1619 Station 3: Mapping the Trans-Atlantic & Intra-American Slave Trade
Directions: Explore the dispersal of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic world. These maps, a small sample from a larger digital memorial assembled by slavevoyages.org, raise questions about the largest slave trades in history and offer access to the documentation available to answer them. European colonizers turned to Africa for enslaved laborers to build the cities and extract the resources of the Americas. They forced millions of mostly unnamed Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas, and from one part of the Americas to another. Analyze these slave trades and examine the following maps to see the dispersal in action.
Then, move to Station 4!
Map 1: Overview of the slave trade out of Africa (1500 - 1900)
Captive Africans followed many routes from their homelands to other parts of the world. The map shows the trans-Atlantic movement of these captives in comparative perspective for the centuries since 1500
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Map 2: Major Regions where Slaves Disembarked
The Caribbean and South America received 95 percent of the slaves arriving in the Americas. Some captives disembarked in Africa rather than the Americas because their trans-Atlantic voyage was diverted as a result of a slave rebellion or, during the era of suppression, because of capture by patrolling naval cruisers. Less than 4 percent disembarked in North America, and only just over 10,000 in Europe. Total documented embarkations: 9,371,001 captives
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Map 3: Direction of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
This map summarizes and combines the many different paths by which captives left Africa and reached the Americas. While there were strong connections between particular embarkation and disembarkation regions, it was also the case that captives from any of the major regions of Africa could disembark in almost any of the major regions of the Americas.
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Once you have gotten through each of the maps, move on to Station 4!