8 ms·

Animated History of the Atlantic Slave Trade

79 points by aidos 11y ago

mmanfrin 11y ago
It's a shame that it stops at 1860 -- since a major part of the article is about how it was not primarily North America that was the recipient of slaves, but 1860 is the beginning of the Civil War (which concerned just the US). Also would have been nice to show 'events', such as the banning of importing slaves to the US in 1807 (you can see the boat traffic essentially stop to North America at that point).
- Tuna-Fish 11y ago
  While there were sporadic slave ships making the crossing after 1860, the trade was already illegal in all destinations. This meant that unlike for the period during which the slave trade was legal, we have no surviving records of them.
- mikeash 11y ago
  From the FAQ for the database which it visualizes: "For the Voyages Database, the time frame is set by default to the period from 1514, the first year in which a slave voyage can be documented, to 1866, the year of arrival of the last three documented slave voyages." I don't know what accounts for the 6-year discrepancy there, but I would wager that the choice of ending in 1860 is not due to the US Civil War.
yitchelle 11y ago
With such high numbers going to the Caribbean and Brazil, were these just holding ports before the slaves were moved onto their final destinations?
- maceo 11y ago
  No, that was their final destination. Brazil had by far the largest slave population in the world. Haiti was the crown jewel of the French empire and the envy of all nations. The caribbean slave trade began to decline when Toussaint L'Ouverture rose to power in Haiti (The Haitian and French revolution were very closely intertwined) and slavery was abolished. The seminal book on this period of Haitian history is "The Black Jacobins" by CLR James.
  - lexcorvus 11y ago
    Haitian revolutionaries murdered virtually all white men, and spared only the women willing to marry black men. [1] "Black Jacobins" is indeed an apt term for such barbarism. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre
    - rodgerd 11y ago
      Perhaps enslaving, torturing, murdering, and raping people might one day result in a negative outcome for the slavemasters? Fancy that. My heart bleeds for them.
      - sliverstorm 11y ago
        Even whites who had been friendly and sympathetic to the black population were imprisoned and later killed.[3] A second wave of massacres targeted white women and children.[3]
      - oldmanjay 11y ago
        Assigning blame for individual actions to members of an amorphous group may feel wonderful vengeful, but it's ethically shitty.
        pessimizer 11y ago
        If you live entirely on the proceeds of slavery, you are likely to be killed if the slaves revolt. This is not a matter of ethics. If you live on a boat that sinks, you are likely to drown.
      - lexcorvus 11y ago
        So, basically, they deserved it. How nice. This is how good people can support mind-boggling evil. The British Empire managed to abolish slavery without anything remotely so horrific as the Haitian Revolution. As a result, former British colonies are what, hellholes? And Haiti is a paradise on Earth? You are likely inheritor to the American Abolitionist tradition, which managed to abolish slavery by fomenting a Civil War that, in its wake, claimed the lives of a quarter of the newly freed slaves—approximately a million people. Does your heart bleed for them? Or to the dead do you say, at least you aren't slaves?
- mixmastamyk 11y ago
  Not really, they were sent there to work on the sugar cane plantations (and other products). Unlike Mexico or Peru, there was not enough native population to exploit and lots of work to do in Brazil. Hence the much higher percentage of African descendants that continues today.
  - DonQuixote1000 11y ago
    The pope outlawed slavery of the native population.
- bjwbell 11y ago
  No. They used the slaves there for sugar plantations, among other things.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  In the Caribbean, slaves were used in the sugar trade. Apparently also in Brazil based on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Brazil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Brazil Slave labor was the driving force behind the growth of the sugar economy in Brazil, and sugar was the primary export of the colony from 1600–1650. Sugar was principally used to produce molasses, and from that, rum: In colonial times, sugar formed one side of the triangle trade of New World raw materials, along with European manufactured goods, and African slaves. Sugar (often in the form of molasses) was shipped from the Caribbean to Europe or New England, where it was distilled into rum. The profits from the sale of sugar were then used to purchase manufactured goods, which were then shipped to West Africa, where they were bartered for slaves. The slaves were then brought back to the Caribbean to be sold to sugar planters. The profits from the sale of the slaves were then used to buy more sugar, which was shipped to Europe. Another major use of slave labour was in cotton and tobacco production. Also of mining, in Brazil. In the Caribbean: Due to overwork and tropical diseases, the death rates for Caribbean slaves were greater than birth rates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery#British_and_French_Caribbean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery#British_and... Another statistic I've seen: life expectancy of British soldiers in West Africa during the 18th and 19th century was about six months. Government servants fared no better. During one seven-month period Sierra Leone went through 4 acting governors; two died in office and another, mindful of his predecessors fates, left the colony when he fell ill. On another occasion, a governor returning from a trip found his administration had no lawyer, no chief justice, no secretary, no chaplain, and only one schoolmaster.... The story was similar elsewhere in Britain’s West African outposts. In 1824 half the 600 soldiers garrisoned in the Gold Coast died within a few months, and the House of Commons was told in 1826, that of 1,567 troops sent out in the previous two years, 905 had died. Europeans died mainly from malaria and yellow fever - or from the “cures” which were nearly as dangerous as the ailments. http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/kenanderson/histemp/whitemansgrave.html http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/kenanderson/histemp/whitemansgrav... Yellow fever also reached the US: Yellow fever has been a source of several devastating epidemics.