Istwa Nou

The Gambia River was the steadiest source of captives in Upper Guinea for nearly a century and a half. Geography explains it. Small oceangoing vessels could work 125 miles upstream, so ships reached inland markets directly instead of waiting on the coast for goods to come down to them. British traders took roughly four of every five people embarked at the estuary, and the largest British fort in West Africa outside the Gold Coast stood there to protect the business. Those carried away were mostly Mandinka, Wolof and Fulani. Many were landed in the mainland North American colonies, others in Grenada and Dominica. Little of this river's traffic reached Saint-Domingue, and the absence is part of the picture. The African coast worked as a set of separate markets, each stretch with its own buyers, its own carriers and its own American ports at the far end, so a Haitian tracing ancestry finds it concentrated on some stretches and thin on others.