The Atlantic Slave trade in images

The slave trade Between 10 and 28 million people taken from Africa 17 million Africans sold into slavery on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa 12 million Africans taken to the Americas 5 million Africans taken across the Sahara and East Africa into slavery in other parts of the world

"The stench of the hold…was so intolerably loathsome that it was dangerous to remain there for any time…but now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us"

George L. Sulivan, Dhow chasing in Zanzibar waters and on the eastern coast of Africa (London, 1873), Caption, "Group of Negro men and boys taken out of captured Dhow in state of starvation." Image courtesy of The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record

Caption for previous image: "Barbarous Cruelty Inflicted on a Negroe." Captain John Gabriel Stedman, an Englishman, spent five years during the 1770s, in the Dutch colony of Surinam in Guiana documenting the agricultural enterprises dependant on slave labor. Stedman described this scene as the "first object which presented itself after my landing ... a young female slave, whose only covering was a rag tied round her loins, which, like her skin, was lacerated in several places by the stroke of the whip. The crime which had been committed by this miserable victim of tyranny, was the nonperformance of a task which she was apparently unequal, for which she was sentenced to receive two hundred lashes, and to drag during some months, a chain several yards in length, one end of which was locked around her ancle, and the other was affixed a weight of at least a hundred pounds..." Notice that other African slaves carried out the punishment orders of the slaveholder; also notice the startled appearance of the English soldier, probably Stedman as he came upon the scene. Note too the color and facial features of the woman being whipped in comparison to those who are doing the whipping. Stedman refers in his writing to the many mulattos and quaderoons, or the offspring of white enslavers and the enslaved, among the slave population. These mixed race children and adults most often resulted from the sexual assaults on enslaved females by the white, male enslavers. Stedman, John Gabriel. Curious Adventures of Captain Stedman, During an Expedition to Surinam, in 1773. London: Thomas Tegg, III, Cheapside, 1796. Mariners' Museum.