[107] Cities as far north as New York, Philadelphia, and Boston were hit with epidemics. In 1793, one of the largest yellow fever epidemics in U.S. history killed as many as 5,000 people in Philadelphia—roughly 10% of the population. About half of the residents had fled the city, including President George Washington.[108] In colonial times, West Africa became known as "the white man's grave" because of malaria and yellow fever.[109] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic#Yellow_fever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic#Yellow_fever Scientific paper, paywalled: The End of the "White Man's Grave"? Nineteenth-Century Mortality in West Africa Philip D. Curtin The Journal of Interdisciplinary History Vol. 21, No. 1 (Summer, 1990), pp. 63-88 http://www.jstor.org/stable/204918?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents http://www.jstor.org/stable/204918?seq=1#page_scan_tab_conte... (Compiled for comment elsewhere.)
Falcon9 11y ago
Seriously impressive interactive map, especially when you realize you can pause and click any "ship" for more information. If this kind of thing had been available when I was in school, I may have had a whole different perspective on history.
- beebs93 11y ago
  Ha - I was impressed before realizing you could do that. Now I'm even more amazed!
- protomyth 11y ago
  One of the back projects that I will never get to is "how much of this kind of moving graphic could be built with basic animation tools and data from tables in a spreadsheet style interface". I think a HyperCard for showing simulations would be an amazing tool. For something like this put the map as a graphic for the background, define the animation routes, the shape of the ship, and then read the data off a table to know what to animate when. There are tools for this type of stuff, but, last time I looked, they are fairly complicated. It would be amazing to have Harry Potter-style living documents.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Ha sheet, part of my ancestry was on one of these ships. My mother met an mixed Indian at the head of an associations, he told us records (for what they're worth) were kept in an archive somewhere. I didn't know (maybe him too) there were digitalization efforts to make them ...clickable. Weird loop. psedit: Erf, sheet again, "only" African trade. Too bad, can't click on my (grand^n)pa.
pierrec 11y ago
The level of detail is impressive. What would be even more impressive would be to combine this with something like Geacron [1] to show the correct country borders for each year (instead of showing modern borders), as well as a timeline of major historical events on the side. If you liked this and you're not aware of Geacron, you're in for a treat. Go ahead and spend countless hours on it, knowledge of history is something that's sorely lacking these days, and yet we have such amazing tools to learn it. There's also Centennia [2] for a more detailed moving map of Europe (but that's commercial). [1]: http://geacron.com http://geacron.com [2]: http://www.clockwk.com/ http://www.clockwk.com/ And here's a video for the lethargic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxDyJ_6N-6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxDyJ_6N-6A
- arjn 11y ago
  Thank you for posting those resources. Yes,it would be very interesting to see changing countries and borders during the Atlantic slave-trade era. we may learn or understand something new from that.
corford 11y ago
I found 12 years a slave difficult viewing but watching this animation makes my skin crawl. The sheer scale of it is horrifying. Clicking randomly on one of the ships revealed its name: Liberty. How pathetically ironic.
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  History is full of horrors. Failure to appreciate that makes it all the easier for such horrors to happen again because we didn't do enough to keep them at bay.
cmyr 11y ago
This is just heartbreaking. If you're inclined to take a dim view of human progress, think about where we started. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice, and all that.
thrwy00001 11y ago
It's worth mentioning that the Transatlantic Slave Trade wasn't even the largest: http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/history/slavery_1.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/history/slaver... http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/white_slaves_01.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/white_s... Taking millions of Africans and even one million Europeans as slaves doesn't quite mesh with the popular perception of Arabs as poor, helpless victims of Western imperialism.
- s_baby 11y ago
  >Taking millions of Africans and even one million Europeans as slaves doesn't quite mesh with the popular perception of Arabs as poor, helpless victims of Western imperialism. Even in the bbc article you posted they're being apologetic and trying to convince the reader that Islamic slavery was somehow exceptional. Great example of why Western narratives are essentially tone-deaf to Eastern Europeans. Can you imagine a respectable publication taking such a tone towards Southern slave owners and not getting into hot water for it?
- dang 11y ago
  That's actually interesting, but immediately invoking some racial/political agenda spoils your comment. HN is for intellectual curiosity, not ideological wars.
  - thetruthteller 11y ago
    >HN is for intellectual curiosity, not ideological wars. /s?
    - dang 11y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
  - s_baby 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

