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  At first, the Portuguese delivered small batches of Africans from Congo to the Gold Coast, and some to Lisbon and Seville, where they worked as domestic servants or on agricultural projects. The story was completely transformed by the impact of sugar, transplanted first to Madeira (from Sicily) and the Canaries. Madeira first satisfied Europe’s rising sugar demands – and it did so using African slaves, alongside people of mixed race, with a Portuguese managerial elite in charge. When Portugal colonised São Tomé and Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea after 1471, sugar again transformed the entire story of the islands. São Tomé attracted settlers familiar with sugar cultivation, and backed by Italian finance. The African coast, only 200 miles away, began to provide slave labour. A pattern was quickly established that was to dominate the sugar industry for the next three centuries: sugar plantations, managed by experienced Europeans, supported by European financiers and their output eagerly devoured by a voracious European market for sweetness. Most critically, the strenuous labour in the sugar fields was undertaken by African slaves. By 1550 perhaps two thousand African slaves were working on São Tomé’s sugar plantations. Though the numbers involved look miniscule compared to what followed, it established the blueprint. African slave labour more than proved itself in creating a lucrative export crop for the eager European demand. Sugar planters wanted ever more slaves, and the slave traders provided them – at a price. What emerged was an Atlantic slave system that has entered popular consciousness like no other aspect of slavery. When people think of slavery, they are likely to imagine a sailing ship packed with Africans.

  Though the early Spanish conquerors in the New World concentrated on Central and South America, by the mid-seventeenth century, the real potential of the Americas was to be found in Brazil and the Caribbean. That meant sugar cultivated by slave labour, all provided by the Atlantic slave ships. Two distinct Atlantic systems developed, each determined by prevailing winds and current. In the South Atlantic, the anti-clockwise system directed the maritime and commercial flow of trading ships between West-Central Africa and Brazil south of the Amazon. In the North Atlantic, a clockwise system saw the development of the European trade with the African coastline north of the Congo, thence to the Caribbean and North America.

  Africans were taken from eight major regions: Senegambia, Sierra Leone, the Windward Coast, the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin, Bight of Biafra, West-Central Africa (focused on the Congo) and south-east Africa (Mozambique). But the largest group – almost half of the twelve million total – was drawn from West-Central Africa. These millions of people were then scattered across the face of the Americas, from the Chesapeake Bay in the north, to the River Plate in the South. Although slave ships made landfall at dozens of locations, 95 per cent of all Africans were landed either in Brazil or the Caribbean; and fewer than 4 per cent landed in what became the USA.[4]

  This oceanic trade in humanity quickly proved its commercial value and attracted a host of merchants and traders – from both sides of the Atlantic. Odd as it may seem to the modern eye, it was a business that attracted little moral condemnation throughout much of its history. What to us seems an ethical and religious outrage passed largely unnoticed, not least because slave trading became so widespread and pervasive among all the maritime nations in the Atlantic world. The initial coastal trade in Africans gave way to a transatlantic system, feeding Africans into Spain’s early settlements in the Caribbean and Central America. By 1641, 418,000 Africans had embarked on ships from Lisbon and Seville. By then, 340,000 had been shipped to Brazil, first in Portuguese ships, but later in Brazilian vessels. When the nations of northern Europe began their own colonial ventures, they too moved into the Atlantic slave trade. In little more than a century and a half after 1642, the Dutch, British and French carried more than five million Africans across the Atlantic. When, in the nineteenth century, these same nations turned their back on slaving, the trade was taken over by traders based largely in Brazil and Cuba, and the scale of African transportations eclipsed even the daunting figures of northern European traders before abolition in 1807; some two million Africans were transported in the fifty years to 1850.[5]

