Rice lands database full of records of slave trade
Digital archives offer extensive details on ship voyages
More than 47,000 records of slave trade voyages — from maps, itineraries and mortality rates to accounts of insurrections on ships and stories of enslaved people — are now entrusted to Rice University.
SlaveVoyages, a digital repository transferred from Emory University in Atlanta earlier this year, offers extensive details on ship voyages along the trans-Atlantic and intra-American routes.
The database has been used by students conducting research and those who are looking to their own history as either descendants of the enslaved or slaveholders, said Rice professor Daniel Domingues da Silva, who also is director of SlaveVoyages. Scientists have also used SlaveVoyages to trace the distribution of sickle cell disease; archaeologists, to find more information about shipwrecks; and geneticists, to analyze the racial distribution of Africans.
Included are dates of voyages, demographics of enslaved Africans transported, as well as the names of ships, captains, slaveholders and more than 91,000 individuals who were liberated from slave voyages. The website presents a 3D rendering of a ship and a time-lapse map that shows slave
“We often think about the slave trade in the Atlantic or North America toward the United States, but it was way greater and way broader than that. Both the estimates page and database show that.” Professor Daniel Domingues da Silva
trade routes over more than 300 years.
Vignettes show how the database and archival materials have helped piece together rare stories of the enslaved. There’s Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, an African man who traveled from Bondu to the Gambia River to sell two slaves, only to be captured himself and transported to Maryland on the ship Arabella. Diallo worked as a slave on a tobacco plantation for more than a year before escaping to England and returning to Africa.
And 8-year-old Catherine Zimmermann-Mulgrave, who with other children was lured to the Portuguese ship Heroína on the coast of Angola by sailors who offered them candies. The Heroína set sail for Cuba with more than 300 slaves. Journal entries from Catherine’s husband said she was treated well, but she saw a slave badly beaten because he had attempted to kill himself. The vessel shipwrecked in Jamaica, then a British territory, and Zimmerman-Mulgrave was freed.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., host of PBS’ “Finding Your Roots,” used SlaveVoyages to aid his work in identifying the histories of notable guests. Gates, the professor and director of Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, once called the database a “gold mine” and “one of the most dramatically significant research projects in the history of African studies, African American studies and the history of world slavery itself.”
The database shows not only the trade from Africa across the Atlantic to the Americas, but intra-American routes. “Hundreds of thousands of people who arrived in British American colonies from Africa quickly boarded new ships for intraAmerican voyages—both within British America and across imperial lines to French and Spanish colonies,” the site says.
“We often think about the slave trade in the Atlantic or North America toward the United States, but it was way greater and way broader than that. Both the estimates page and database show that,” Domingues said.
The origins of SlaveVoyages go back to 1970, when David Eltis began compiling data.
Launched in 1999 on CD-ROM, the project has expanded beyond the capacity of any book or CD with the contributions of researchers around the globe. In 2008, a free website was launched to make it more accessible and has since estimated 12.5 million Africans were transported to the Americas as slaves, and around 10.7 million made it alive.
Now professor emeritus at Emory University, Eltis said traffic is the highest it’s ever been — at an average of 1,700 visits a day — a sharp contrast from when he began compiling data a half century ago.
Then, slave trade history was “a peripheral subject,” he said.
“American history didn’t deal with it as much,” he said, but now that such subjects, including race and social justice issues, are center stage, he predicts there will be more interest and more traffic.
Domingues, who started working with the database as a graduate student in Brazil in 2001 and helped expand it while a doctorate student at Emory, said it’s the first time the project has moved to another location aside from Emory.
“It’s a big responsibility to maintain a website like this,” said Domingues, adding that Rice’s goal is to preserve, maintain and further build the archive so that people can learn and expand on the research for years to come.
Scholars who worked on the database have noted that the biggest issue with the database is ensuring that it endures and its information is not lost even as institutions and their priorities change, Eltis said.
To maintain the website, Rice and Emory have formed the SlaveVoyages Consortium with six other institutions — the Hutchins Center, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at the College of William & Mary, and three University of California campuses including UC Berkeley.
The network institutions, each required to pay around $8,000 annually to upkeep the database, plan to host the database for at least three years.
The work on the database itself, however, will continue filling the gaps and will serve as a model for future large-scale digital humanities projects, said Allen Tullos, co-director of Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship.
Domingues said staff will work to include additional images, documents and archival information, as well as new slave trade voyages, particularly those across the Indian Ocean and traffic to Texas. In partnership with the university’s Center for African and African Studies, Rice students will work over the summer as history research assistants.
Rice has already begun to focus some of its courses and events on SlaveVoyage material.
A December conference, “Bound Away: Voyages of Enslavement in the Americas,” will highlight new information on the intra-American slave trade and feature panels on the involvement of Texas, Louisiana, Spanish American countries and Brazil.
And a year-and-a-half-long seminar for students through the Center for African and African American Studies will explore the African diaspora and history of slavery with visits to Ghana, Brazil, Jamaica and a former plantation near Houston.
As the country strives to come to terms with its history of slavery, segregation and racial injustice, the database will also be an educational asset, Domingues said.
For Rice, already working to confront its history and social injustice through its Task Force on Slavery, Segregation and Racial Injustice and Center for African and African American Studies, “it will be one giant step in that direction,” he said.