79 points by aidos 11y ago

It's a shame that it stops at 1860 -- since a major part of the article is about how it was not primarily North America that was the recipient of slaves, but 1860 is the beginning of the Civil War (which concerned just the US). Also would have been nice to show 'events', such as the banning of importing slaves to the US in 1807 (you can see the boat traffic essentially stop to North America at that point).

Tuna-Fish 11y ago
While there were sporadic slave ships making the crossing after 1860, the trade was already illegal in all destinations. This meant that unlike for the period during which the slave trade was legal, we have no surviving records of them.
mikeash 11y ago
From the FAQ for the database which it visualizes: "For the Voyages Database, the time frame is set by default to the period from 1514, the first year in which a slave voyage can be documented, to 1866, the year of arrival of the last three documented slave voyages." I don't know what accounts for the 6-year discrepancy there, but I would wager that the choice of ending in 1860 is not due to the US Civil War.

yitchelle 11y ago

With such high numbers going to the Caribbean and Brazil, were these just holding ports before the slaves were moved onto their final destinations?

maceo 11y ago
No, that was their final destination. Brazil had by far the largest slave population in the world. Haiti was the crown jewel of the French empire and the envy of all nations. The caribbean slave trade began to decline when Toussaint L'Ouverture rose to power in Haiti (The Haitian and French revolution were very closely intertwined) and slavery was abolished. The seminal book on this period of Haitian history is "The Black Jacobins" by CLR James.
- lexcorvus 11y ago
  Haitian revolutionaries murdered virtually all white men, and spared only the women willing to marry black men. [1] "Black Jacobins" is indeed an apt term for such barbarism. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre
  - rodgerd 11y ago
    Perhaps enslaving, torturing, murdering, and raping people might one day result in a negative outcome for the slavemasters? Fancy that. My heart bleeds for them.
    - sliverstorm 11y ago
      Even whites who had been friendly and sympathetic to the black population were imprisoned and later killed.[3] A second wave of massacres targeted white women and children.[3]
    - oldmanjay 11y ago
      Assigning blame for individual actions to members of an amorphous group may feel wonderful vengeful, but it's ethically shitty.
      - pessimizer 11y ago
        If you live entirely on the proceeds of slavery, you are likely to be killed if the slaves revolt. This is not a matter of ethics. If you live on a boat that sinks, you are likely to drown.
    - lexcorvus 11y ago
      So, basically, they deserved it. How nice. This is how good people can support mind-boggling evil. The British Empire managed to abolish slavery without anything remotely so horrific as the Haitian Revolution. As a result, former British colonies are what, hellholes? And Haiti is a paradise on Earth? You are likely inheritor to the American Abolitionist tradition, which managed to abolish slavery by fomenting a Civil War that, in its wake, claimed the lives of a quarter of the newly freed slaves—approximately a million people. Does your heart bleed for them? Or to the dead do you say, at least you aren't slaves?
mixmastamyk 11y ago
Not really, they were sent there to work on the sugar cane plantations (and other products). Unlike Mexico or Peru, there was not enough native population to exploit and lots of work to do in Brazil. Hence the much higher percentage of African descendants that continues today.
- DonQuixote1000 11y ago
