A digital archive of
slave voyages details the largest forced migration in history
A digital archive of slave voyages details the largest forced migration in history
Philip Misevich, St. John's University; Daniel Domingues, University of
Missouri-Columbia; David Eltis, Emory University; Nafees M. Khan, Clemson
University , and Nicholas Radburn, University of Southern
California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
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.
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 , and Nicholas Radburn, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Southern
California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
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