  The slave trade was so profitable that other, smaller powers joined in: the Danes, Swedes, Germans (Brandenburgers). Although theirs was a minor contribution, this confirms that anyone able to organise a slaving voyage was keen to do so. We know of 188 ports that were involved in slave trading, but 93 per cent of all slave voyages originated in only 20 ports. Particular ports came to dominate their nation’s slave trading though other, lesser and sometimes unlikely places dispatched a local vessel to the African coast for slaves. Ships from Rio de Janeiro and Salvador were the largest carrier of slaves (1.5 and 1.36 million); Liverpool was the third largest with 1.32 million. Port cities with well-established commercial foundations were suitably placed to enter the slave trade. Established ports were able to use existing financial systems and commodities traded from Asia (textiles, for example) to create new commercial connections to Africa. But there were plenty of newcomers keen to elbow their way into the lucrative market, if only for an occasional or infrequent venture. Who, today, would think of Cowes, Poole, Lyme Regis, Oulton, Whitehaven or Lancaster dispatching a ship to trade for African slaves? Merchants with existing links to other forms of trade in the Atlantic had no hesitation in turning their attention to the trade in Africans. Here were commercial riches, which lured all sorts of merchants and investors, including minor, local ones. Locations that offered good access to Atlantic sailing routes enabled previously small ports to become ascendant slaving cities (Liverpool and Nantes, for example).[6]

  London was geographically well away from obvious shipping routes to Africa, yet ships from there carried more than one million Africans, primarily because the city was the hub of a thriving system of finance and insurance (which became increasingly important in the slave trade.) In addition, London became the centre of global maritime experience and an entrepôt for a multitude of goods and commodities with which to tempt African slave traders. The city’s outbound vessels were thus loaded with mixed cargoes of essentials and luxuries, all ideal to be exchanged for African slaves. Slave ships from Bristol transported half a million Africans, and that port (primarily serving Jamaica) had become Europe’s second largest slaving port by the mid-eighteenth century. Thereafter it was eclipsed by the rapid emergence of Liverpool, which by 1807 had risen to a newfound civic and commercial prominence on the back of the Africans carried in Liverpool ships. It was well placed for the sailing routes to Africa, had good links to internal British markets and its slave captains quickly developed important networks of contacts among African traders.

  Most of Europe’s major ports responded to the commercial prospects of the slave trade. Le Havre was the first French port to develop a significant slave trade, carrying 135,000 Africans mainly to St-Domingue. Bordeaux carried a similar number to St-Domingue and to French islands in the Indian Ocean. But the dominant French slaving port was Nantes, whose ships carried almost half a million Africans destined to French possessions in the Caribbean.

  Until recently, the study of the Atlantic slave trade tended to see the system as one dominated by Europe. We now know that, as port cities developed in the Americas, a number of them came to play a major role in the slave trade: 46 per cent of all slave voyages originated in ports in the Americas, dotted along the entire eastern rim from New England in the far north to Montevideo in the south. That said, most American slaving voyages originated from a small number of major ports, most of them in Brazil. Even before 1807, ships from Recife loaded more than a half million Africans, while another one and a quarter million embarked on ships that originated in Salvador. Almost 700,000 were embarked on ships from Rio. By the time the Cuban slave trade ended in 1867, slave ships from Havana had transported 683,000 Africans.

  By comparison with these immense Brazilian figures, the numbers of Africans embarked on vessels from other American ports before 1807 seem small scale. Shi
ps from the British Caribbean carried 125,000 while 33,000 were transported on French Caribbean ships and 131,000 on ships from Rhode Island.[7]

  The first European slave voyages had been piratical ventures, with Africans seized and bundled aboard. Sir John Hawkins’ first English slaving voyage described it perfectly. He acquired 300 Africans in Sierra Leone, partly by the sworde and partly by other meanes’, and took them to Hispaniola.[8] Such piracy had obvious, natural limits (people would flee at the sight of an arriving sailing ship). The transactions for African slaves quickly developed into routine commercial dealings. For that, the European, and later the American traders, needed to offer attractive deals. They haggled for enslaved Africans using those imported goods preferred and valued by local African merchants and traders. It was, after all, a trade. The point of enslavement – the moment when Africans were actually seized or captured and enslaved – was clearly a moment of violent seizure. But in the great majority of cases that initial seizure was not the work of men from the slave ships. They had sailed to Africa to trade for Africans who were already enslaved. They acquired their cargoes of Africans from local traders, from people who were eager to get their hands on imported goods. Much like any other trading vessel, the ships heading to west Africa – from Europe or the Americas – arrived with their holds filled with items expected to be the basis of trade on arrival.