  The pope outlawed slavery of the native population.
bjwbell 11y ago
No. They used the slaves there for sugar plantations, among other things.
dredmorbius 11y ago
In the Caribbean, slaves were used in the sugar trade. Apparently also in Brazil based on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Brazil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Brazil Slave labor was the driving force behind the growth of the sugar economy in Brazil, and sugar was the primary export of the colony from 1600–1650. Sugar was principally used to produce molasses, and from that, rum: In colonial times, sugar formed one side of the triangle trade of New World raw materials, along with European manufactured goods, and African slaves. Sugar (often in the form of molasses) was shipped from the Caribbean to Europe or New England, where it was distilled into rum. The profits from the sale of sugar were then used to purchase manufactured goods, which were then shipped to West Africa, where they were bartered for slaves. The slaves were then brought back to the Caribbean to be sold to sugar planters. The profits from the sale of the slaves were then used to buy more sugar, which was shipped to Europe. Another major use of slave labour was in cotton and tobacco production. Also of mining, in Brazil. In the Caribbean: Due to overwork and tropical diseases, the death rates for Caribbean slaves were greater than birth rates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery#British_and_French_Caribbean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery#British_and... Another statistic I've seen: life expectancy of British soldiers in West Africa during the 18th and 19th century was about six months. Government servants fared no better. During one seven-month period Sierra Leone went through 4 acting governors; two died in office and another, mindful of his predecessors fates, left the colony when he fell ill. On another occasion, a governor returning from a trip found his administration had no lawyer, no chief justice, no secretary, no chaplain, and only one schoolmaster.... The story was similar elsewhere in Britain’s West African outposts. In 1824 half the 600 soldiers garrisoned in the Gold Coast died within a few months, and the House of Commons was told in 1826, that of 1,567 troops sent out in the previous two years, 905 had died. Europeans died mainly from malaria and yellow fever - or from the “cures” which were nearly as dangerous as the ailments. http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/kenanderson/histemp/whitemansgrave.html http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/kenanderson/histemp/whitemansgrav... Yellow fever also reached the US: Yellow fever has been a source of several devastating epidemics.[107] Cities as far north as New York, Philadelphia, and Boston were hit with epidemics. In 1793, one of the largest yellow fever epidemics in U.S. history killed as many as 5,000 people in Philadelphia—roughly 10% of the population. About half of the residents had fled the city, including President George Washington.[108] In colonial times, West Africa became known as "the white man's grave" because of malaria and yellow fever.[109] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic#Yellow_fever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic#Yellow_fever Scientific paper, paywalled: The End of the "White Man's Grave"? Nineteenth-Century Mortality in West Africa Philip D. Curtin The Journal of Interdisciplinary History Vol. 21, No. 1 (Summer, 1990), pp. 63-88 http://www.jstor.org/stable/204918?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents http://www.jstor.org/stable/204918?seq=1#page_scan_tab_conte... (Compiled for comment elsewhere.)

