1642 to 1794 · Africanspan
Dutch slavers took their final orders in the roads off Texel
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Merchants in Amsterdam and the northern Netherlands sent their slaving ships out from the anchorage behind the island of Texel, at the entrance to the Zuiderzee, where deep hulled vessels could lie in shelter. A ship took on its last stores there, and its captain received his sailing instructions there, before standing away for the African coast. Between 1642 and 1794 the Dutch bought most of their captives on the Gold Coast and in the Bight of Benin. In the middle of the seventeenth century they sold across a wide spread of American markets, being at that point the general carriers of the Atlantic. After 1670 the pattern narrowed. Captives went principally to Suriname, where Dutch planters were opening sugar estates, and to Curacao and St Eustatius, the two islands the Dutch ran as re-export markets serving other people's colonies. A Dutch ship of the eighteenth century therefore sailed to a short list of destinations, and every one of them existed to supply somebody's plantations.
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