Where Did Slave Ships Sail From?

Slave ships were large cargo ships built or converted from the 17th to the 19th century for transporting slaves, also known as Guineamen. The trade involved human trafficking to and from the Guinea coast in West Africa. After Charles I of Spain signed an edict allowing slave ships to travel directly from Africa to the Americas, human cargo on transatlantic voyages spiked nearly tenfold. 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 enslaved African.

During the four centuries of the Atlantic slave trade, an estimated twelve to fifteen million Africans were shipped from the west coast of Africa to the New World on slavers. These ships were confined to cargo holds, with each slave chained with little room to move. The most significant routes of the slave ships led from the north-western and western coasts of Africa to South America and the south-east coast of what is today the United States, and the Caribbean.

Captives deported in the transatlantic slave trade were carried in ships from Brazil, Britain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands. In the 1510s and 20s, ships sailing from Spain to the Caribbean settlements of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola might contain as few as one or two slaves. Once across the Atlantic, up to 20% of enslaved Africans were dispatched on another voyage to their final destinations within the Americas.

The Transatlantic slave trade was a segment of the global slave trade that transported between 10 million and 12 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean. The round trip from Bristol to Africa and the Americas and back to Bristol usually took about 12 months due to hard and dangerous conditions on the ships.

How long did it take for slave ships to sail from Africa to America?

The Middle Passage itself lasted roughly 80 days on ships ranging from small schooners to massive, purpose-built “slave ships.” Ship crews packed humans together on or below decks without space to sit up or move around. Without ventilation or sufficient water, about 15% grew sick and died. Ottobah Cugoano, a survivor of the voyage, called it “the brutish, base, but fashionable way of traffic” (Gates and Anderson 1998: 369). In addition to the physical violations enslaved people suffered, they were ripped away from their families, homelands, social positions, and languages.

Voices of the Middle Passage. Many individuals who experienced the Middle Passage or participated in the Transatlantic Slave Trade have documented its horrors. Read the words of some of these individuals through the dropdowns below.

Boston’s Role in the Middle Passage. As a major port city, Boston played a role in this global economic story. The first slave trade voyage from the American colonies sailed out of Massachusetts. The ship Desire left Salem in 1637, carrying Native American captives from the Pequot War to be sold as slaves in the Caribbean. When it returned up the coast with the first known Africans imported into the northern English colonies, it most likely anchored in Boston. After this documented case of enslavement, Massachusetts legalized the enslavement of Africans, Native Americans, and mixed-race people in the colony’s Body of Liberties. Thus began the legal justification for slavery in the Massachusetts colony.

What ocean did the slaves come from?

Between 1501 and 1867, nearly 13 million African people were kidnapped, forced onto European and American ships, and trafficked across the Atlantic Ocean to be enslaved, abused, and forever separated from their homes, families, and cultures.

Coastal communities across the U.S. were permanently shaped by the trafficking of African people. New England, Boston, New York City, the Mid-Atlantic, Virginia, Richmond, the Carolinas, Charleston, Savannah, the Deep South, and New Orleans had local economies built around the enslavement of Black people.Few have acknowledged this history.

EJI’s new report examines the economic legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, which created generational wealth for Europeans and white Americans and introduced a racial hierarchy that continues to haunt our nation.

How were female slaves punished?

Women also faced exploitation by slaveholders because of their ability to reproduce. Enslavers desired more slave laborers in a society where economic success was based on this exploitative regime. So, women endured a dual exploitation of being forced to labor for slaveholders and simultaneously increase the supply of the enslaved population through reproduction. This dual exploitation exposed tensions in the system of slavery itself because enslavers tried to preserve the value of their property, even when unborn, but at the same time they desired physically to abuse women whose work did not meet expectations. Hence enslavers found ways to whip women in ways they believed would protect valuable future offspring. Punishers commonly tied up women and forced them to strip off their clothes before a whipping, but if these women were pregnant then, as WPA respondents testified, women would sometimes be forced to dig a hole in the ground, and lie face down in it to receive their punishment, so as to protect their unborn child. While it is impossible to quantify the number of times that white people in authority whipped their enslaved women, whether pregnant or not, the fact that physical violence appears frequently in a variety of testimonies shows that the practice was routine, even expected, in enslaved people’s everyday lives. However, enslavers rarely whipped a slave to death because they wanted to preserve their property.