Falcon9 11y ago

Seriously impressive interactive map, especially when you realize you can pause and click any "ship" for more information. If this kind of thing had been available when I was in school, I may have had a whole different perspective on history.

beebs93 11y ago
Ha - I was impressed before realizing you could do that. Now I'm even more amazed!
protomyth 11y ago
One of the back projects that I will never get to is "how much of this kind of moving graphic could be built with basic animation tools and data from tables in a spreadsheet style interface". I think a HyperCard for showing simulations would be an amazing tool. For something like this put the map as a graphic for the background, define the animation routes, the shape of the ship, and then read the data off a table to know what to animate when. There are tools for this type of stuff, but, last time I looked, they are fairly complicated. It would be amazing to have Harry Potter-style living documents.
agumonkey 11y ago
Ha sheet, part of my ancestry was on one of these ships. My mother met an mixed Indian at the head of an associations, he told us records (for what they're worth) were kept in an archive somewhere. I didn't know (maybe him too) there were digitalization efforts to make them ...clickable. Weird loop. psedit: Erf, sheet again, "only" African trade. Too bad, can't click on my (grand^n)pa.

pierrec 11y ago

The level of detail is impressive. What would be even more impressive would be to combine this with something like Geacron [1] to show the correct country borders for each year (instead of showing modern borders), as well as a timeline of major historical events on the side. If you liked this and you're not aware of Geacron, you're in for a treat. Go ahead and spend countless hours on it, knowledge of history is something that's sorely lacking these days, and yet we have such amazing tools to learn it. There's also Centennia [2] for a more detailed moving map of Europe (but that's commercial). [1]: http://geacron.com http://geacron.com [2]: http://www.clockwk.com/ http://www.clockwk.com/ And here's a video for the lethargic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxDyJ_6N-6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxDyJ_6N-6A

arjn 11y ago
Thank you for posting those resources. Yes,it would be very interesting to see changing countries and borders during the Atlantic slave-trade era. we may learn or understand something new from that.

corford 11y ago

I found 12 years a slave difficult viewing but watching this animation makes my skin crawl. The sheer scale of it is horrifying. Clicking randomly on one of the ships revealed its name: Liberty. How pathetically ironic.

InclinedPlane 11y ago
History is full of horrors. Failure to appreciate that makes it all the easier for such horrors to happen again because we didn't do enough to keep them at bay.

cmyr 11y ago

This is just heartbreaking. If you're inclined to take a dim view of human progress, think about where we started. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice, and all that.

thrwy00001 11y ago

It's worth mentioning that the Transatlantic Slave Trade wasn't even the largest: http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/history/slavery_1.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/history/slaver... http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/white_slaves_01.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/white_s... Taking millions of Africans and even one million Europeans as slaves doesn't quite mesh with the popular perception of Arabs as poor, helpless victims of Western imperialism.

s_baby 11y ago
>Taking millions of Africans and even one million Europeans as slaves doesn't quite mesh with the popular perception of Arabs as poor, helpless victims of Western imperialism. Even in the bbc article you posted they're being apologetic and trying to convince the reader that Islamic slavery was somehow exceptional. Great example of why Western narratives are essentially tone-deaf to Eastern Europeans. Can you imagine a respectable publication taking such a tone towards Southern slave owners and not getting into hot water for it?
dang 11y ago
That's actually interesting, but immediately invoking some racial/political agenda spoils your comment. HN is for intellectual curiosity, not ideological wars.
- thetruthteller 11y ago
  >HN is for intellectual curiosity, not ideological wars. /s?
  - dang 11y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
- s_baby 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]