The Atlantic Slave Trade and Abolition
1441 O.S. – 13 May 188877 items
rightsslaveryFour and a half centuries, three continents
In 1441 a Portuguese crew seized a man and a woman on the Saharan coast. In 1888 Brazil, the last country in the Americas to do so, abolished slavery. In between, European ships carried about 12.5 million Africans across the Atlantic. This timeline follows the trade on all three shores: the African ports where people were embarked, the American colonies where they were landed and worked, and the European cities that paid for the voyages.
By the numbers
12.5 million people embarked and 10.7 million landed, 1501–1866, by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database estimates
About 1.8 million died at sea, roughly one in seven: the gap between the two figures
About 4.9 million were landed in Brazil, more than anywhere else; about 390,000 in mainland North America
Enslaved people are at the centre, not only the legislators: revolts, maroon communities, the Haitian Revolution, and the writers who testified against the trade. Bands mark the eras of the trade and the long struggles against it. Filter by africa, americas and europe to stay on one shore, or follow resistance, abolition, law and brazil through the centuries.
Calendars
Dates are given in the calendar their documents used. Portugal and Spain kept the Julian calendar until October 1582, and England and its colonies until September 1752, so the Lagos sale of 1444 and the Stono Rebellion of 1739 are Julian dates. Jamaica’s 1739 treaty with the Maroons is dated as its English copy was, in a year that began on 25 March. France’s abolition of 1794 and Bonaparte’s law of 1802 are given in the French Republican calendar their texts were written in.
I was now persuaded that I had got into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me. — Olaudah Equiano, on being carried aboard a slave ship, 1789
Items
Antão Gonçalves seizes captives on the Saharan coast
Captives divided and sold at Lagos
Bull Romanus Pontifex
São Jorge da Mina founded
Spain licenses shipments straight from Africa to the Americas
Afonso I of Kongo protests to the king of Portugal
Seville’s census counts its enslaved
Luanda founded
“20. and odd Negroes” land at Point Comfort
The Dutch take Elmina
Barbados passes its slave code
England takes Cape Coast Castle
Royal African Company chartered
France takes Gorée
The Code Noir
Zumbi of Palmares killed
Parliament opens the African trade
Britain wins the asiento
Dahomey takes Ouidah
Treaty with Cudjoe’s Leeward Maroons
Stono Rebellion
Nanny’s land patent
Berbice Uprising
The Marie-Séraphique sails from Nantes
Somerset v Stewart
The Zong massacre begins
Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade founded
Clarkson collects evidence in Bristol
Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments
The Brookes plan
Equiano’s Interesting Narrative
Bois Caïman ceremony
Black Loyalists found Freetown
Denmark bans its slave trade
Sonthonax proclaims freedom in the North
The Convention abolishes slavery
Bonaparte keeps slavery in the colonies
Delgrès’s last stand at Matouba
Toussaint Louverture dies at Fort de Joux
Battle of Vertières
Haiti declares independence
Britain abolishes its slave trade
Kitty’s Amelia sails from Liverpool: the last legal British slaving voyage
The United States bans the import of slaves
Valongo Wharf built
Bussa’s Rebellion
Denmark Vesey hanged
Brazil’s first ban on the trade
Samuel Sharpe hanged in Montego Bay
Slavery Abolition Act
Malê Revolt in Salvador
The Supreme Court frees the Amistad Africans
France abolishes slavery for good
Uprising in Saint-Pierre forces emancipation in Martinique
Emancipation in the Danish West Indies
Brazil ends the trade for real
The Clotilda lands its captives near Mobile
The Netherlands abolishes slavery
The Thirteenth Amendment ratified
Law of the Free Womb
Luís Gama dies in São Paulo
Ceará abolishes slavery
Cuba ends slavery
Mass flight from São Paulo’s coffee estates
The Golden Law