1686 to 1804 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan
Bordeaux arrives late and buys its captives in the Indian Ocean
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Bordeaux came late to the slave trade. Most of the voyages it organised sailed after 1750, by which point Nantes, Liverpool, London and Bristol had the best West African outlets tied up. A latecomer takes what is left, and what was left was distance. Bordeaux merchants built the strongest connection of any French port with Southeast Africa and the Indian Ocean, sending ships around the Cape to buy captives on the Mozambique coast and at Madagascar. Some of those people were landed on the Mascarene Islands, the French sugar colonies now called Reunion and Mauritius. Others were carried the whole way west to Saint-Domingue, on a passage that could run half a year. Eltis and Richardson record the strategy as one that worked, keeping Bordeaux a serious participant in the French maritime economy through the late eighteenth century by trading where its rivals did not. It also means the Africans who stepped ashore in Saint-Domingue came from a far wider stretch of the continent than the West African coast, some of them having crossed two oceans.
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