and the French.

Finally, not all Atlantic commerce and settlement flowed from east to west. Indigenous people also took advantage of the Columbian Exchange and traveled to Europe seeking ways to help themselves and their people. By the seventeenth century, dozens of Indigenous negotiators had gone to Europe to appeal directly to the monarchs for aid and for military and economic benefits. Their efforts reveal the ways in which Indigenous groups all over the Atlantic World hoped to shape their future on their own terms.

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The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes

315 years. 20,528 voyages. millions of lives..

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Usually, when we say “American slavery” or the “American slave trade,” we mean the American colonies or, later, the United States. But as we discussed in  Episode 2 of Slate’s History of American Slavery Academy , relative to the entire slave trade, North America was a bit player. From the trade’s beginning in the 16 th  century to its conclusion in the 19 th , slave merchants brought the vast majority of enslaved Africans to two places: the Caribbean and Brazil. Of the more than 10 million enslaved Africans to eventually reach the Western Hemisphere, just 388,747—less than 4 percent of the total—came to North America. This was dwarfed by the 1.3 million brought to Spanish Central America, the 4 million brought to British, French, Dutch, and Danish holdings in the Caribbean, and the 4.8 million brought to Brazil.

This interactive, designed and built by Slate’s Andrew Kahn, gives you a sense of the scale of the trans-Atlantic slave trade across time, as well as the flow of transport and eventual destinations. The dots—which represent individual slave ships—also correspond to the size of each voyage. The larger the dot, the more enslaved people on board. And if you pause the map and click on a dot, you’ll learn about the ship’s flag—was it British? Portuguese? French?—its origin point, its destination, and its history in the slave trade. The interactive animates more than 20,000 voyages cataloged in the  Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database . (We excluded voyages for which there is incomplete or vague information in the database.) The graph at the bottom accumulates statistics based on the raw data used in the interactive and, again, only represents a portion of the actual slave trade—about one-half of the number of enslaved Africans who actually were transported away from the continent.

There are a few trends worth noting. As the first European states with a major presence in the New World, Portugal and Spain dominate the opening century of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, sending hundreds of thousands of enslaved people to their holdings in Central and South America and the Caribbean. The Portuguese role doesn’t wane and increases through the 17 th , 18 th , and 19 th  centuries, as Portugal brings millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas.

In the 1700s, however, Spanish transport diminishes and is replaced (and exceeded) by British, French, Dutch, and—by the end of the century—American activity. This hundred years—from approximately 1725 to 1825—is also the high-water mark of the slave trade, as Europeans send more than 7.2 million people to forced labor, disease, and death in the New World. For a time during this period, British transport even exceeds Portugal’s.

In the final decades of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Portugal reclaims its status as the leading slavers, sending 1.3 million people to the Western Hemisphere, and mostly to Brazil. Spain also returns as a leading nation in the slave trade, sending 400,000 to the West. The rest of the European nations, by contrast, have largely ended their roles in the trade.

By the conclusion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade at the end of the 19 th  century, Europeans had enslaved and transported more than 12.5 million Africans. At least 2 million, historians estimate, didn’t survive the journey.  —Jamelle Bouie

If you are an academic or nonprofit institution that would like to use Slate’s interactive, please email  [email protected] .

Also on Slate: 

“ Watch as 13,000 Civil War Monuments Fill the U.S. Map—and Read the Chilling Inscriptions ”

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Introduction, Definitions, and Historiography: What is Atlantic History?

Alison Games is associate professor of history at Georgetown University. She is the author of Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (1999), which won the 1999 Theodore Saloutos Book Award in American Immigration History from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. She has also written articles on various aspects of the seventeenth-century Atlantic World and on teaching Atlantic history, which she offers as an introductory survey course at Georgetown .

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Alison Games, Introduction, Definitions, and Historiography: What is Atlantic History?, OAH Magazine of History , Volume 18, Issue 3, April 2004, Pages 3–8, https://doi.org/10.1093/maghis/18.3.3

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W hat is Atlantic history and what does it have to offer those who teach the history of the geographic region that became the United States? This issue of the OAH Magazine of History is dedicated to a field of study with neither a single definition nor even generally accepted chronological parameters, a field so inchoate and so elusive that although its practitioners debate particular issues vigorously, the field as a whole has no overarching points of historiographic contention. This issue marks something of a departure from other issues that strive to sharpen readers' focus on emerging problems and controversies in established areas of specialization while suggesting innovative ways to teach these subjects. Instead, this particular issue showcases the range of approaches contained within a newly revitalized field of which United States and, more broadly, North American history, comprises only one small portion.

Atlantic history is most literally the study of a geographic region: the four continents that surround the Atlantic Ocean and the people contained therein. It especially focuses on those people whose societies were transformed by the intersection of the four continents after Christopher Columbus's momentous voyage in 1492. These societies are not necessarily places along the Atlantic Ocean itself— Peru, for example, or the western coast of North America, or the region surrounding the Great Lakes. Places and people on the Pacific coast of the Americas were engaged in processes originating from the Atlantic, regardless of their actual geographic location. Africans who lived hundreds of miles from the Atlantic coast were nonetheless ensnared in the slave trade and its varied economic, social, andpolitical repercussions, while diets around the world were altered by the new products of the Americas. Many American Indians found their world transformed by pathogens, animals, and plants well before they laid eyes on a European. Nor is Atlantic history only about the literal points of contact—ports, traders, or migrants, for example—but rather about explaining transformations, experiences, and events in one place in terms of conditions deriving from that place's location in alarge, multifaceted, interconnected world.

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Details of Brutal First Slave Voyages Discovered

By: Becky Little

Updated: August 21, 2023 | Original: August 31, 2018

In August 1518, King Charles I authorized Spain to ship enslaved people directly from Africa to the Americas. The edict marked a new phase in the transatlantic slave trade in which the numbers of enslaved people brought directly to the Americas—without going through a European port first—rose dramatically.

Researchers have uncovered new details about those first direct voyages .

Historians David Wheat and Marc Eagle have identified about 18 direct voyages from Africa to the Americas in the first several years after Charles I authorized these trips—the earliest such voyages we know about.

The transatlantic slave trade didn’t start in 1518, but it did increase after King Charles authorized direct Africa-to-Caribbean trips that year. In the 1510s and ‘20s, ships sailing from Spain to the Caribbean settlements of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola might contain as few as one or two enslaved people, or as many as 30 or 40.

“By the mid 1520s, we’re seeing 200—sometimes as many as almost 300—captives being brought on the same slave ship [from Africa],” says Wheat, a history professor at Michigan State University. It’s difficult to trace what parts of Africa the captives on board came from, since many were captured on the mainland and shipped to island ports off the coast before Spanish boats took them to the Americas.

“This is also some of our earliest examples of enslaved people throwing themselves overboard, people dying of malnutrition,” Wheat adds. “Some of the same really horrible and violent and brutal aspects of the slave trade that was seen much later on, we’re seeing them already in these voyages from São Tomé in the 1520s.”

São Tomé was a colonial island port off the west coast of Africa that Portugal established in the mid-1400s. Before 1518, Portugal forced enslaved Africans to work on islands in the eastern Atlantic. In addition, Spanish ships brought captive Africans to the Iberian Peninsula, from which they sent some to the Caribbean.

Spain may have increased the number of enslaved Africans it brought to the Caribbean after 1518 because the Native people it had previously enslaved there were dying from European disease and colonial violence. Though it’s not clear how many captive Africans arrived through the 1520s, Wheat estimates the number is in the thousands.

We don’t have many firsthand accounts of Africans in the Americas during this period, but one exception is Rodrigo Lopez , a former enslaved man in Africa’s Cape Verde islands freed in a slaveholder’s will. After he became a free man, he was captured and sent to the Americas, where he was re-enslaved in the late 1520s. Lopez, who could read and write Latin, protested his re-enslavement and won back his freedom in the early ’30s.

