Istwa Nou

Christopher Columbus opened the Atlantic trade in human beings by shipping about five hundred indigenous people from the Caribbean to Spain for sale. He was not improvising. Italian merchants and bankers in the Atlantic ports had been financing sugar estates and dealing in enslaved labour for generations, and the men who backed his voyages knew what a new island with a workable climate was for. What followed was the collapse of the people already living there. Smallpox, influenza and other diseases reached populations with no prior exposure and no immunity, and epidemics of that kind kill adults as readily as children, so households lost the people who planted and fished. Spanish violence and the wrecking of local food systems finished what the pathogens started. Millions of Caribbean islanders died within a few decades. The labour supply the Spanish had counted on disappeared, and the shortage they made themselves is why ships began sailing to Africa for replacements.

Rebellion aboard slave ships is documented on about one voyage in ten across the three centuries of the traffic. Most of it happened while the vessel was still within sight of the African coast, or during the first days at sea, when land was close enough to make escape imaginable. That rate had consequences the traders recorded in their own books. A ship expecting revolt carries more crew than sailing her requires, and it carries guns, nets, chains and irons that serve no other purpose. All of that is cost, and it was folded into the price of every person sold. The fear also moved the map. Owners and captains came to believe that captives shipped from some stretches of coast were likelier to rise than others, and they shifted their buying southward on that belief. People held below deck, without weapons and often without a common language, altered the geography of the trade that was carrying them. Resistance is in the accounts because it changed the accounts.