On the African Role in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Dahomey.

As a result of these delayed payments in kind, some slave ships returned to Europe largely empty of cargo. The so-called Triangular Trade between Europe, Africa, and the Americas was in fact a complex series of separate trades, spread over several vessels sailing on each of its three legs. 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.

High losses to slave mortality on the Middle Passage were a primary reason that voyages failed to turn a profit. The Abolition of the Slave Trade. Or the Inhumanity of Dealers in human flesh exemplified in Captn. According to one survey made between and , more than 21 percent of British crew members on tripartite slave voyages died. Often they were loaded onto ships only 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.

While chained below decks, they could barely move, even to attend to bodily functions, and were subject to routinely rough, sometimes brutal treatment by anxious members of the crew, whom they outnumbered by ten or more to one. Malnutrition and dehydration, both aggravated by dysentery, smallpox, and many other afflictions, produced mortalities at sea that could sometimes rise above 50 percent.

• Riches & Misery: The Consequences Of The Atlantic Slave Trade - OpenLearn - Open University?
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• Transatlantic Slave Trade, The – Encyclopedia Virginia.

In , the Portuguese founded the Cacheu and Cape Verde Company to defend its trade in this region from English encroachment. The French created a number of companies to fill similar gaps in their colonial development strategies. The United States, itself a set of colonies, had no similar strategic interests and so created none, leaving North America—based slaving to merchants in Rhode Island. After falling into debt, it reorganized and obtained a new charter in September as the Royal African Company.

Again structured around the quest for gold, the company carried slaves to the Americas largely as a concession to the interests of the Crown in securing strategic island anchors in Barbados and Jamaica in the Caribbean. The company purchased its enslaved Africans from Senegambia and on the Gold Coast and established direct routes from these areas in Africa to English colonies in the Caribbean and North America, occasionally extending to Virginia.

Prior to , direct shipments to the Chesapeake Bay were rare. The sales were not made at public auction or directly to planters. Instead, the company did its business through intermediaries, usually local merchants buying captives on behalf of planters or through factors of their own in charge of selling arriving human cargoes. As a result, nearly all enslaved Africans ended up in the hands of the richest Virginians. These planters paid in tobacco and, after receiving their slaves, claimed headrights, or land grants, of 50 acres each on 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 slaves imported as well.

Headrights for slaves were terminated in Two to three ships, carrying to captives each, arrived over the several years prior to In the following decade that number tripled to between seven and nine arrivals, perhaps as many as slaves. About eleven ships carrying approximately 3, slaves landed in Virginia between and But with its monopoly gone, private traders swooped in to build up the trade in slaves. In part because more independent traders were involved and selling to more planters around the Chesapeake, the number of enslaved Africans coming to Virginia rose eightfold in —, to 8,, dipped slightly to 6, in —, and more than doubled to 13, in — From to , 90 percent of the enslaved Africans brought into Virginia went to work in the tobacco-rich Tidewater region.

On the Gold Coast of Africa, meanwhile, a series of wars were intensified with financing, including weaponry, gained through the selling of slaves. These wars resulted in even larger numbers of captive Africans whom a powerful warrior regime in the interior, known as Asante, then sold, mostly to the Dutch but also to the British. Slaves from this region came to be known in Virginia as Coromantees, after a minor British trading fort in the area. In order to escape Dutch and increasingly also French competition on the Gold Coast, smaller British traders moved east to regions beyond the Niger River delta, particularly in the Bight of Biafra.

By the nineteenth century, well-armed traders there, known as Aro, purchased goods from British traders on credit, which they loaned to buyers in the interior, again on credit, to be paid later with slaves. They developed a shrine and associated oracles, which served as a kangaroo court to condemn whole communities to slavery for defaulting on their loans. These captured men and women were labeled in Virginia as Igbo, or sometimes Eebo, a name that derived from a pejorative ethnic stereotype in the region.