Women’s gender influenced the forms of reproductive exploitation they endured in other ways, too. Sometimes slaveowners forced enslaved women to breastfeed infants not their own—either those of white families or of other enslaved women. Enslavers’ use of women to feed other infants was a form of oppression at the intersection of women’s work labor and reproductive labor. Enslaved in Mississippi, WPA respondent Mattie Logan described her mother’s role as a wet nurse:

“Mother nursed all Miss Jennie’s children because all of her young ones and my mammy’s was born so close together it wasn’t no trouble at all for mammy to raise the whole caboodle of them….They say I nursed on one breast while that white child, Jennie, pulled away at the other! That was a pretty good idea for the mistress, for it didn’t keep her tied to the place and she could visit around with her friends most any time she wanted.”

Was a slave ship found off the coast of Brazil?

Researchers believe they’ve found the lost wreck of the Camargo, a US slave ship that illegally transported and sold enslaved African people into bondage in Brazil in the early 1850s, The Washington Post reports.

If the wreck has indeed been found, it will mark the culmination of an epic search that’s spanned library archives, local communities, and the murky waters of Brazil’s Bracuí River.

The Camargo entered Brazilian waters in 1852, two years after the country passed a new anti-trafficking law.

Where did slave ships leave from in Africa?

European sources began documenting the development of trade in the “Slave Coast” region and its integration into the transatlantic slave trade around 1670. The transatlantic slave trade led to the formation of an “Atlantic community” of Africans and Europeans in the 17th, 18th, and 19th century. Roughly twelve million enslaved Africans were purchased by European slave traders from African slave merchants during the period of the transatlantic slave trade. Enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas to work on cash crop plantations in European colonies. Ports that exported these enslaved people from Africa include Ouidah, Lagos, Aného (Little Popo), Grand-Popo, Agoué, Jakin, Porto-Novo, and Badagry. These ports traded slaves who were supplied from African communities, tribes and kingdoms, including the Allada and Ouidah, which were later taken over by the Dahomey kingdom.

Modern historians estimate that between two and three million people were transported out of this region and traded for goods like alcohol and tobacco from the Americas and textiles from Europe as part of the triangular trade. Historians have noted that though official records state that twelve million enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas from Africa, the actual number of slaves purchased by European slave traders was considerably higher. Alongside other forms of trade, this complex exchange also fostered cultural exchanges between these three regions, involving religions, architectural styles, languages, and knowledge. In addition to the enslaved people, free men used the exchange routes to travel to new destinations, and both slaves and free travelers helped blend European and African cultures. After the institution of slavery was abolished by successive European governments, the transatlantic slave trade continued for a time, with independent traders operating in violation of their countries’ laws.

The coast was also called “the White man’s grave” because of the mass amount of death from illnesses such as yellow fever, malaria, heat exhaustion, and many gastro-entero sicknesses. In 1841, 80% of British sailors serving in military expeditions on the Niger River were infected with fevers. Between 1844 and 1854, 20 of the 74 French missionaries in Senegal died from local illnesses, and 19 more died shortly after arriving back to France. Intermarriage has been documented in ports like Ouidah where Europeans were permanently stationed. Communication was quite extensive among all three areas of trade, to the point where even individual enslaved people could be tracked.

Where did the last slave ship come from?

• Diouf, Sylviane Anna. Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Durkin, Hannah. The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade. New York: Amistad, 2024.
• Glennon, Robert M. Kudjo
• The Last Slave Voyage to America, Fairhope, Alabama: Over the Transom Publishing, 1999.
• Harris, John. The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage. Yale University Press, 2020.
• Hurston, Zora Neale. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”, Amistad Press. Harper Collins, 2018.
• Lockett, James D. “The Last Ship That Brought Slaves from Africa to America: The Landing of the Clotilde at Mobile in the Autumn of 1859”. The Western Journal of Black Studies, vol. 22, no. 3 (Fall 1998).
• Raines, Ben. The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning. New York, NY, USA: Simon & Schuster, 2022.
• Robertson, Natalie S. The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Making of AfricaTown, USA: Spirit of Our Ancestors. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2008.
• Roche, Emma Langdon. Historic Sketches of the South. New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1914.
• Simonpillai, Radheyan (October 19, 2022). “Descendant: the untold story of an illegal slave ship and the legacy it left behind. A new Netflix documentary tells the story of activists in Africatown, a Black community in Alabama, as they fight to reclaim their history”. The Guardian.

