Istwa Nou

A ship leaving West Africa for Brazil spent far less time at sea than one bound for the Caribbean islands. The reason is the shape of the ocean. Winds and currents in the South Atlantic turn in a tight circuit between the African bulge and the Brazilian coast, so a captain could make the passage in weeks where a Caribbean voyage took months. Time at sea governs everything else aboard a slave ship: the water and food that must be carried, the length of confinement in the hold, the spread of dysentery and smallpox through people packed together in the dark. Shorter passages produced lower death rates for captives bound for Brazilian plantations through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Two parts of the Americas therefore received African populations shaped by different odds, and the odds were set before anyone came aboard. Saint-Domingue lay at the far end of the long route. Every cargo that reached it had been at sea long enough for the arithmetic to work against the people below.