scholarly journals Rufino Joins the Slave Trade

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-74
Author(s):  
João José Reis ◽  
Flávio dos Santos Gomes ◽  
Marcus J. M. de Carvalho ◽  
H. Sabrina Gledhill
Keyword(s):  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Strategic Position

Now a freedman, Rufino starts working as a cook aboard slave ships, a strategic position in the business of transporting captives alive across the Atlantic, for cooks kept the slaves and crew healthy during the Middle Passage lasting 27 to 60 days. Rufino may also have used his earlier experience to prepare medicine and amulets for Muslim slaves. After the slave trade was banned in 1831, slave ships were frequently overcrowded, leading to an increase in mortality rates. Rufino’s first employer was a trader named Joaquim José da Rocha who sent slaves from Angola to Rio de Janeiro. Later, he would work for other slave traders, such as Joaquim Ribeiro de Brito, who operated between Luanda and Recife, in the province of Pernambuco, where at least 28,000 slaves were disembarked between 1837 and 1841.

France and the Slave Trade

2020 ◽  
pp. 60-78
Author(s):  
Alan Forrest
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Short Overview ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Triangular Trade

The chapter begins with a short overview of France’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and shows how, by the second half of the eighteenth century, more and more merchants and investors became dazzled by the profits offered by a successful slave voyage. All the Atlantic ports engaged in the slave trade, though Nantes had the highest level of slaving and the greatest dependence on the triangular trade with west Africa and the Caribbean. The economics of a slave voyage are analysed, as well as the cargoes purchased for trading in Africa; the captains’ involvement in slave markets in both West Africa and the Caribbean; the risks run by the slave ships and their crews during the voyage; and the conditions that were endured below deck during the Middle Passage.

Circuits of wealth, circuits of sorrow: financing the illegal transatlantic slave trade in the age of suppression, 1850–66

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. E. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Capital Flows ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The United States ◽  
Final Phase ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Global Commerce ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Financial Arrangements

AbstractSlave traders forced more than 1.65 million captive Africans aboard illegal transatlantic slave ships during the nineteenth century. This article focuses on the final phase of this brutal traffic, between 1850 and 1866. It argues that slave traders sustained their illicit industry, in large part, by strategically coordinating their financial arrangements against a rising tide of international suppression. One key tactic was for slave trade investors in the United States, Cuba, Africa, and Iberia to lower the risks of interdiction by joining forces and co-financing voyages. Another was to combine with an international cast of merchants and bankers, who helped them launder slave trade capital and transmit it to their distant allies. This capital was concealed within broader currents of global commerce, which was, in turn, spurred by the growth of free trade in the nineteenth century. These myriad alliances and capital flows undergirded the trade until its final extinction in the 1860s.

Slave Purchasing Strategies and Shipboard Mortality: Day-to-Day Evidence from the Dutch African Trade, 1751–1797

2007 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 160-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon J. Hogerzeil ◽  
David Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Survival Rates ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender ◽  
In Transit ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Close Investigation ◽  
Shed Light

The mortality of enslaved Africans in the Atlantic crossing has long preoccupied historians but the relationship between slave traders' purchasing strategies and slave mortality rates in transit has escaped close investigation. We address these issues by using records of 39 eighteenth-century voyages of the Dutch Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie. These allow shipboard mortality rates of enslaved Africans to be estimated. They also reveal previously un-noticed age- and gender-based variations in slave purchase and mortality patterns, which in turn shed light on the relative importance of African and shipboard conditions in determining slave survival rates in the middle passage.

Mortality and Voyage Length in the Middle Passage: New Evidence from the Nineteenth Century

1984 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Eltis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
High Mortality ◽  
Death Rate ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Endemic Disease ◽  
Testing Of Hypotheses ◽  
New Evidence

New data on mortality and voyage length in the nineteenth-century slave trade make possible further testing of hypotheses on why slaves died during the middle passage. Mortality rates (defined as death per slaves embarked/voyage length in days × 1000) were higher in the nineteenth century than in earlier centuries and varied markedly between regions of embarkation. In the high mortality regions, all ships in the sample appeared to have experienced a higher death rate, suggesting that epidemics were not of prime importance. Mortality rates do not appear to have fluctuated very much during the voyage nor does the slaves–per–ton variable have much explanatory power. The major explanation is probably endemic disease.

