Istwa Nou

For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Salvador da Bahia organised more slaving voyages than any other port in the Atlantic world, ahead of Liverpool, Lisbon and Nantes. Its advantage was a particular commercial link with the Bight of Benin, held together by African demand for Brazilian tobacco coated in molasses, a grade Europe did not produce. Ships worked the route directly, carried by the prevailing Atlantic currents, exchanging tobacco for people without touching Europe on either leg. After gold was found in the Brazilian interior in 1695 the destination of many of those captives changed. They were landed at Bahia and sold inland to the mining districts, hundreds of miles from the coast, into work that killed faster than cane did. The busiest slaving port in the Atlantic therefore stood in the Americas, and the commodity that bought the captives was grown a few days' ride from the quay where they were landed.