“It’s an unusual case because we have not only a person who was of very high status among enslaved people in the Cape Verde islands,” Wheat says, but also because “he sues for his freedom and he writes about it, and that document still survives.” Lopez explained that one of his master’s former employees kidnapped him in the night and sold him into slavery. This was illegal, Lopez argued, because he was free man now.

Most of the enslaved men, women and children in the Caribbean didn’t have the option of suing for their freedom. Still, there were some free people of color in Spanish-American colonies, because race wasn’t yet as closely tied to slave status as it would be during American chattel slavery .

“It was considered normal for enslaved people to be black, even though there were enslaved people of other origins,” Wheat says. “But at the same time, it was also normal for there to be small numbers of free people of color in Iberian societies around the Atlantic.”

Wheat and Eagle will publish an essay on their research in a forthcoming book, From the Galleons to the Highlands: Slave Trade Routes in the Spanish Americas in 2019 .  For the project, they spent a lot of time studying Spanish shipping records and lawsuits from the Caribbean that mentioned slave voyages.

“Most of [the lawsuits] involve either one of two things…corruption or disgruntled investors,” Wheat says. Corruption often involved “officials who had permitted unlicensed slave trading voyages to take place.” Crown officials pursued these types of corruption lawsuits, whereas investors usually sued after losing money on a slave voyage.

Dealing with the “casual brutality” in these records is often difficult, says Eagle, a history professor at Western Kentucky University. Even in a report about a slave revolt, “the whole report is about a captain who’s trying to justify the fact that he’s lost some goods to his investors, and it really is just like he’s talking about merchandise,” he observes.

“When a slaves dies they’ll send somebody to [record] what the brand was on the slave and what they died of and keep a record, and that’s all again for commercial purposes—they can claim that as loss later on,” Eagle continues. “So it is really kind of horrifying to read things like this and realize they’re talking about human beings.”

Descendants of Last Slave Ship Still Live in Alabama Community

The story of the Clotilda and the people who built Africatown.

One of the Last Slave Ship Survivors Describes His Ordeal in a 1930s Interview

Zora Neale Hurston's searing book about Cudjo Lewis, brought to Alabama aboard the Clotilda—the last known US slave ship—took nearly 90 years to find a publisher.

The Last American Slave Ship

A half‑century after Congress banned the slave trade, a converted racing yacht defied American law in 1858 and made the last documented voyage of an American slave ship.

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The middle passage.

Boston's "Cradle of Liberty," Faneuil Hall , stands only steps away from sites where merchants sold enslaved Africans whom they had trafficked across the Middle Passage from West Africa to North America. While frequently recognized as a place of debate and protest during the American Revolution and subsequent social revolutions, this building also serves as a reminder of the wealth amassed by the port city of Boston from the Transatlantic trade, which included the selling of enslaved Africans.

From the 1500s to the 1800s, merchants transported approximately 12 million Africans across the Atlantic as human property. The most common routes formed what is now known as the "Triangle Trade," connecting Europe, Africa, and the Americas. From 1560 to 1850, about 4.8 million enslaved people were transported to Brazil; 4.7 million were sent to the Caribbean; and at least 388,000, or 4% of those who survived the Middle Passage, arrived in North America. Between 1700 and 1808, the most active years of the international slave trade, merchants transported around 40% of enslaved Africans in British and American ships.

The Middle Passage itself lasted roughly 80 days on ships ranging from small schooners to massive, purpose-built "slave ships." Ship crews packed humans together on or below decks without space to sit up or move around. Without ventilation or sufficient water, about 15% grew sick and died. Ottobah Cugoano, a survivor of the voyage, called it "the brutish, base, but fashionable way of traffic" (Gates and Anderson 1998: 369). In addition to the physical violations enslaved people suffered, they were ripped away from their families, homelands, social positions, and languages.

Voices of the Middle Passage

Many individuals who experienced the Middle Passage or participated in the Transatlantic Slave Trade have documented its horrors. Read the words of some of these individuals through the dropdowns below.

Belinda Sutton

Belinda Sutton submitted a petition to the Massachusetts General Court in 1783 to argue her right to a pension from the estate of her enslaver Isaac Royall Jr. This petition provides an account of her experience being forcibly removed from her homeland and brought to the colonies.

But her affrighted imagination, in its most alarming extension, never represented distresses equal to what she hath since really experienced – for before she had Twelve years enjoyed the fragrance of her native groves, and e’er she realized, that Europeans placed their happiness in the yellow dust which she carelessly marked with her infant footsteps – even when she, in a sacred grove, with each hand in that of a tender Parent, was paying her devotions to the great Orisa who made all things – an armed band of white men, driving many of her Countrymen in Chains, ran into the hallowed shade! – could the Tears, the sighs and supplications, bursting from Tortured Parental affection, have blunted the keen edge of Avarice, she might have been rescued from Agony, which many of her Country's Children have felt, but which none hath ever described, — in vain she lifted her supplicating voice to an insulted father, and her guiltless hands to a dishonoured Deity!  She was ravished from the bosom of her Country, from the arms of her friends – while the advanced age of her Parents, rendering them unfit for servitude, cruelly separated her from them forever! Scenes which her imagination had never conceived of – a floating World – the sportingMonsters of the deep – and the familiar meetings of Billows and clouds, strove, but in vain to divert her melancholly attention, from three hundred Affricans in chains, suffering the most excruciating torments; and some of them rejoicing, that the pangs of death came like a balm to their wounds. Once more her eyes were blest with a Continent – but alas! how unlike the Land where she received her being!  here all things appeared unpropitious – she learned to catch the Ideas, marked by the sounds of language only to know that her doom was Slavery, from which death alone was to emancipate her... i  

To learn more about Belinda Sutton, please visit the Royall House & Slave Quarters webpage on Belinda Sutton and Her Pensions .

i. "Petition of Belinda." Massachusetts Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions; Massachusetts Archives Collection. v.239-Revolution Resolves, 1783. SC1/series 45X. Massachusetts Archives. Boston, Mass. https://nrs.lib.harvard.edu/urn-3:fhcl:13906083 .

Olaudah Equiano

In his personal narrative, Olaudah Equiano recounts his kidnapping, enslavement, and life in freedom. Equiano dedicated his life to advocating against slavery and published this narrative to help illustrate the horrors of this system.

The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror, which I am yet at a loss to describe, nor the feelings of my mind. When I was carried on board I was immediately handled, and tossed up, to see if I were sound, by some of the crew, and I was now persuaded that I had got into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me…When I looked round the ship too, and saw a … a multitude of black people of every description chained together, everyone of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate, and, quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted. i ... The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable. ii

i. Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa,  The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself Vol 1 (London: Author, 1789), 70.

ii. Olaudah Equiano,  The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano , 79.

Alexander Falconbridge

Dr. Alexander Falconbridge served as surgeon aboard a number of slave ships in the late 1700s. He later became active in anti-slavery work. The following is excerpted from his book,  An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa :

...The hardships and inconveniences suffered by the Negroes during the passage are scarcely to be enumerated or conceived….But the exclusion of fresh air is among the most intolerable… the Negroes' rooms soon grow intolerable hot. The confined air, rendered noxious by the effluvia exhaled from their bodies and being repeatedly breathed, soon produces fevers and fluxes which generally carries off great numbers of them… During the voyages I made, I was frequently witness to the fatal effects of this exclusion of fresh air… The deck, that is the floor of their rooms, was so covered with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the flux, that it resembled a slaughter-house. It is not in the power of the human imagination to picture a situation more dreadful or disgusting… i

i. Alexander Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (London: J. Phillips, George Yard, Lombard-Street, 1788), 24. GoogleBooks .