The ensnaring of whole communities there, as opposed to just male prisoners of war, meant that substantial numbers of women and children from the Bight of Biafra made the Middle Passage, which produced higher mortality at sea and led to an American stereotype of Igbo being weak. More women arriving in Virginia meant that the slave population in the Chesapeake quickly reached a point where it increased naturally, which is to say through births rather than entirely from new arrivals from Africa.

In the Bight of Biafra British traders favored trading towns known as Old and New Calabar, and in Virginia the slaves from this region became known as Calabars. After , the British moved south of the equator, as far as the mouth of the Congo River, or to what was called the Loango Coast. There they competed with the Dutch and, more intensely, with the French, who were building up a large sugar and coffee industry in Saint-Domingue. In Virginia, slaves from this region came to be known as Angolas, from the Portuguese term for the region.

A second triangular pattern of trading developed in British North America and the United States, as merchants from Rhode Island sold naval stores and other New England provisions to sugar plantations in the West Indies and returned to Rhode Island with molasses. They then carried these captive men, women, and children to the West Indies to sell to sugar planters for more molasses.

The significant economic benefits this trade created for Rhode Islanders and early southern cotton planters became part of the debate during the American Revolution and the subsequent Constitutional Convention over ending the Atlantic trade in slaves. The abolition movement that had begun with British Quakers had spread to the United States, including Virginia. It aroused popular alarm against the transatlantic trade by reporting on the horrors of the Middle Passage and, among other strategies, spreading far and wide an iconic image of the British slave ship Brookes , one of several slaving vessels in the s measured to demonstrate the extreme crowding of the captives on the slave deck.

In , the British Parliament restricted the number of enslaved Africans who could be transported in given spaces on the ships, and in Westminster banned trade to foreign territories, including the new United States. On March 25, , Parliament ended British participation in the trade altogether. In Britain, the stakeholders in the trade were primarily merchants invested in the goods and ships. In the United States, they were planters, whose profits from owning slaves were often substantial and who seldom found slavery to be in conflict with their Revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality.

Elite Virginia planters supported the prohibition of further imports of slaves, but not because they opposed slavery. Rather, many of them had transitioned from 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 slaveholders thus found themselves positioned to become the suppliers of the hands needed to cultivate cotton, in part by vigorously supporting the ban on the transatlantic slave trade. Absent new supplies of enslaved laborers from Africa, planters from Georgia west to Texas would be forced to purchase captives from Virginians.

Between and , more than 1 million enslaved men, women, and children were transported in a large and very profitable domestic trade from the Upper South—mostly Virginia—to what came to be known as the Deep South.

Elsewhere, the French gradually gave up slaving in the wake of the Paris revolution and the Napoleonic wars. The Danes and the Dutch dropped out. The Portuguese legally participated in the South Atlantic slave trade until Brazil banned it in Brazil became independent in The trade survived illegally for two decades after that. The human toll of the slave trade in terror, death, and widespread social disruption, is difficult to fathom. Virginia Humanities acknowledges the Monacan Nation , the original people of the land and waters of our home in Charlottesville, Virginia.

We invite you to learn more about Indians in Virginia in our Encyclopedia Virginia. Skip to content. Contributor: Joseph C. Origins Portuguese Map of West Africa. King Henry of Portugal. Brazil and the Caribbean Portugal had claimed Brazil in April and within a century had managed to establish sugar plantations in the northeast corner of South America. Numbers Between and , Cowrie Shell.

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Royal African Company Africae novo descriptio. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Carving of a Slave Trader and an Enslaved Female. Slave Uprising in Saint-Domingue. Slave Ship Diagram.

Cotton Gin Patent. April 22, Sailing far to the west in an attempt to pick up the best winds down the west coast of Africa, Pedro Alvares Cabral sights what is present-day Brazil in South America. He claims it for Portugal. After stealing about sixty enslaved Africans, the ships sail to Virginia with the intention of selling them. These are the first Africans to enter the Virginia colony.