Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database


"Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database" launched Friday in conjunction with a conference at Emory University marking the bicentennial of the official end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808. Emory spearheaded the two-year interactive project, which is free to the public, accessible online at http://www.slavevoyages.com/. The database has information on almost 35,000 slaving voyages between the 16th and 19th centuries. It also includes an African Names database which identifies over 67,000 Africans aboard slave ships, using name, age, gender, origin, and place of embarkation.

Click here to view the press release.

The image above is of a map of West Africa published in William Snelgraves’ “A New Account of Guinea” in 1754. Snelgrave was captain of several slave vessels that sailed to the coast of West Africa in the first half of the eighteenth century. The map shows some of the major slave trading ports along the coast between the River Senegal and Cape Lopez as well as details about the peoples, cities and states located in the interior of West Africa. The image is reproduced courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

1 comment:

Lucky7 said...

Wonderful!
I've been waiting for a site like this. It should definitely help with my ancestral search. Can't wait to view it online!