| Chapter 1: | New England Merchants and the Circum-Caribbean Slave Trade |
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Given the range of possible endpoints, this itinerant form of slaving had profound implications for the enslaved person. An individual might be moved on a north-to-south trajectory or the reverse, shifted among the British sugar islands or (often illegally) to the islands held by competing imperial powers, or relocated from rigid plantation regimes to more latitudinous slave systems on the colonial periphery. Not all were as fortunate as Newport, who ultimately parlayed his forced move into opportunity. For New England ship captains, tacking a few slave sales onto their to-do lists required little effort and promised easy commissions, so they facilitated this transfer of people from one locale to another, adding it to their regular coastal and circum-Caribbean trading routes. A slave sale could be concluded at any one of the hundreds of ports-of-call, large and small, that New England ships frequented—from Rhode Island down the coast of North America to Jamaica, the Bahamas, and other islands, as far as the shores of Central America. Where an individual slave ended up depended entirely on where a particular ship was headed and where along the route slave-market conditions seemed favorable.
In the West Indies, local demand for individual slaves varied widely depending on the season, on the availability of slaves newly imported from Africa, and on larger regional economic and demographic trends. The greatest demand for slaves was, predictably, among the larger sugar colonies. Because these were also the main entrepôts of the transatlantic slave trade, however, they were also the most competitive markets. Demand was likewise strong among developing frontier regions, such as the woodcutting settlements in Central America and these marginal areas appealed to small-scale traders because transatlantic slavers did not generally service them. By contrast, the net exporters of slaves tended to be smaller colonies where sugar production was on the decline; by the mid-eighteenth century, this included Barbados and many of the Leeward Islands (St. Kitts, Antigua, Nevis, and Montserrat).9 In such locales, New England ships were apt to acquire small numbers of slaves for sale or transport to other more promising venues.
As with the transatlantic slave trade, assessing this type of small-scale, intercolonial slaving presents significant, albeit somewhat different,