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 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

Click here to view this map in greater detail.