Paths of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Interactions, Identities, and ...

challenges to historians. In recent years, extensive scholarship has focused on documenting the mass shipments of Africans trafficked into the Americas. Most notably, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database: Voyages has proved an invaluable research tool, now readily available online.¹⁰ Tackling what was long considered an impossible task, its compilers documented over 35,000 transatlantic slaving voyages between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Historians’ preliminary analysis of the data has already greatly illuminated the understanding of the overall volume of the transatlantic slave trade, its participants, and their typical trade routes, as well as the demographics of the enslaved people, their points of origin and destination, and much more.¹¹ This research has confirmed that the majority of Africans enmeshed in the eighteenth-century transatlantic slave trade (not including Brazil) were sold via well-established slave markets, such as those in Jamaica or Barbados, and ended up on West Indian sugar plantations or in various North American destinations after a “seasoning” period in the Caribbean. Over time, thousands of enslaved persons were funneled through these central loci of exchange and dispersed to myriad destination

It has been enormously difficult for historians to quantify this flood of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, and tracing the slow drip of small-scale, intercolonial slaving is also elusive. It requires a meticulous search for individuals in the account books, shipping records, and correspondence of merchants and ship captains. Surviving documentary sources are often incomplete, inconsistent about how human cargo was recorded, and unclear as to the circumstances or outcomes of the transactions. Much of this more informal slaving seems to have transpired outside of centralized slave markets. Ship captains negotiated directly with local merchants, planters, woodcutters, or other itinerant traders, with whom they often had already established business relationships. In addition, it is frequently unclear where slaves in transit actually originated—some may have been born in the islands or have spent considerable time there, others may have embarked at points along the North American coast aboard southbound ships, and still others may have been quite recent arrivals from Africa in the process of transshipment. These distinctions