The longer you were on a slave ship, the worse it was. Millions of africans spent months at sea before they even left for the americas. The ships accumulated their human cargoes slowly from place to place where there were no facilities for holding africans on shore. In the seventeenth century, he writes, dutch ships spent an average of a hundred and 20 days on the coast. British ships 94. A century later, the dutch spent two hundr days on the coastline. French ships, a hundred and forty three. in the mid to late eighteenth century, british ships spent a hundred and 73 days on the african coast.
The Atlantic Slave Trade mixes centuries of human bondage with violence, economics, commerce, geo-political competition, liberty, morality, injustice, revolution, tragedy and bloody reckonings. That sounds like a lot, yet this show merely scratches the surface of this enormous subject.