Media related to Clotilda (slave ship) at Wikimedia Commons.

• “Last Slaver from U.S. to Africa. A.D. 1860”: Capt. William Foster, Journal of Clotilda, 1860, Mobile Public Library Digital Collections
• “Why was it significant when Clotilde, the last slave ship, was captured?, enotes.com (subscription required)
• The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning by Ben Raines and an interview with Raines, the discoverer of the wreck and the author of the book
• Clotilda Descendants Association
• Africa Heritage House – Clotilda: The Exhibition

What were the cruelest punishments for slaves?

Two years later in 1753, Thistlewood received a runaway slave’s severed head, and he placed it on a pole on the road near his home. Thistlewood also invented a form of torture called Derby’s dose, which entailed flogging a slave, rubbing lime juice on their wounds, and having a fellow slave defecate into their mouth. In 1767, Thistlewood purchased a 160-acre plantation called “Breadnut Island Pen”; by 1779, he had 32 enslaved people rearing livestock and growing provisions. All of his slaves were branded with his initials on their right shoulders. At Breadnut Island Pen, Thistlewood made attempts to “match” his male and female slaves; despite this he continued to rape the women. By 1781, Thistlewood was becoming regularly ill with syphilis and his sexual abuse declined as a result.

For most of the 1780s, Thistlewood’s slaves suffered from malnutrition due to intentional mistreatment. If any enslaved person was caught eating the plantation’s produce, they were brutally flogged. While his slaves complained of hunger and starvation, Thistlewood continuously entertained guests with lavish meals. He never married but he had a long term partner, an enslaved woman called Phibbah, with whom he had a son. In 1784, he became so ill that he had difficulty writing in his diary, and died at Breadnut Island Pen in November 1786. In his will he left £3,000 (equivalent to £490,262 in 2023) and 34 slaves. Thistlewood’s treatment of his enslaved workers did not attract criticism from Jamaica’s slavocracy, as this was typical of the conditions faced by Jamaican slaves. His diary, published as The Diary of Thomas Thistlewood, remains an important historical document chronicling the history of Jamaica during the 18th century.

Thomas Thistlewood was born in Tupholme, Lincolnshire on 16 March 1721. The second son of a farmer, he was educated in Ackworth, West Yorkshire, where he received training in mathematics and “practical science.” At age six, he inherited 200 pounds sterling from his father, but most of the estate was given to his brother, thereby giving him the opportunity to leave England. He began training as a surveyor, but after a friend and fellow surveyor reportedly went mad and threw himself into the sea, Thistlewood reflected that “now my hopes are dead”. Trevor Burnard concludes that the friend in question was William Wallace, though it is also possible the man in question was James Crawford.(original research?) After a two-year voyage on one of the East India Company’s ships as a supercargo, Thistlewood returned to England briefly at 29 and decided to seek employment in Jamaica. On 1 February 1750, he boarded the Flamborough to Savanna la Mar, Jamaica. He had letters of recommendation but no arranged employment. He arrived on 4 May.

Where did most of the slave ships come from?

Nearly one-third of all slave voyages were outfitted in Liverpool, London, Bristol, and other ports in Britain. French vessels from such ports as La Rochelle, Le Havre, Bordeaux, and Nantes made up another 13 percent. In the Americas, a number of slave ships were sent from the British Caribbean and Rhode Island in North America, and in the nineteenth century, especially, from the Brazilian port cities of Recife, Salvador da Bahia, and Rio de Janeiro. All told, 90 percent of captives deported in the transatlantic slave trade were carried in ships from Brazil, Britain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands.

Just as the circulation of European and American slave ships shifted according to supplies, prices, and political alliances, the movement of captives toward African coastal markets varied in scale and direction from place to place and over time. In nearly all instances, however, the sale of enslaved people to European traders was the result of a long and arduous journey through an extensive network of traders in the African interior.

