Istwa Nou

The Congo carries more water than any river on earth except the Amazon and drains a basin the size of India. Slaving vessels used its estuary from 1534 until 1862, though the main embarkation points sat on the coast a short distance north and south of the mouth rather than in the river itself, at places such as Cabinda, Malemba and Ambriz. The region's share of the traffic peaked twice, at the very beginning of the Atlantic trade and again in its final decades. Portuguese traders were there first and stayed longest. Dutch and British merchants worked the coast heavily in the middle and later eighteenth century, which is the period that supplied Saint-Domingue. In the nineteenth century, after Britain outlawed the trade, the buyers were merchants operating out of Brazil, Cuba and the United States, running captives past naval patrols to markets that were still legal or still profitable while illegal.