The website Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database documents more than 35,000 voyages made by slave ships from Africa to the New World. The seven-year old database attracts about 1,000 online visitors each day.
Research by Gregory O’Malley, an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has found that as many as 25 percent of all slaves transported to the New World were later shipped to other ports in the Americas. Dr. O’Malley’s recent book, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807 (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), documents this extension of the slave trade between ports in the Western Hemisphere.
Dr. O’Malley reports that “I went through all of the port records from all of the British colonies in the Americas, in both the Caribbean and North American mainland, and I logged every shipment that carried enslaved people. It took a year and a half, and I found more than 7,600 shipments carrying hundreds of thousands of people.”
Now, Dr. O’Malley has received a $220,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to incorporate his data into the Voyages database. The grant will also support additional research that will document the slave trade that took place between Brazilian ports and further destinations throughout South America.
