Dutch and British Atlantic Slave Trade Voyages, 1751-1795
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The below Web maps represent forty-eight slaving voyages during the second half of the eighteenth century (1751-1795). Forty-six of the voyages were Dutch and two British, most of them transporting enslaved people across the Atlantic from Africa to Suriname and Caribbean islands. Forty-four of the voyages also appear in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (the other four voyages concern vessels that carried slaves on voyages that were not trans-Atlantic).
Users can access this part of the database through the below spatial interfaces, or Web maps, by zooming in on an area or voyage of interest, panning, and clicking on daily position, route, and place symbols. Clicking on the "View Larger Map" link below any of the Web maps will open it in the free ArcGIS Online viewer and make possible additional functions, such as being able to turn layers on or off and access the underlying tabular data, as well as modify the Web map and save it to a free ArcGIS Online account. Users with ArcGIS 10 installed on their computers can enjoy the full functionality of the GIS (such as searching for and selecting particular vessels, captains, or cargoes) by downloading it as a map package called Slave_voyages_GIS.mpk from the Downloads page. For more details and background, see the Project Overview pages, especially those on methods, data, and Web mapping.
Connect to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
Clicking on any of the daily-position symbols of the below Web map opens a pop-up box that contains a link ("More info") to the relevant record in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. The pop-up also contains date and cargo information as well as, in the case of the Middelburgs Welvaren, its image taken from a marginal sketch in its logbook. Clicking the route line of a voyage brings up a box with the vessel name and, in some cases, a description of arrivals, departures, and cargoes from the shipping news sections of newspapers. You can also click on place markers for the archives in Europe that preserve the logbooks, ports along the African coast and in the Caribbean, and so on to bring up images and links to further information about those places. (Note that the time function is not implemented in this Web map.)
Temporally Animate the Voyages
This map allows users to view the voyages through time, as an animation. If the embedded version below does not run due to browser compatibility issues, you can switch browsers (IE, Chrome, Firefox), change security settings, or (best of all) simply view the Web map or the Web mapping application directly directly on ArcGIS Online.
This Website and all constituent materials are © 2013 Andrew Sluyter but open source and licensed through the Creative Commons as attribution-noncommercial 3.0, which allows others to use the contents, data, and programming to produce non-commercial derivative products.