Austin Bearse

In his book,  Reminiscences of Fugitive-Slave Law Days in Boston,  sailor and abolitionist Austin Bearse recounts his time shipping enslaved Africans in the southern states. Though not referring specifically to the Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean, Bearse's account gives further insight into New England's complicity with slavery and the slave trade and the horrors experienced by its victims.

Between the years of 1818 and 1830, I was from time to time mate on board of different vessels engaged in the coasting trade on the coast of South Carolina. It is well known that many New England vessels are in the habit of spending their winters on the Southern coast, in pursuit of this business –for vessels used to run up the rivers for the rice and cotton of the plantations, which we took to Charleston. We often carried gangs of slaves to the plantations as they had been ordered. These slaves were generally collected by slave-traders in Charleston, brought there by various causes, such as the death of owners and the division of estates, which threw them into the market. Some were sent as punishment for insubordination, or because the domestic establishment was too large; or because persons moving to the North and West preferred selling their slaves to the trouble of carrying them. We had on board our vessels, from time to time, numbers of these slaves –sometimes two or three, and sometimes as high as seventy or eighty. They were separated from their families and connections with as little concern as calves and pigs are selected out of a lot of domestic animals…We used to allow the relatives and friends of the slaves to come on board and stay all night with their friends, before the vessel sailed. In the morning it used to be my business to pull off the hatches and warn them that it was time to separate, and the shrieks and cries at these times were enough to make anybody's heart ache. i

After this experience, Austin Bearse decided that, "Because I no longer think it right to see these things in silence, I trade no more south of Mason and Dixon's line." ii He later became an active and leading member of Boston's abolitionist community.

i. Austin Bearse,  Reminisces of the Fugitive Slave Law Days  (Warren Richardson, 1880), 9,  Archive.org .

ii. Austin Bearse,  Reminisces of the Fugitive Slave Law Days , 9.

George Henry Moore

The following is excerpted from George Henry Moore's 1866  Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts . Though not a first-hand account, Moore's research and writings shed light into one of the Boston's darkest episodes early in the slave trade in the mid 1600s.

…at the very birth of the foreign commerce of New England the African slave trade became a regular business. The ships which took cargoes of staves and fish to Madeira and the Canaries were accustomed to touch on the coast of Guinea to trade for negroes, who were carried generally to Barbadoes or the other English Islands in the West Indies, the demand for them at home being small. In the case referred to, instead of buying negroes in the regular course of traffic, which, under the fundamental law of Massachusetts already quoted, would have been perfectly legal, the crew of a Boston ship joined with some London vessels on the coast, and, on pretence of some quarrel with the natives, landed a "murderer" –the expressive name of a small piece of cannon –attacked a negro village on Sunday, killed many of the inhabitants, and made a few prisoners, two of who fell to the share of the Boston Ship. i

i. George Henry Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts (Massachusetts: D. Appleton & Company, 1866), 29.

Boston's Role in the Middle Passage

As a major port city, Boston played a role in this global economic story. The first slave trade voyage from the American colonies sailed out of Massachusetts. The ship Desire left Salem in 1637, carrying Native American captives from the Pequot War to be sold as slaves in the Caribbean. When it returned up the coast with the first known Africans imported into the northern English colonies, it most likely anchored in Boston. After this documented case of enslavement, Massachusetts legalized the enslavement of Africans, Native Americans, and mixed-race people in the colony's Body of Liberties . Thus began the legal justification for slavery in the Massachusetts colony.

It is estimated that 166 transatlantic voyages embarked out of Boston. Local newspapers carried over 1,000 ads for the sale of enslaved people during the 1700s, which took place everywhere from ships to markets, warehouses, coffee houses, and homes.

Boston Gazette, June 22, 1761

Boston was further complicit in the Triangle Trade as a major exporter of rum, likely made from sugar produced in the Caribbean and sometimes sold in exchange for enslaved Africans. Ironically, commodities such as sugar and molasses drove colonial Bostonians to revolution: leaders likened taxation on these goods to slavery even as the trade continued to prop up slavery itself.

As one of the wealthiest and most well-connected Boston merchants, Peter Faneuil played an integral role in this empire of goods, wealth, and enslavement. Ledgers, letters, custom records, and other primary sources reveal his involvement in trading goods consumed and produced by enslaved labor including sugar, molasses, indigo, and grain. Peter Faneuil financed in part at least two slaving voyages, and several suspected slaving voyages, as well as enslaved men and women in his home. Though Faneuil cannot be characterized as a major slave trader, he built his financial empire on this complex trading system that relied on the institution of slavery.

The Legacy of the Middle Passage

Despite vast cultural and linguistic diversity, enslaved Africans in the colonies transformed shared elements of their cultures into the creolized societies of the African diaspora. Widespread southern and Caribbean food traditions, music, and religious rituals in the colonies have been traced back to African roots. In Boston, the enslaved community composed of descendants of the first Africans from the West Indies, supplemented by trafficked Africans.

In the years leading up to the American Revolution, enslaved people called for their own freedom as Boston's leaders spoke about liberty from the Crown. In the 1770s, enslaved individuals petitioned the General Court of Massachusetts for their freedom and for an end to slavery; however, their efforts failed. After the Revolution, northern states confronted the hypocrisy of fighting a war for freedom while holding thousands of men, women, and children in bondage. In 1783, the Massachusetts Supreme Court decided that slavery was incompatible with the new state constitution. In 1808, Britain and the United States agreed to ban the transatlantic slave trade.

Slavery itself flourished in the United States until the American Civil War, becoming the defining issue of national political life. Slavery in the South and second-class citizenship in the North became legacies of a history that began with the Middle Passage. As trailblazing Bostonian Maria Stewart wrote in 1833:

"The unfriendly whites...stole our fathers from their peaceful and quiet dwellings, and brought them hither...now that we have enriched their soil, and filled their coffers, they say that we are not capable of becoming like white men, and that we never can rise to respectability in this country. They would drive us to a strange land. But before I go, the bayonet shall pierce me through."

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Boston African American National Historic Site

Last updated: February 22, 2023

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About this Timelapse

This timelapse offers an overall preview as well as demonstration of how the slave movement happened. The results of any user query will display in this timelapse feature. Also, please note the following:

Each circle on this timelapse represents a single voyage and is both sized, according to the number of captives on board, and colored, according to the three icons at the bottom left of the graph.

Each circle is color coded and the color code represents the nationality of the slave vessel, but users can instead choose Region of Embarkation, or Region of Disembarkation by clicking on the icons to the left of the graph.

To inspect details of an individual voyage, pause and click on a circle.

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A forgotten stage of the atlantic slave trade.

The observant among them gleaned from the sun or stars that this new voyage carried them north, instead of west. They surely noticed a change in the weather. Winter gripped North America, and even in Georgia that January, locals remarked at “the severity of it.” The Mars rocked and thrashed in violent waves whipped up by storms out of the northeast. Frigid rains and high seas drenched the deck with water that dripped and sloshed into the hold. Contrary winds caused an unexpectedly “long passage.” Provisions ran low.

The crew headed for the nearest harbor, but one of the Angolan women succumbed to cold or hunger and “died two days before [the Mars ] got into port.” Mercifully, the other thirty-four prisoners survived to reach Savannah, Georgia—probably unaware that their intended destination had been a place called Charleston, farther up the coast. The merchant in charge of selling the survivors perceived them as “a very slight made People,” probably because their passage from Jamaica on short rations made them appear so. One man died “a few days after they arrived.” The others recovered enough for sale into American slavery, but it would eight months after sailing from Jamaica before the last of them sold.

As typically told, the story of the Atlantic slave trade ends after the ocean crossing. A transatlantic slave ship glides into an American port, planters flock to an auction on the pier, and enslaved people presumably march with new owners to nearby plantations. Slave trade histories usually end with such a sale, but for hundreds of thousands of enslaved African people the journey did not end there. Labor-hungry plantation owners were not the only buyers of weary survivors of the Middle Passage; merchant speculators sought human commodities as well.

