The Atlantic slave trade

Between 1501 and 1866, about 12.5 million African people were forced onto ships bound for the Americas. About 10.7 million survived the crossing.

Counting from ship records

How do we know how many people were taken? Since the 1990s historians have gathered the records of slaving voyages from archives in Europe, Africa and the Americas into the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, which is free to search at slavevoyages.org. It now holds records of about 36,000 voyages, which its editors estimate to be most of the voyages that ever carried captives. From these records and careful estimates for the missing voyages, the database estimates that about 12.5 million people were embarked in Africa between 1501 and 1866, and that about 10.7 million were landed alive, mainly in the Americas. The difference, about 1.8 million people, died at sea. The largest single destination was Brazil, which received about 4.8 million people; about 4.7 million were taken to the Caribbean, and about 388,000 to North America.

How the trade worked

European ships carried cloth, metal goods, alcohol and guns to the coast of West and West Central Africa. There they bought captives from African rulers and merchants. Most of the people sold had been seized in wars, raids or kidnappings, sometimes far inland, and marched to the coast. Forts such as Elmina, built by the Portuguese in today’s Ghana, held people until ships arrived. The ships then crossed the Atlantic, the leg known as the Middle Passage, and the survivors were sold to work on plantations growing sugar, tobacco, rice, coffee and cotton, or in mines and households. The ships returned with plantation goods. Textbooks often call this a triangular trade, but that picture fits British and French ships best. Many Portuguese and Brazilian ships sailed straight between Brazil and Angola.

The Middle Passage

The crossing took weeks or months. Below deck, men were usually chained together in pairs; women and children were kept in separate spaces. There was little air, water or food, and diseases such as dysentery spread fast. On average about 15 percent of the people aboard died before landing, and on some voyages far more. Captives resisted in every way they could. Some refused to eat, and crews force-fed them. On some ships captives rose against the crew; the database records hundreds of such revolts. Enslaved people brought languages, music, food and faiths with them, and they shaped the cultures of Brazil, the Caribbean and the United States.

Voices and the end of the trade

Olaudah Equiano was taken from his home as a boy, enslaved in the Caribbean and Virginia, bought his own freedom and settled in London. In 1789 he published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, an account of his life that was widely read and helped to turn British opinion against the trade. Britain, whose ships had carried more captives than any other country’s in the 18th century, passed an Act to abolish its slave trade on 25 March 1807. Slavery itself continued in British colonies until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which took effect on 1 August 1834. Even then, freed people were forced to keep working for their former owners as “apprentices” until 1838, and the government paid compensation to the slave owners, not to the people who had been enslaved. Brazil, the last country in the Americas to end slavery, did so on 13 May 1888.