The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes

July 2, 2015 3:00 PM

Interactive animation of the Atlantic slave trade. Pause and click on individuals ships for detailed data (not available for all ships).
posted by laptolain (25 comments total)

Wow, that is an effective presentation.
posted by LobsterMitten at 3:10 PM on July 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

If you let your eyes cross, just a little bit, you can see it as a spurting, gaping, mortal wound inflicted on the heart of africa.
posted by cacofonie at 3:37 PM on July 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

If you let your eyes cross, just a little bit, you can see it as a spurting, gaping, mortal wound inflicted on the heart of africa.

Yeah, that struck me, too; it's like watching a blood-spatter analysis or something.

I don't know why this is so viscerally effective, but it certainly is. Just horrifying and chilling. I think perhaps it's seeing each individual ship making it's way across the ocean--you're forced to think of each of those ships being loaded with its individual cargo, over and over and over again. The sheer numbers are staggering but when you get them in the aggregate it's hard to wrap your mind around them; they're somehow numbing. But seeing ship after ship after ship taking its cargo away somehow humanizes and individualizes it. Awful--in every sense of that word.
posted by yoink at 4:15 PM on July 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

"There are more records of slave ships than one would dream. It seems inconceivable until you reflect that for 200 years ships sailed carrying cargo of slaves."
posted by cashman at 4:30 PM on July 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

I watched this a few days ago. They can stop doing these types of interactive animations now. Nothing is ever going to be as powerful as this.

The crazy thing is it's not like it's something we don't know. But see like this is such a gut punch.
posted by dry white toast at 5:29 PM on July 2, 2015

I think what was most surprising to me was how much traffic there was to Hispaniola. I knew it was a big customer, mainly because of sugar plantations, but it's still horrifying how many went to a single relatively small island.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 5:29 PM on July 2, 2015

I wanted to favorite your comment, Chocolate Pickle, but it seemed wrong. It is astonishing how many ships went to Hispaniola, and how few went to North America, given the impact that slavery has had, and continues to have, on US history.
posted by mollweide at 5:48 PM on July 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

So many sent to the Caribbean. Were most of these then sent on to North America?
posted by Thella at 6:07 PM on July 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

No. The Caribbean needed to import slaves because the life expectancy of a slave there was only about seven years.
posted by rdr at 6:16 PM on July 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

Slaves in the Caribbean were worked to death at a higher rate. Think Vorkuta, but warm.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 6:16 PM on July 2, 2015

Oh god.
posted by Thella at 6:29 PM on July 2, 2015

so, like, genocide. 12.5 million people (a conservative estimate, I imagine) this is right up there with the Holocaust, Stalin etc., and no no no those people weren't outright killed but kidnapped and forced into brutal slavery is not much of an alternative. some times I wonder if we can ever truly move beyond such a horrifying legacy of evil.
posted by supermedusa at 6:40 PM on July 2, 2015

I had to close the tab, leave the room, leave the house and look up at the sky. I was so angry I could not speak.
posted by skye.dancer at 6:49 PM on July 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

Jesus.

So what has the legacy been in Brazil of their part of the slave trade? Have they made social progress or is it as fucked up there today as it is in the states today?

Has anyone come to a "good" or "acceptable" place with their slaving legacy?

Humans are a fucked up species.
posted by maxwelton at 7:32 PM on July 2, 2015

I thought I had come to terms with the fact that my ancestors went down to the docks and bought people off one of those ships, but this hit me like a ton of bricks all over again.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:03 PM on July 2, 2015

Are there any animations that show the flows of capital back to Europe from the slave trade? Because that would help to complete the picture, I think.
posted by the lake is above, the water below at 8:15 PM on July 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

This is probably a good thread to recommend The Half Has Never Been Told. I'm about half way thru and wow is it a gut punch. It's weaving actual stories if US slaves into hard numbers and economic realities about the acceleration and further commodification of people that occurred in the U.S. mostly after independence.
posted by R343L at 9:10 PM on July 2, 2015

wow.
posted by you're a kitty! at 9:22 PM on July 2, 2015

Thella, at the bottom of that animation is a data plot showing the main places the slaves were taken to, and the quantities. What ultimately became the United States is very low on the scale; the vast majority went to Brazil and the Caribbean. And no, they weren't transshipped.

If you listen to American grade schools, you'll learn that the US was the main sinner, and perhaps even the only sinner, in this business. It ain't true, though; the US was a small player overall.

And after 1807 the US wasn't a player at all any more. Further importation of slaves was forbidden in the US beginning in 1808.

Slavery was a bad thing, an evil thing. But it's important to confront it honestly and not to rewrite history.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:12 PM on July 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

And every nook and cranny of those ships was packed full of slaves. That's an abolitionist poster of the British slave ship Brooks:

The Brooks was reportedly allowed to stow 454 African slaves, by allowing a space of 6 feet (1.8 m) by 1 foot 4 inches (0.41 m) to each man; 5 feet 10 inches (1.78 m) by 1 foot 4 inches (0.41 m) to each women, and 5 feet (1.5 m) by 1 foot 2 inches (0.36 m) to each child.

That's after the reforms of the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788; before the reforms the same ship carried as many as 609 slaves.
posted by kirkaracha at 10:23 PM on July 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think what was most surprising to me was how much traffic there was to Hispaniola. I knew it was a big customer, mainly because of sugar plantations, but it's still horrifying how many went to a single relatively small island.

It's because most of them died:

In the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana and Brazil, the slave death rate was so high and the birth rate so low that they could not sustain their population without importations from Africa. Rates of natural decrease ran as high as 5 percent a year. While the death rate of U.S. slaves was about the same as that of Jamaican slaves, the fertility rate was more than 80 percent higher.
...
Slavery in the US was distinctive in the near balance of the sexes and the ability of the slave population to increase its numbers by natural reproduction.

And after 1807 the US wasn't a player at all any more. Further importation of slaves was forbidden in the US beginning in 1808.

The US stopped importing slaves in 1808, true, but there was still a massive internal slave trade."Between 1790 and 1860, 835,000 slaves were moved from Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas."
posted by kirkaracha at 10:40 PM on July 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Thella, at the bottom of that animation
Yeah I saw that and wondered if they were then transhipped because, as you mention, the US is written up in common western history as the major bad guys wrt slavery. But no.
posted by Thella at 11:33 PM on July 2, 2015

That steady flow to the Caribbean is sugar. Every pound of sugar cost a part of a life, and people loved (and still do) sugar enough that they have killed millions of people making it. It's probably safe to say that without the sugar industry, a lot of these ships would never have been.

I recommend this book for a more detailed accounting of the relationship between the slave trade and the sugar industry. It's light on the current situation (still unpleasant, maybe because we call slavery something else these days) but it might change the way you eat.
posted by epanalepsis at 8:24 AM on July 3, 2015

If you listen to American grade schools, you'll learn that the US was the main sinner, and perhaps even the only sinner, in this business. It ain't true, though; the US was a small player overall.

No.

The focus on US slavery in US schools is because it is a part of US history. A huge part of our history, and the reverberations of it are still with us today. It galls me to no end when racism-deniers want to bring up slavery in other countries or ancient Egypt or whatever. Our Civil War wasn't fought over Brazilian slavery. Systemic racism in the US is the direct result of Slavery in the US. Slavery is completely intertwined in the formation of this country and any attempt to diminish that is an insult.
posted by billyfleetwood at 12:54 AM on July 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

Well, we're also meant to learn world history in US schools, too.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:48 PM on July 5, 2015