Port records, merchant papers, and imperial correspondence all suggest that a thriving intercolonial slave trade dispersed as many as a quarter of the African people who arrived in the New World, extending their dangerous journeys to American plantations. Such “final passages,” after the Atlantic crossing, occurred for a variety of reasons. Some colonial markets were too small to attract vessels directly from Africa with hundreds of slaves, but could be profitably targeted by intercolonial traders with a few enslaved people and an assortment of goods; some European empires enjoyed stronger trading positions in Africa than others, creating supply and price discrepancies across imperial borders in the Americas, setting the stage for smuggling; some important sites of American slavery were inland, requiring overland distribution after the Middle Passage. Whatever the reasons, colonial port records document more than seven thousand such shipments originating in British American colonies alone. Thousands more ventures surely occurred—in other regions and in periods not covered by surviving records.

Despite the vast scale of such intercolonial trafficking, historians have been slow to recognize and examine it, a blind spot especially pronounced for the British Atlantic. The oversight may stem partly from the long shadow that Philip Curtin cast on the field. His path-breaking book, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969), was framed by a simple and straightforward question: Just how many African people crossed the Atlantic in the slave trade? That question (and his attempt to answer it by synthesizing regional estimates from the extant secondary scholarship) was an essential starting point for slave trade studies. But in some ways, Curtin’s focus on quantifying the transatlantic migration circumscribed the field—in ways both obvious and more surprising.

Most straightforward, for decades after Curtin’s book appeared, slave trade scholars focused on the so-called “numbers game,” with one scholar after another revising Curtin’s estimates. Some used census records and demographic modeling; others counted the captives in port records and shipping returns. Such efforts culminated in Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database ( www.slavevoyages.org ), spearheaded by David Eltis, which seeks to document each individual voyage that carried Africans across the Atlantic. It is a prodigious work that documents more than 35,000 slave-trading ventures. The database improves our knowledge of the trade’s scale, organization, and mortality, and it stands as a monument to scholarly collaboration, with dozens of researchers contributing data. Despite these virtues, however, the database is limited to voyages that crossed the Atlantic—omitting the intercolonial trade—perhaps because that is how Curtin framed the question that launched the field.

More surprising perhaps, critics of such quantitative study have also focused on the Atlantic crossing at the expense of other phases of the trade. In recent years, a rich historiography has called for moving beyond the counting of enslaved people crossing the Atlantic to achieve a more humanizing portrayal—one that reckons more with what enslaved migrants endured, how they understood their journeys, and what cultures they carried with them. Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship: A Human History (2008) and Stephanie Smallwood’s Saltwater Slavery (2009), for example, focus explicitly on lived experiences aboard slave ships, on putting a human face on the millions of people who had been counted by other slave trade scholars. Yet these works, too, stop after the Atlantic crossing. They describe the infamous Middle Passage, but do not examine the networks of dispersal that forced beleaguered men and women onward—from Barbados to Savannah, from Jamaica to Panama, or from Charleston to the North American backcountry.

Yet hundreds of thousands of enslaved people did move on. Weary, often ill, angry, and often terrified, they arrived in a first American port only to be purchased by intercolonial speculators. American traders bought enslaved people in one port for transshipment to another, adding additional weeks and new dangers to the voyages of captives. Mortality in this intercolonial trade was devastating for people already debilitated by the Middle Passage. Furthermore, dispersal after the Atlantic crossing often separated transatlantic shipmates who shared language, culture, or even ties of kinship. And the importance of such intra-American trafficking extends beyond the devastating experiences of captives. The intercolonial slave trade spread the institution of slavery to new colonies and helped colonial merchants elaborate their trade networks. Many general traders in the Americas (and imperial policymakers) saw such slave trading as vital to opening a broader business with new customers, entangling the profits of slave trading with all manner of other commerce.

There is a certain irony to slave trade scholars focusing only on the Atlantic crossing—an irony captured in the phrase used to describe that journey. For most twenty-first-century readers, “Middle Passage” conjures thoughts of the horrific experiences of African captives in their forced Atlantic crossings, but the voyage was termed “middle” to reflect European, not African, experience. For European traders the transatlantic voyage typically formed the second leg of a three-part journey: a first passage, from Europe to Africa with trade goods; a “middle” passage, from Africa to America with slaves; and a third voyage, from America back to Europe with colonial staples. This “triangle” trade gave the Middle Passage its name. Despite these Eurocentric origins, scholars have claimed the term for the slave trade’s victims. But ironically, “Middle Passage” actually fits the experiences of African migrants better than most scholars have realized. The journeys of enslaved Africans did not begin at their ports of embarkation for the ocean crossing, nor did they end when transatlantic vessels reached the Americas. Instead, people often fell into slavery deep in the African interior, facing a first passage to the Atlantic coast; likewise, many enslaved people spread outward after the Middle Passage, often settling hundreds or even thousands of miles away from their first American landfall. Understanding the African migration experience—and the full profits of slave trading—requires reckoning with these final passages after the Atlantic crossing.

Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanities

The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Middle Passage

The transatlantic slave trade involved the purchase by Europeans of enslaved men, women, and children from Africa and their transportation to the Americas, where they were sold for profit. Between 1517 and 1867, about 12.5 million Africans began the Middle Passage across the Atlantic, enduring cruel treatment, disease, and paralyzing fear aboard slave ships . Of those, about 10.7 million survived, with about 40 percent of them going to work on sugarcane plantations in Brazil. Most others labored in the Caribbean, while about 3.5 percent ended up in British North America and the United States. In total, an estimated 388,000 Africans landed alive in North America and about 140,000 of these came to the Chesapeake Bay region. Most enslaved people reaching the Chesapeake Bay region before the 1670s were purchased from the English West Indies. The Royal African Company then brought about 7,000 Africans directly to Virginia between 1670 and 1698. The number of enslaved Africans imported to the colony rose steeply after 1698, when the Royal African Company lost its monopoly. The number of enslaved Africans imported into the Chesapeake Bay region peaked in the decade between 1721–1730, when 13,000 men, women, and children arrived, although it continued at robust levels until around 1780. The abolitionist movement, which began in Great Britain, helped end the British trade to the United States. The United States outlawed the importation of enslaved people through the transatlantic trade beginning in 1808. Virginia planters supported these bans, which due to a surplus of enslaved laborers positioned them as suppliers in a new, domestic slave trade .

The transatlantic slave trade was the purchase, transportation, and sale of enslaved people from Africa. These Africans were purchased by Europeans and sold in the Americas for a profit. Between 1517 and 1867, about 12.5 million Africans were forced onto the Middle Passage. On the slave ships , they suffered cruel treatment, disease, and fear. About 10.7 million survived the voyage. They were sold to work in North and South America. Most enslaved Africans ended up in the Caribbean and South America. But the number in the Virginia colony increased over time. The abolitionist movement helped end the British trade to the United States. The United States outlawed the transatlantic slave trade in 1808. By then, Virginia planters had many enslaved laborers. They could continue a profitable trade within the United States .

In This Entry

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Contributor:  Joseph C. Miller

Origins of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Some tribes and nations in Africa experienced conflict. This led to many Africans being vulnerable to capture. Another nation in Europe, Spain, united with Portugal. The two nations began working together to buy and trade many different resources.  They also worked together to buy and sell enslaved people. They transported captives to different islands and other slave plantations. In 1619, two English ships—the  White Lion  and the  Treasurer —attacked a Portuguese ship. They robbed its cargo of about fifty enslaved Africans. A few months later, the  White Lion  arrived in Virginia. It was carrying the  “20. and odd”  survivors—the  first Africans  in the new colony.

By the 1620s Portugal had many large sugar plantations in Brazil. These plantations required many enslaved laborers. The work growing sugar cane was intense.