  The slave ships’ captains were critical players in the entire project. They had to be a master-mariner in dangerous, unpredictable waters, in charge of a generally difficult crew and, on the African coast, they became the main commercial negotiator. Once enslaved Africans came on board, the captain became head jailor of a floating prison. For their part, African traders and rulers quickly developed a keen sense of what to expect from masters of the slave ships. The days soon passed when Africans could be bought off with cheap trinkets; they learned how to judge and value the goods on offer against the worth of the slaves they provided in return. Soon, commodities from the wider world were traded. Both Lisbon and Amsterdam became the crossroads for cargoes of tempting goods: from the Indian Ocean, from India, China and Indonesia – in addition to the Americas – and many of those items, along with local and European goods, were shipped on outbound slave ships to west Africa.

  Dutch slave traders to Upper Guinea offered textiles from Flanders, England and Spain, woollen goods from France, calico from Gujarat and other cloths from Bengal and Seurat. They offered satin from Persia, taffeta from China, woven goods from North Africa. They also traded beads and precious stones – coral, cowries and pearls – salt fish from Newfoundland, fruits and French brandy. All alongside more mundane items of clothing – hats, shoes, belts and cloaks. A similar pattern was repeated from one slave ship to another and, with variations, from one slaving nation to the next. The Bristol ship, Fly, on the Windward Coast in 1786-7, traded for slaves with a cargo that included brandy, Virginian tobacco, a range of Indian textiles, brass kettles and pans, pewter basins, firearms from France and Denmark, iron bars, linen from Ireland, knives, swivel guns, beads and earthenware.[9]

  Like Amsterdam before it, London became the financial, commercial and political bedrock on which the nation’s slave system developed and thrived. From the mid-seventeenth century the growing number of British ships heading to West Africa carried mixed cargoes from a range of British industries and from far afield: textiles of all kinds (from Yorkshire, Lancashire and India), metal goods – iron bars from Sweden – and firearms in enormous volumes. No single country could provide all the goods demanded by African traders and hence the British (and all the others trading on the African coast) had to assemble their cargoes from their homeland, from Europe, from Asia and the Americas. French brandies, Brazilian tobacco and Caribbean rum, all and more were eagerly awaited by African traders along Africa’s Atlantic coast.

  When the early monopoly trading companies gave way to freer trade in Africans, London’s initial dominance in the British trade gave way, first to Bristol, then, by the mid-eighteenth century, to the rapidly growing city of Liverpool. London’s financial importance, however, remained a fixture in the subsequent history of British slave trading. What happened to Liverpool provides a glimpse into the importance of the slave trade not only in the development of that city but in the economic development of Liverpool’s wider hinterland. The slave trade from Liverpool spawned a commercial and financial web throughout Lancashire and was important in the subsequent growth of the nearby city of Manchester and a host of regional towns. The trade between Liverpool and west Africa in search of Africans was to be an important element in the transformation of Lancashire’s economy.

  In 1709 only one Liverpool ship, of a mere 30 tons, traded to west Africa. A century later, that had grown to 134 ships. The cargoes carried to Africa were more valuable than cargoes on most other ships from Liverpool, because they consisted largely of the manufactured items sought by African slave traders. One Africa-bound slave ship after another carried similar cargoes: textiles, metal goods, firearms, pipes, luxury drinks. Many of those goods were manufactured by local craftsmen, who, along with the local shipbuilding trades, formed a workforce of some 10,000 people (from a population of 80,000) dependent on the trade to west Africa. Eventually, an estimated 40 per cent of Liverpool’s income was derived from its slaving business to and from west Africa.[10] Liverpool is just one example of a phenomenon we can find at all points of the Atlantic slaving system. Each major slave port spawned trades and businesses within the city itself and its wider hinterland, which fed upon the Atlantic slave trade. This was also true of slave ships departing from American ports: fish from Canadian waters, rum from Barbados, tobacco from Brazil – all found their way to the bargaining sessions between sea captains and African slave traders. The latter often rejected out of hand goods they simply did not want. (There were times when slave captains returned home with cargo rejected by African traders.) As the trade evolved, the maritime slave traders developed a keen sense of which goods would suit their purpose. They even developed long-standing commercial dealings with particular Africans, nurturing their goodwill with valuable or much-sought-after gifts.

