The largest forced migration in history: how some 12.5 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic between the 1500s and the 1860s, where they were taken from and to, how they resisted, and how the trade was ended.
Stop 01 · 1441–1482
Beginnings
From 1441, ships sent down the West African coast by Prince Henry the Navigator began bringing captives back to Portugal. In 1444 six caravels landed 235 men, women and children at Lagos, seized around the Bay of Arguin in today's Mauritania; many historians date the Atlantic trade from that landing. A papal bull of 1452 let Portugal's king enslave non-Christians for life. The Portuguese bought and captured people to sell at home and on new sugar plantations on Madeira and, from the 1490s, São Tomé. Slavery already existed in Africa, Europe and the Islamic world, but what grew from this was new in scale and brutality: a trade in human beings across an ocean, for profit, defined by race.
From 1441, ships sent down the West African coast by Prince Henry the Navigator began bringing captives back to Portugal. In 1444 six caravels landed 235 men, women and children at Lagos, seized around the Bay of Arguin in today's Mauritania; many historians date the Atlantic trade from that landing. A papal bull of 1452 let Portugal's king enslave non-Christians for life. The Portuguese bought and captured people to sell at home and on new sugar plantations on Madeira and, from the 1490s, São Tomé. Slavery already existed in Africa, Europe and the Islamic world, but what grew from this was new in scale and brutality: a trade in human beings across an ocean, for profit, defined by race.
Portuguese priests and envoys reached Mbanza Kongo, capital of the Kingdom of Kongo, in 1491. Afonso I, king from 1509, made Catholicism the royal faith, sent young nobles to study in Lisbon, and traded ivory, copper, palm cloth and, increasingly, people. Kongo already held slaves, and its wars of expansion produced captives: after a campaign against Ndongo in 1512, Afonso told Portugal's King Manuel he had sent him 410. But Kongolese law forbade selling freeborn subjects, while the sugar island of São Tomé drove demand ever higher. In 1526, angry that nobles and Portuguese merchants were kidnapping free people, Afonso wrote to King João III threatening to stop the trade, and set up a board to check each captive's status.
As Spanish and Portuguese colonists took over the Americas, the Indigenous peoples they forced to work died in huge numbers from disease and overwork, and in the mid-16th century Spain's New Laws banned enslaving them. Colonists turned to enslaved Africans. The earliest known direct voyage from Africa to the Americas, in 1519, carried eight people from Guinea to Puerto Rico; from 1525 ships sailed straight from São Tomé to Hispaniola. Barred from African ports by treaty, Spain relied on Portuguese carriers and on trading licences called asientos. In 1562 the Englishman John Hawkins took about 300 Africans to Hispaniola. From around 1560 the trade reached Brazil, whose sugar plantations, and later the Caribbean's, became its main destinations.
Most of the trade took place in the 18th century, peaking in its last two decades, and Portuguese, British and French ships carried nine of every ten captives. West Central Africa, from Loango through Kongo to Angola, supplied the largest share. Other great sources were the Bight of Benin around Ouidah, known as the Slave Coast; the Bight of Biafra, where Bonny was a leading market; and the Gold Coast, whose forts switched from gold to slaves after 1690. Most captives were taken in wars and raids, often by expanding states such as Dahomey, Oyo and Asante, and sold to Europeans on the coast for textiles, guns, gunpowder and alcohol. Dahomey's king Agaja seized Ouidah in 1727.
The crossing, the 'Middle Passage', could take anything from about one to six months depending on the weather. In the 18th century many voyages lasted at least two and a half months; by the 19th, five to seven weeks was common. Captives were chained below deck in crowded, airless holds, where dysentery and scurvy caused most deaths. A typical British ship of the later 1700s carried about 267 people. Of about 12.5 million people embarked, roughly 10.7 million survived the crossing; well over a million died at sea, some estimates say two million. The largest share, more than four in ten, were taken to Brazil; most of the rest went to the Caribbean; about 388,000 to mainland North America.
Much of the trade ran as a triangle. Ships carried guns, gunpowder, alcohol, Indian cloth and other manufactured goods from Europe to Africa, enslaved people from Africa to the Americas, and sugar, tobacco, coffee and cotton grown by enslaved workers back to Europe. Port cities such as Liverpool, Bristol, Nantes, Lisbon and Amsterdam grew rich on it; Liverpool ships alone delivered more than 1.1 million captives, while Birmingham's gunmakers and Manchester's cotton industry also profited. Historians now stress a second system in the South Atlantic, though: ships from Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Recife sailed straight to Angola and back, and between them carried more captives than London, Liverpool, Bristol and Nantes combined.
Enslaved Africans resisted at every stage, from the forced marches to the coast to the plantations. Records list some 350 revolts on slave ships between 1698 and 1807, and perhaps one voyage in ten saw an uprising, though most were crushed; in 1729 captives on the Clare seized its guns, drove off the crew and beached the ship near Cape Coast. Others escaped to form free 'maroon' communities, such as Palmares in north-eastern Brazil, which held out for most of the 1600s, from about 1605 until 1694, with perhaps 11,000 to 20,000 people. The greatest uprising, in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1791, became the Haitian Revolution; in 1804 Haiti became the first nation founded by formerly enslaved people.
Saint-Domingue, the western part of Hispaniola, produced more sugar than any other colony in the Americas: about 452,000 enslaved people worked there under some 40,000 whites, and around 30,000 new captives arrived each year. After a vodou ceremony at Bois Caïman, the enslaved of the northern plain rose in August 1791; within weeks 100,000 had joined, and both sides committed atrocities. Revolutionary France abolished slavery in 1794, and the former slave Toussaint Louverture came to govern the colony. In 1802 Napoleon sent an army under Charles Leclerc to restore French rule; it was destroyed by yellow fever and Haitian resistance. After victory at Vertières in November 1803, Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti independent at Gonaïves on 1 January 1804.
In Britain, a mass movement of abolitionists grew from the 1780s, led by Quakers, Thomas Clarkson and, in Parliament, William Wilberforce. Formerly enslaved writers and speakers such as Olaudah Equiano joined it; his 1789 memoir went through nine editions in his lifetime. Denmark had legislated a ban in 1792. In February 1807 the Commons voted 283 to 16 to end the British trade, and the United States banned imports from 1 January 1808. The Royal Navy began intercepting slave ships. Slavery itself lasted longer: after the great Jamaican revolt of 1831–32, it was abolished in the British Empire in 1833, freeing some 800,000 people; in the United States in 1865; and in Brazil, the last in the Americas, in 1888.
Banning the trade did not stop it. More than a quarter of all captives, some 3.2 million people, embarked after 1807, most bound for Brazil and Cuba. Britain's West Africa Squadron, formed in 1808, patrolled the coast, and courts at Freetown in Sierra Leone judged the ships it seized. It caught only about 6 per cent of slave ships but freed around 150,000 Africans, and nearly 1,600 of its sailors died, mostly of disease, between 1830 and 1865. Brazil outlawed imports in 1831, yet over 500,000 captives landed there in the next two decades, until a new law in 1850 finally ended the traffic. The last known slave ship reached Cuba in 1867; Cuba ended slavery itself only in 1886.