The Dutch took control of these sugar Plantations from 1630 until 1654. The Dutch were eventually driven out. They turned to bringing captured Africans to the English sugar plantations in Barbados and Jamaica.

The Middle Passage

The trade developed between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. It was sometimes called the “triangular trade.” On the first leg, goods from Europe were transported for trade in Africa. These goods included wine, metals such as iron and copper, and cheap muskets. The highest demand, however, was for cloth.

Inhumanity and Horrors of the Middle Passage

More than half of the enslaved Africans who landed in North America came through Charleston, South Carolina. Many came through Charleston after 1800 as cotton production became profitable. About 130,000 men, women, and children landed in the Chesapeake Bay region. Virginia planters purchased them to work in  tobacco fields .

Virginia and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

In 1673, adult enslaved people were sold to Virginia planters for low prices. Most enslaved Africans were sold to the  richest Virginians . The planters paid in tobacco. They also claimed headrights, or land grants, of fifty acres on each enslaved person. (The headright system, gave land to anyone who paid the cost of transporting an  indentured servant  to the colony. It was extended to cover enslaved laborers. Headrights for enslaved people were ended in 1699.)

The number of enslaved Africans in Virginia rose to 13,000 by 1730. The population of enslaved people no longer depended on the transatlantic slave trade. If an enslaved woman gave birth to a child, that child would be considered enslaved as well. This would make the transatlantic slave trade much less important to Virginia and the other English colonies.

End of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

In the United States, plantation owners made huge profits from owning enslaved people. These enslavers rarely found slavery to conflict with their Revolutionary ideas of liberty and equality.  Thomas Jefferson criticized Britain’s practice of selling enslaved people to colonists at high prices.

Congress passed an “Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves,” on January 1, 1808. Rich Virginia planters supported the ban on importing slaves. But this was not because they opposed slavery. Many of them had transitioned from growing tobacco to producing things that were easier to grow. Their numbers of enslaved Africans had been increasing naturally. The invention of the cotton gin and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution created a cotton boom in the southern states. Virginia enslavers were able to be the suppliers of the enslaved labor needed to grow cotton. Planters from Georgia to Texas would be forced to purchase enslaved people from Virginia. Between 1790 and 1860, more than 1 million enslaved men, women, and children were transported from the Upper South to the Deep South.

The transatlantic slave trade involved the purchase, transportation, and sale of enslaved men, women, and children from Africa. These Africans were purchased by Europeans and transported to the Americas where they were sold for profit. Between 1517 and 1867, about 12.5 million Africans began the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. They endured cruel treatment, disease, and paralyzing fear aboard  slave ships . Of those, about 10.7 million survived, with about 40 percent of them going to work on sugarcane plantations in Brazil. Most others labored in the Caribbean, while about 3.5 percent ended up in British North America and the United States. In total, an estimated 388,000 Africans landed alive in North America. About 140,000 of these came to the Chesapeake Bay region. Most enslaved people reaching the Chesapeake Bay region before the 1670s were purchased from the English West Indies. The Royal African Company then brought about 7,000 Africans directly to Virginia between 1670 and 1698. The number of enslaved Africans imported to the colony rose steeply after 1698, when the Royal African Company lost its monopoly. The trade continued at robust levels until around 1780. The abolitionist movement, which began in Great Britain, helped end the British trade to the United States. The United States outlawed the importation of enslaved people through the transatlantic trade beginning in 1808. Virginia planters supported these bans, which, due to a surplus of enslaved laborers, positioned them as suppliers in a new,  domestic slave trade .

Portuguese mariners began patrolling the west coast of Africa in the fifteenth century, primarily in search of gold. In the process, they encountered and either purchased or captured small numbers of Africans. The first shipload of 235 captives landed in Lagos, Portugal, in 1444. After the 1470s, gold from the Akan area (modern-day Ghana) financed a second, larger stage of Atlantic slaving. The Portuguese purchased captives from the Benin area just east of the Niger River delta and sold them to labor in the gold mines of the Akan area. The Portuguese left other enslaved Africans on the small islands of the eastern Atlantic. The Portuguese and Spaniards held these islands for strategic reasons. They paid the costs of military occupation by putting Africans to work turning small farms into large sugar plantations. In this way, gold supported slaving and enslaved people produced sugar. In turn, this supported increased commercial investments in the Atlantic world.

Shortly after 1500, the Portuguese transferred the plantation model to the island of São Tomé off the coast of what is now Gabon. São Tomé had good rains and rich volcanic soil ideal for growing sugar. By the mid-sixteenth century the island’s residents had invested heavily in enslaved labor. São Tomé would be the world’s leading producer of raw sugar.

From Local to Transatlantic Trade

The first large wave of captured Africans swept across the Atlantic in the 1590s. Prior to then, the trade in captives had been relatively small. African authorities strongly preferred to sell commodities such as gold, ivory, and other natural resources. At the time, conflicts between African peoples did not result in much violence or produce many captives. An exception to this involved Saharan traders. Beginning in the tenth century, they introduced horses to sell for gold from the region next to the desert. The Africans who bought these horses deployed them to wage wars of a much greater intensity. As conflicts grew, the demand for horses exceeded the supply of gold to pay for them. The horses were used to capture Africans to sell as enslaved laborers to buy more horses. These captives were destined for markets in North Africa, but along the way the desert traders diverted some of their human cargo to Portuguese buyers.

At the same time, the death of King Henry of Portugal in 1580 led to a union with Spain. The Portuguese in West Africa became Spanish subjects with the authority to trade in American markets. By this time, the chaos in Kongo had produced thousands of refugees who were easily captured for transport to the Spanish Indies. The cost of buying these vulnerable Africans was low. European investors were able make a profit selling these captives in America for Spanish silver.

Dutch and English privateers, neither of them friends of Spain or Portugal, preyed on the ships transporting these captive Africans. In 1619, two of them—the  White Lion  and the  Treasurer —attacked the Portuguese ship  São João Bautista . They robbed it of its cargo of about fifty enslaved Africans. A few months later, the  White Lion  arrived in Virginia carrying the  “20. and odd”  survivors—the  first Africans  in the new colony. 

The trade remained relatively small until a series of unrelated events converged in the area south of the Kingdom of Kongo (present-day northern Angola). This transformed the early stream of captives for sale in the Old World into a flood of enslaved people destined for the Americas. In 1575, the Portuguese sent a military expedition to a bay near the mouth of the Kwanza River. Their intention had been to seize what they incorrectly believed to be mountains of silver in the interior. They arrived during a prolonged drought, which had caused many African communities to scatter in search of food. Some younger men survived by forming armed gangs to prey on the few communities still with crops. Some of these bandits joined the Portuguese in attacking the area around the lower Kwanza River.

By the 1620s Portugal had established large sugar plantations in Brazil. Portugal had claimed Brazil in 1500, replacing São Tomé as the world’s largest producer of sugar. These plantations required enslaved labor on a large scale to do the back-breaking work of cultivating sugar cane. However, enslaved Africans for sale in the Spanish port cities were far too expensive. Instead, the Brazilian Portuguese bought enslaved Africans from ship captains stopping along their course to the Caribbean. They also organized their own slaving ventures in West Africa.

Portuguese sugar production was interrupted when the Dutch seized northeast Brazil’s plantations from 1630 until 1654. When they were eventually expelled, the Dutch turned to supplying captive Africans to the early English sugar plantations in Barbados and Jamaica.

The so-called triangular trade that subsequently developed between Europe, Africa, and the Americas was in fact a complex series of separate trades. These were sometimes spread over several ships sailing on each of its three legs. On the first leg, manufactured goods from Europe were transported for sale or trade in Africa. These goods included wine and spirits, various metals such as iron and copper, and ammunition and cheap muskets. (The Portuguese avoided and eventually banned the sale of firearms in Angola.) The most highly sought-after material in Africa, however, was cloth, mostly Indian cottons and Chinese silks.