  Slave ships themselves came in all shapes and sizes. The Liverpool ship, the Brookes, gave us perhaps the most famous image of a slave ship. Launched in 1781, the 207-ton Brookes collected 5,163 Africans (of whom 4,559 survived) on ten voyages. The engraving of that ship, cleverly used as abolitionist propaganda after 1788, showed 482 Africans packed like sardines. Yet two years earlier, that same ship had crossed the Atlantic carrying 740 Africans, i.e. 258 more than we see in that pestilential drawing.

  Overcrowding was a well-known problem, and there had been early efforts to control the ‘packing’ of slaves. The Spanish had limited numbers to one slave per ship’s ton in 1586. By the late seventeenth century the Portuguese sought to establish a limit of 2.5 slaves per ton on their vessels. The Brookes, sailing at the peak of Liverpool’s slave-trading success, carried five times that ratio. There was a marked deterioration in the shipboard condition of the Africans. Yet the data is confusing.

  We know of one tiny vessel of a mere 11 tons, while another Liverpool slave ship was a massive 566 tons. The pioneering Dutch first used ships drawn from other areas of maritime trade and gradually came to rely on small frigates, which were adapted by the ship’s carpenters to accommodate Africans as they were bought on the coast. By the late eighteenth century, when Liverpool dominated the North Atlantic trade, all of Europe’s major slave ships were much bigger than earlier vessels. A substantial proportion of Liverpool’s vessels had been built in the city itself, notably of the ‘Guineamen type built specifically to carry slaves. But as slave ships got bigger, the space provided for each person contracted. Even so, the level of ‘packing’ on slave ships was not the main cause of slave mortality. The key factor was the length of time Africans spent on board a ship: the longer they remained incarcerated there, the higher the mortality. As Atlantic crossings got swifter, the mortality ra
te dropped.

  The exception to this was in the last ‘illicit’ phase of slave trading (post-1807) when crowded Cuban and Brazilian vessels, pursued by British and American naval patrols, packed in as many Africans as possible before making a seaborne dash for the Americas. It was then, on grossly overcrowded ships, that we find the most terrible of all transatlantic conditions. Excessive crowding, brutal treatment, bad provisioning, all creating a string of harrowing stories – of suffering and death rates at horrifying levels.

  To modern eyes, all the slave ships – including the biggest ones used by the Brazilians in the nineteenth century – seem tiny; 200 to 300 tons, not much longer than a cricket pitch, and perhaps only 7 metres wide. But they were the floating prison, for months on end, for hundreds of Africans. At sea, the Africans were steeped in the filth below decks, not knowing where they were or where they heading: the sick and the dead chained together in a stew of violated humanity. There had been nothing like it, on this scale, before, and no other recorded or contemporary account of sea travel provides such horrifying data. But even the raw data of the Atlantic crossings fails to evoke the experience of life on a slave ship. The noise, the stench, the violent movement of a sailing ship in rough weather, the fears – all this and more was the everyday, commonplace experience of every one of the twelve million Africans who boarded a slave ship.

  The Atlantic crossing was the latest stage of a prolonged journey, albeit the most punishing and brutal leg. Many Africans had reached the Atlantic coast after travelling from inland communities. As far as we can tell, most were driven there by a variety of factors; famine, poverty, but, overwhelmingly, by acts of violence. Moreover, the networks of enslavement expanded, geographically, as demand on the coast for enslaved Africans increased. Contemporary, mainly late eighteenth century, accounts and a few surviving illustrations reveal that the victims were force-marched and sometimes taken by river craft, in coffles, in pairs or small groups, and generally shackled in some way in metal or wooden fetters.