In Senegambia, for example, where Europeans purchased 6 percent of all captives in the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved people came from an immense area of West Africa that stretched from coastal regions drained by the Sénégal and Gambia Rivers to the mountainous Futa Toro, Futa Bundu, and Futa Jalon, and farther east to settlements in the Sahel. In Senegambia, as in other regions, the transport of more than 750,000 captives over land and water required an intricate system of auxiliary traders in food and supplies, who literally kept the slave trade alive along its far-flung routes to the sea.

What were the routes of slave trade from Africa?

Routes. According to professor Ibrahima Baba Kaké, there were four main slavery routes to North Africa, from east to west of Africa, from the Maghreb to the Sudan, from Tripolitania to central Sudan and from Egypt to the Middle East.

The trans-Saharan slave trade, part of the Arab slave trade, was a slave trade in which slaves were mainly transported across the Sahara. Most were moved from sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa to be sold to Mediterranean and Middle Eastern civilizations; a small percentage went the other direction.

Estimates of the total number of black slaves moved from sub-Saharan Africa to the Arab world range from 6 to 10 million, and the trans-Saharan trade routes conveyed a significant number of this total, with one estimate tallying around 7.2 million slaves crossing the Sahara from the mid-7th century until the 20th century when it was abolished. The Arabs managed and operated the trans-Saharan slave trade, although Berbers were also actively involved.

Alongside Black Africans, Turks, Iranians, Europeans and Berbers were among the people traded by the Arabs, with the trade being practised throughout the Arab world, primarily in Western Asia, North Africa, East Africa, and Europe.

Where did the African slave trade originate?

By the 1480s Portuguese ships were already transporting Africans for use as enslaved labourers on the sugar plantations in the Cape Verde and Madeira islands in the eastern Atlantic. Spanish conquistadors took enslaved Africans to the Caribbean after 1502, but Portuguese merchants continued to dominate the transatlantic slave trade for another century and a half, operating from their bases in the Congo-Angola area along the west coast of Africa. The Dutch became the foremost traders of enslaved people during parts of the 1600s, and in the following century English and French merchants controlled about half of the transatlantic slave trade, taking a large percentage of their human cargo from the region of West Africa between the Sénégal and Niger rivers. In 1713 an agreement between Spain and Britain granted the British a monopoly on the trade of enslaved people with the Spanish colonies. Under the Asiento de negros, Britain was entitled to supply those colonies with 4,800 enslaved Africans per year for 30 years. The contract for this supply was assigned to the South Sea Company, of which British Queen Anne held some 22.5 percent of the stock.

Study the history of the African slave trade and its economic effect on western Africa, where coastal states became rich and powerful while savanna states were destabilized as their people were taken captive.

Learn about the history of the slave trade in western Africa.

Which country received the most slaves from Africa?

Although much has been made of the idea that the colonials had preferences for people from certain ethnic groups within Africa and that enslaved people were randomly distributed, Eltis et al suggest otherwise. Brazil and British American ports were the points of disembarkation for most Africans. On a whole, over the 300 years of the Transatlantic slave trade, 29 per cent of all Africans arriving in the New World disembarked at British American ports, 41 per cent disembarked in Brazil.

Perhaps 5–10 percent of all Africans who arrived in the Americas quickly moved to other parts of the Americas, as part of an intra-American slave trade. Most Africans arriving in Spanish America came from an intermediary point of disembarkation rather than directly from Africa. Exactly how many cannot be deduced from the data analyzed by Eltis et al., however they estimate the mainland Spanish colonies may have received half of their arrivals through intra-American slave trade and the mainland British colonies fewer than 5 percent in this manner.

In most regions, during the colonial period when Africans were adapting their cultural patterns to the new environment, they like other people coming to America before 1750 were less likely to be of diverse origins (Eltis et al 2001; Walsh 2001). However, over time people from different regions of Africa arrived, which resulted in the mixing of peoples. Based upon these findings as well as recent archeology of African American sites from the colonial period, historical interpretations of colonial life among Africans need to revisit notions of Africans being unable to communicate with one another, or being randomly distributed in the colonies.