On the second, middle leg of the trade, goods were replaced with human cargo for the journey to the Americas. The captives were sold in the European colonies to produce the sugar, tobacco, cotton, and other raw materials that would be shipped to Europe. Captured Africans  suffered terribly  on this Middle Passage. They were often loaded onto slave ships after enduring weeks or months of forced marches, deprivation, and brutality on their way to the sea. This left them vulnerable to traumatic stress and diseases. When chained below decks, they could barely move, even to attend to bodily functions. They were routinely subjected to rough, sometimes brutal treatment by members of the crew. As the writer known only as “Dicky Sam” recounted in  Liverpool and Slavery  (1884): “The captain bullies the men, the men torture the slaves, the slaves’ hearts are breaking with despair; many more are dead, their bodies thrown into the sea, more food for the sharks.” Malnutrition, dehydration, and disease produced mortality among the captives. The death rate averaged above 20 percent in the first decades of the transatlantic trade. This rate dropped to 10 percent by 1800 or so, and to about 5 percent in the last decade of the trade.

Between 1517 and 1867, 12.5 million enslaved Africans were forced onto ships to begin the Middle Passage to America. About 10.7 million men, women, and children survived the journey. About 40 percent, mostly from Angola, landed in Brazil, where the trade continued until 1850. About 35 percent of enslaved Africans went to the non-Spanish colonies in the Caribbean. A bit more than 20 percent were sold in Spanish colonies. About 3.5 percent were sent to British North America and the United States. This was well north of the major sailing routes, where the sugar, the heart of the Atlantic economy, could not be cultivated.

The tens of thousands of voyages that comprised the transatlantic slave trade were structured as business ventures. Elite European merchants and merchant bankers provided funding and capital transfer services to British, French, and Dutch operators of ships. The Portuguese left their trade in the southern Atlantic to traders in Brazil. High losses due to mortality on the Middle Passage were a primary reason that many Triangular Trade voyages failed to turn a profit. John Newton, a British captain who publicly turned against the trade, described the whole enterprise as “a sort of lottery in which every adventurer hoped to gain a prize.”

Every national community of European merchants participated in the transatlantic slave trade. Portugal was the largest overall transporter of enslaved Africans. Great Britain became the dominant slaving power in the eighteenth century. It accounted for about 25 percent of the total, including up to half of those enslaved people delivered to North America. Spain accounted for about 15 percent of the total. The French transported about 12 percent of enslaved Africans—mostly to its West Indies islands during the eighteenth century and before the Haitian Revolution of 1791. The Dutch transported less than 5 percent.

North Americans were relatively minor players in the transatlantic slave trade. They accounted for less than 3 percent of the total trade. Most of the North American trade was conducted by Rhode Island merchants. They exported lumber and pine resin, meat and dairy products, cider, and horses to the West Indies and returned with molasses. The rum processed from this molasses was exported to Africa, to sell for enslaved captives. They then transported these captives to the West Indies to sell to sugar planters for more molasses.

The highest volumes of the transatlantic slave trade came in the 1700s. During this century more than half of the total, amounting to an average of about 50,000 enslaved Africans per year, was transported. This took place mostly from the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 until the end of the British trade in 1807.

More than half of the 388,000 enslaved Africans who landed alive in North America came through the port of Charleston, South Carolina. A burst of arrivals came through Charleston after 1800 as cotton production in the state took off. Anxious planters anticipated the end of slave imports in 1808. The Chesapeake Bay region was second, with an estimated 130,000 men, women, and children landing there. Some of these enslaved people, particularly before 1700, came to North America not directly from Africa but from the Caribbean. Virginia planters purchased them to work in  tobacco fields .

In the Americas, planters paid for enslaved people on credit secured by future deliveries of sugar or other products. Some captains of slave ships were reluctant to accept sugar or tobacco. They were concerned over the price they might receive when they then tried to sell it in European markets. Bills of exchange in financial centers such as London covered this risk. Generally, American buyers of captives paid captains about a quarter of what they owed immediately in cash or commodities such as sugar or tobacco. They sent the rest over the next year and a half. As a result of these delayed payments, some slave ships returned to Europe largely empty of cargo. Once home, slave-ship captains sold what commodities they carried. The investors in the voyages waited to collect the rest in payments on the credit extended.

English Trade Monopoly in West Africa

Though the number of enslaved Africans arriving in Virginia increased under the Royal African Company, it remained relatively small. In the years prior to 1670, only two to three ships, carrying perhaps 200 to 300 captives each, arrived. In the following decade, that tripled to between seven and nine arrivals, totaling as many as 2,000 enslaved captives. Between 1681 and 1690, about eleven ships carrying approximately 3,200 enslaved Africans landed in Virginia. That number decreased the following decade to five ships carrying about 1,100 enslaved Africans, probably related to King William’s War (1689–1697) with France.

In 1698, the Crown withdrew the Royal African Company’s monopoly. It had sold enslaved Africans on credit to startup planters in Barbados, who paid their debts too slowly for the company to continue to operate. With the monopoly gone, private traders swooped in, increasing the slave trade. About the same time, a series of wars on the Gold Coast and the rise of slave-trading in the southeastern region of Nigeria was occurring. This resulted in more enslaved Africans available for export to the Americas. The number of enslaved Africans being brought to Virginia rose from about 1,100 in the 1690s to 13,000 between 1721–1730. Imports of enslaved Africans remained robust for the next several decades. Though, after about 1730 the enslaved population in the Chesapeake Bay region became self-sustaining due to births to enslaved women. This would gradually decrease the importance of the transatlantic slave trade to Virginia.

The abolition movement that had begun with British Quakers, spread to the United States. It aroused popular opinion against the transatlantic trade by  reporting on the horrors  of the Middle Passage. Among other strategies, they spread an iconic image of the British slave ship  Brookes  to demonstrate the extreme crowding of the captives on the slave deck. In 1788, the British Parliament restricted the number of enslaved Africans who could be transported in given spaces on the ships. In 1806 Westminster banned trade to foreign territories, including the new United States. On March 25, 1807, Parliament ended British participation in the trade altogether.

In Britain, the stakeholders in the trade were primarily merchants invested in goods and ships. In the United States, they were plantation owners, whose profits from owning enslaved people were substantial. These enslavers rarely found slavery to be in conflict with their Revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality.  Thomas Jefferson , in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, criticized Britain’s practice of selling enslaved people to colonists at inflated prices. Debate over the civil standing of enslaved people in the United States resulted in a constitutional compromise. This compromise allowed limited additional enslaved people to be sold into the country. Without referring specifically to enslaved Africans, Article I, Section 9, of the U.S. Constitution gave temporary control over imports to the states. It prohibited Congress from interfering with the “Migration or Importation such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit,” for twenty years.

Congress passed an “Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves,” which became effective on January 1, 1808. Elite Virginia planters supported the prohibition of further imports of enslaved people, but not because they opposed slavery. Rather, many of them had transitioned from growing tobacco to production of less labor-intensive wheat. For three generations or more, their holdings of enslaved Africans had been increasing naturally, creating a surplus of hands. Around the same time, the invention of the cotton gin and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution created a cotton boom in the southern states. Virginia enslavers thus found themselves positioned to become the suppliers of the enslaved labor needed to cultivate cotton. Planters from Georgia to Texas would be forced to purchase enslaved people from Virginia and other long-time slave-holding states. Between 1790 and 1860, more than 1 million enslaved men, women, and children were transported in a large and profitable domestic trade from the Upper South to the Deep South. Whether through the transatlantic trade or through the domestic trade of enslaved people, the human toll of the slave trade in terror, death, and widespread social disruption is difficult to fathom.