scholarly journals Visualizing the Middle Passage: The Brooks and the Reality of Ship Crowding in the Transatlantic Slave Trade

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 533-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Radburn ◽  
David Eltis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Accurate Representation ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Contemporary Artists

Crowding on slave ships was much more severe than historians have recognized, worsening in the nineteenth century during the illegal phase of the traffic. An analysis of numerous illustrations of slave vessels created by then-contemporary artists, in conjunction with new data, demonstrates that the 1789 diagram of the British slave ship Brooks—the most iconic of these illustrations—fails to capture the degree to which enslaved people were crowded on the Brooks, as well as on most other British slaving vessels of the eighteenth century. Five other images of slave ships sailing under different national colors in different eras further reveal the realities of ship crowding in different periods. The most accurate representation of ship-board conditions in the eighteenth-century slave trade is in the paintings of the French slave ship Marie-Séraphique.

Prize voyages and ideas of freedom

2019 ◽  
pp. 97-132
Author(s):  
Mary Wills
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Racial Attitudes ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
African People ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
St Helena ◽  
Naval Officers

To witness the human trauma of the transatlantic slave trade was extraordinary employment for British naval officers, and this chapter examines rare surviving accounts of life on prize voyages, whereby naval officers were tasked with transporting captured slave ships to Admiralty courts for adjudication. It explores the extent to which officers engaged with the individuals they were ‘liberating’ – on captured slavers, on HM ships, or while stationed at the British territories of Sierra Leone or St Helena. Officers’ ideas about freedom, its limits, and its applicability to African people were concepts bound to racial attitudes. A prize voyage could constitute an alternative ‘Middle Passage’ for captive Africans, a state of affairs naval officers could contribute to. This chapter looks at the experiences of captive Africans, and at cases where individual Africans were taken into British guardianship by naval officers.

scholarly journals Ship Crowding and Slave Mortality: Missing Observations or Incorrect Measurement?

2017 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 1177-1202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter M. Solar ◽  
Nicolas J. Duquette
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Missing Observations ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Incorrect Measurement ◽  
Over Time

Inconsistent measurement of ship tonnage, the denominator in the usual measures of crowded conditions on slave vessels, may confound estimated associations between crowding and slave mortality on the Middle Passage. The tonnages reported inLloyd's Registersare shown to be consistent over time and are used to demonstrate that both the unstandardized and standardized tonnages in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database are deeply flawed. Using corrected tonnages, we find that crowding increased mortality only on British slave ships and only before the passage of Dolben's Act in 1788.

Shipping Patterns and Mortality in the African Slave Trade to Rio de Janeiro, 1825-1830.

1975 ◽  
Vol 15 (59) ◽  
pp. 381-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert S. Klein ◽  
Stanley L. Engerman
Keyword(s):  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
African Slave

Slave Traders by Invitation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Finn Fuglestad
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Human Settlement ◽  
Local Setting ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

The small Slave Coast between the river Volta and Lagos, and especially its central part around Ouidah, was the epicentre of the slave trade in West Africa. But it was also an inhospitable, surf-ridden coastline, subject to crashing breakers and devoid of permanent human settlement. Nor was it easily accessible from the interior due to a lagoon which ran parallel to the coast. The local inhabitants were not only sheltered against incursions from the sea, but were also locked off from it. Yet, paradoxically, this small coastline witnessed a thriving long-term commercial relationship between Europeans and Africans, based on the trans-Atlantic slave trade. How did it come about? How was it all organized? Dahomey is usually cited as the Slave Coast's archetypical slave raiding and slave trading polity. An originally inland realm, it was a latecomer to the slave trade, and simply incorporated a pre-existing system by dint of military prowess, which ultimately was to prove radically counterproductive. Dahomey, which never controlled more than half of the region we call the Slave Coast, represented an anomaly in the local setting, an anomaly the author seeks to define and to explain.

Four Sierra Leone Recaptives

1961 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Fyfe
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

Parliament passed in 1807 the act to illegalize (called prematurely to abolish) the slave-trade. A Vice-Admiralty Court where the Navy could bring captured slave-ships for condemnation was constituted in Freetown, the capital of the Colony of Sierra Leone. From 1819 international anti-slave-trade courts, the Courts of Mixed Commission, were constituted there too. Until 1864, when the last ship destined for the Atlantic slave-trade was condemned, slave-ships were regularly brought in and the slaves freed.

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