Portuguese mariners began patrolling the west coast of Africa in the fifteenth century, primarily in search of gold. In the process, they encountered and either purchased or captured small numbers of Africans, with the first shipload of 235 captives landing in Lagos, Portugal, in 1444. After the 1470s, gold from the Akan area inland from the so-called Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) financed a second, larger stage of Atlantic slaving. The Portuguese purchased captives from the Benin area just east of the Niger River delta and sold them to labor in the gold mines of the Akan area. On their way back to Europe, the Portuguese left other enslaved Africans on the small islands of the eastern Atlantic, especially Madeira and the Canaries. The Portuguese and Spaniards held these islands for strategic reasons and paid the costs of military occupation by putting Africans to work turning small farms into large sugar plantations. In this way, gold begat slaving and slaves begat sugar, which, in turn, supported increased commercial investments in the Atlantic world.

Shortly after 1500, the Portuguese transferred the plantation model to the equatorial island of São Tomé off the coast of what is now Gabon, which boasted good rains and rich volcanic soil ideal for growing sugar. By the mid-sixteenth century the island’s residents had invested heavily in enslaved labor and made São Tomé the world’s leading producer of raw sugar.

The first large wave of captive Africans swept across the Atlantic in the 1590s. Prior to then, the trade in captives had been relatively small because African authorities strongly preferred to sell extracted commodities, such as gold, ivory, and other natural resources. At the time, conflicts between African peoples did not result in much violence or produce many captives. An exception to this involved Saharan traders who, beginning in the tenth century, introduced horses to sell for gold from the region adjoining the desert. The Africans who bought these horses deployed them to wage wars of a much greater intensity. As conflicts escalated, the demand for horses exceeded the supply of gold to pay for them, and the mounts were used to capture Africans to sell as slaves to buy more horses. These captives were destined for markets in North Africa, but along the way the desert traders diverted some of their human cargo to Portuguese buyers, who then sold them in established Iberian markets, which was how the first cargo of enslaved people came to be sold at Lagos, Portugal.

The trade remained relatively small until a series of unrelated events converged in the area south of the Kingdom of Kongo (present-day northern Angola) to transform the early stream of captives for sale in the Old World into a flood of enslaved people destined for the Americas. In 1575, the Portuguese sent a military expedition to a bay near the mouth of the Kwanza River. Their intention had been to seize what they incorrectly believed to be mountains of silver in the interior. They arrived in the midst of a prolonged drought, which had caused many African communities to disperse in search of food. Some younger men survived by forming armed gangs to prey on the few communities still with crops, and some of these bandits joined the Portuguese in attacking the area around the lower Kwanza River, then under the influence of a military leader called the Ngola.

At the same time, the death of King Henry of Portugal in 1580 led to a dynastic union with Spain. The Portuguese in West Africa became Spanish subjects with the authority to trade in Spain’s American markets. By this time, the chaos in Kongo had produced thousands of refugees who were easily captured for dispatch to the Spanish Indies. The cost of buying these desperately vulnerable Africans was low, so European investors were able make a profit selling these captives in America for Spanish silver.

Dutch and English privateers, neither of them friends of Spain or Portugal, preyed on the ships transporting these captive Africans. In 1619, two of them—the  White Lion  and the  Treasurer —attacked the Portuguese ship  São João Bautista , robbing it of its cargo of about fifty enslaved Africans. A few months later, the  White Lion  arrived in Virginia carrying the  “20. and odd” survivors—the  first Africans  in the new colony.

The Production of Sugar

By the 1620s Portugal had established sizable sugar plantations in Brazil, which it had claimed in 1500, replacing São Tomé as the world’s largest producer of sugar. These plantations required enslaved labor on a large scale to do the back-breaking work of cultivating sugar cane. However, enslaved Africans for sale in the Spanish port cities were far too expensive. Instead, the Brazilian Portuguese bought enslaved Africans from ship captains stopping along their course to the Caribbean, while also organizing their own slaving ventures in West Africa.

Portuguese sugar production was interrupted when the Dutch seized northeast Brazil’s plantations from 1630 until 1654. When they were eventually expelled, the Dutch turned to supplying captive Africans to the early English sugar plantations in Barbados and Jamaica in the West Indies.

The so-called triangular trade that subsequently developed between Europe, Africa, and the Americas was in fact a complex series of separate trades, sometimes spread over several vessels sailing on each of its three legs. On the first leg, manufactured goods from Europe were transported for sale or trade in Africa. These goods included wine and spirits, various metals such as iron and copper, and ammunition and cheap muskets. (The Portuguese avoided and eventually banned the sale of firearms in Angola.) The category of goods most in demand in Africa, however, was cloth, mostly Indian cottons and Chinese silks.

On the second, middle leg of the trade, goods were replaced with human cargo for the journey to the Americas, where the captives were sold in the European colonies to produce the sugar, tobacco, cotton, and other raw materials that would be shipped to Europe on the final leg of the triangle. Captive Africans suffered terribly on this Middle Passage, often loaded onto slave ships after enduring weeks or months of forced marches, deprivation, and brutality on their way to the sea, leaving them vulnerable once onboard the ships to traumatic stress and communicable diseases. When chained below decks, they could barely move, even to attend to bodily functions. “The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. … the air soon became unfit for respiration from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died,” wrote Olaudah Equiano of his time on a slave ship following his capture ( The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano , 1789).

Captives were routinely subjected to rough, sometimes brutal treatment by members of the crew, whom they outnumbered by ten or more to one. As the writer known only as “Dicky Sam” recounted in Liverpool and Slavery (1884): “The captain bullies the men, the men torture the slaves, the slaves’ hearts are breaking with despair; many more are dead, their bodies thrown into the sea, more food for the sharks.” Malnutrition and dehydration, both aggravated by dysentery, smallpox, and other afflictions, produced mortality among the captives that averaged above 20 percent in the first decades of the transatlantic trade, which dropped to 10 percent by 1800 or so, and to about 5 percent in the last decade of the trade.

Between 1517 and 1867, 12.5 million enslaved Africans were forced onto ships to begin the Middle Passage to America. About 10.7 million men, women, and children survived the journey. Of these, about 40 percent, mostly from Angola, landed in Brazil, where the trade continued until 1850. About 35 percent of enslaved Africans went to the non-Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and a bit more than 20 percent were sold in Spanish colonies. About 3.5 percent were sent to British North America and the United States, which lay well north of the major sailing routes and where the sugar at the heart of the Atlantic mercantile economy could not be cultivated.

The tens of thousands of voyages that comprised the transatlantic slave trade were structured as business ventures. Elite European merchants and merchant bankers provided funding and capital transfer services to British, French, and Dutch operators of ships, while the Portuguese left their trade in the southern Atlantic to traders in Brazil. High losses due to slave mortality on the Middle Passage were a primary reason that many Triangular Trade voyages failed to turn a profit. John Newton, a British captain who publicly turned against the trade, described the whole enterprise as “a sort of lottery in which every adventurer hoped to gain a prize.”

Every national community of European merchants participated in the transatlantic slave trade. Portugal was the largest overall transporter of enslaved Africans. Great Britain became the dominant slaving power in the eighteenth century, accounting for about 25 percent of the total, including up to half of those enslaved people delivered to North America. Spain, which entered the trade directly only in the nineteenth century to support the belated development of sugar and coffee in Cuba, eventually accounted for about 15 percent of the total. The French transported about 12 percent of enslaved Africans—mostly to its West Indies islands during the eighteenth century and before the Haitian Revolution of 1791—and the Dutch less than 5 percent.

North Americans were relatively minor players in the transatlantic slave trade, accounting for less than 3 percent of the total trade. Most of the North American trade was conducted by Rhode Island merchants, who exported lumber and pine resin, meat and dairy products, cider, and horses to the West Indies and returned with molasses, which they distilled into very high-proof rum. This they exported to Africa, primarily Upper Guinea and the Windward Coast, to sell for enslaved captives, which they then transported to the West Indies to sell to sugar planters for more molasses.

The highest volumes of the transatlantic slave trade came in the 1700s. During this century more than half of the total, amounting to an average of about 50,000 enslaved Africans per year, was transported, mostly from the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 until the end of the British trade in 1807. (The source for these precise numbers is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, a collection of the known details of almost 36,000 slaving voyages, about 80 percent of the total, which allow reasonable estimates for the undocumented remainder.)

Slightly more than half of the 388,000 enslaved Africans who landed alive in North America came through the port of Charleston, South Carolina. A burst of arrivals came through Charleston after 1800 as cotton production in the state took off and anxious planters anticipated the end of slave imports in 1808. The Chesapeake Bay region was second, with about a third, or an estimated 130,000 men, women, and children disembarking there. Some of these enslaved people, particularly before 1700, came to North America not directly from Africa but from the Caribbean, where Virginia planters purchased them to work in tobacco fields .

In the Americas, planters or their brokers paid for slaves on credit secured by future deliveries of sugar or other commodities. Some slave captains were reluctant to accept sugar or tobacco out of concern over the price they might receive when they then tried to sell it in European markets, and bills of exchange drawn on merchant-bankers in financial centers such as London covered this risk. Generally, American buyers of captives paid captains about a quarter of what they owed immediately in cash or commodities such as sugar or tobacco and sent the rest over the next year and a half. As a result of these delayed payments, some slave ships returned to Europe largely empty of cargo. Once home, slave-ship captains sold what commodities they carried, and the investors in the voyages waited to collect the rest in payments on the credit extended.

In 1660, King Charles II of England chartered the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa, granting its investors a monopoly on English trade in West Africa, then mostly for gold. After falling into debt, it reorganized and obtained a new charter in 1672 as the Royal African Company. Again structured around the quest for gold, the company carried enslaved captives to the Americas as a concession to the interests of the Crown in securing strategic island anchors in Barbados and Jamaica. The company purchased African captives from Senegambia and on the Gold Coast and established direct routes to English colonies in the Caribbean and North America.

Prior to 1672, direct shipments of enslaved captives to the Chesapeake Bay region were rare. Beginning in 1673, however, the company offered to sell adult slaves to Virginia planters for £18 sterling. These  sales  were not made at public auction or directly to planters but to intermediaries, usually local merchants who served as sales agents. As a result, nearly all enslaved Africans ended up in the hands of the  richest Virginians . These planters paid in tobacco and claimed headrights, or land grants, of fifty acres each on each of them. (The headright system awarded land to anyone who paid the cost of transporting an  indentured servant  to the colony and was extended to cover enslaved laborers. Headrights for enslaved laborers were terminated in 1699.)

Though the number of enslaved Africans arriving in Virginia increased under the Royal African Company, it remained relatively small. In the years prior to 1670, only two to three ships, carrying perhaps 200 to 300 captives each, arrived. In the following decade, that tripled to between seven and nine arrivals, totaling as many as 2,000 enslaved captives. Between 1681 and 1690, about eleven ships carrying approximately 3,200 enslaved Africans landed in Virginia. That number decreased the following decade to five ships carrying about 1,100 enslaved Africans, probably related to King William’s War (1689–1697) with France.

In 1698, the Crown withdrew the Royal African Company’s monopoly after it had sold enslaved Africans on credit to startup planters in Barbados, who paid their debts too slowly for the company to continue to operate. With the monopoly gone, private traders swooped in, increasing the slave trade. About the same time, a series of wars on the Gold Coast and the rise of the slave-trading Aro Confederacy in southeastern Nigeria resulted in more enslaved Africans available for export to the Americas. As a result, the number of enslaved Africans being brought to Virginia rose from about 1,100 in the 1690s to 8,600 between 1701–1710 and to 13,000 between 1721–1730. Imports of enslaved Africans remained robust for the next several decades, although after about 1730 the enslaved population in the Chesapeake Bay region became naturally self-sustaining due to births to enslaved women, which would gradually lessen the importance of the transatlantic slave trade to Virginia.

The abolition movement that had begun with British Quakers spread to the United States. It aroused popular opinion against the transatlantic trade by reporting on the horrors  of the Middle Passage by, among other strategies, spreading an iconic image of the British slave ship  Brookes to demonstrate the extreme crowding of the captives on the slave deck. In 1788, the British Parliament restricted the number of enslaved Africans who could be transported in given spaces on the ships, and in 1806 Westminster banned trade to foreign territories, including the new United States. On March 25, 1807, Parliament ended British participation in the trade altogether.

     In Britain, the stakeholders in the trade were primarily merchants invested in goods and ships. In the United States, they were plantation owners, whose profits from owning slaves were substantial and who seldom found slavery to be in conflict with their Revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality. Thomas Jefferson , in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, criticized Britain’s practice of selling slaves to colonists at inflated prices, and debate over the civil standing of individuals enslaved in the new United States resulted in a constitutional compromise allowing limited additional numbers to be sold into the country. Without referring specifically to enslaved Africans, Article I, Section 9, of the U.S. Constitution ceded temporary control over imports to the states by prohibiting Congress from interfering with the “Migration or Importation such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit,” for twenty years.

At the first opportunity, on March 2, 1807, Congress passed an “Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves,” which became effective on January 1, 1808. Elite Virginia planters supported the prohibition of further imports of slaves, but not because they opposed slavery. Rather, many of them had transitioned from growing tobacco to production of less labor-intensive wheat, and for three generations or more their holdings of enslaved Africans had been increasing naturally, creating a surplus of hands. Around the same time, the invention of the cotton gin and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution created a cotton boom in the southern states. Virginia enslavers thus found themselves positioned to become the suppliers of the enslaved labor needed to cultivate cotton, as absent new supplies of enslaved laborers from Africa, planters from Georgia west to Texas would be forced to purchase enslaved people from Virginia and other long-time slave-holding states. Between 1790 and 1860, more than 1 million enslaved men, women, and children were transported in a large and very profitable domestic trade from the Upper South to the Deep South. Whether the transatlantic trade or the domestic trade in enslaved people, the human toll of the slave trade in terror, death, and widespread social disruption is difficult to fathom.

“Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database”

• African American History
• Antebellum Period (1820–1860)
• Colonial History (ca. 1560–1763)
• Revolution and Early Republic (1763–1823)
• Coombs, John C. “The Phases of Conversion: A New chronology for the Rise of Slavery in Early Virginia.” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 3 (July 2011): 332–360.
• Eltis, David and David Richardson. Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade . New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2010.
• Harms, Robert. The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
• Miller, Joseph C. Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730­–1830. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.
• O’Malley, Gregory E. Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
• Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship: A Human History . New York: Penguin Books, 2007.
• Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 . New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.
• Thornton, John K., and Linda Heywood. Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
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How Long Did It Take to Get Across the Atlantic in the 1700s?

Since ships in the 1700s relied on sails to propel them, the length of the voyage greatly depended on the wind. An immigrant who made the journey in 1750 reported that it could take between eight and 12 weeks, while another who arrived in 1724 reported that the journey took six weeks and three days. The average journey was about seven weeks.

These journeys do not include periods during which ships remained anchored in a harbor in either England or the American colonies while they were filled with cargo. According to the firsthand accounts of immigrants, ships sometimes remained anchored at a port for as many as three weeks at a time.

Immigrants were also forced to spend longer amounts of time on ships once they got to the American colonies if they could not afford to pay the required passage fee. Those who could not pay were required to remain on board the ship until they were sold into indentured servitude and forced to work to pay for their voyage.

The journey across the Atlantic Ocean was very difficult. Firsthand accounts speak of illness, cramped quarters, food and water rations, and death. Because the journey was so long, when passengers died, their bodies were thrown overboard because there was no way to store them on the ship.

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