1619 to 1775 · Africanspan
The Chesapeake takes its people from the Bight of Biafra
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About 128,000 Africans were landed directly from Africa in the Chesapeake Bay region between 1619 and 1775. More than 95 percent of them arrived on ships fitted out in London, Bristol or Liverpool, so the labour force of Virginia and Maryland was assembled by British merchants working from British ports for British colonies. The largest supplying region was the Bight of Biafra, the coast of what is now southeastern Nigeria and Cameroon, and its people were shipped in numbers heavy enough to mark the population that grew from them. Igbo names, words and burial practice appear in the colonial record of the tobacco country. The Chesapeake is worth setting beside Saint-Domingue. It imported a fraction of what the French colony did, over a longer period, and its enslaved population then grew by birth into millions. Saint-Domingue imported far more people and had fewer of them alive at the end. That difference is a measure of how each system used the people it bought.
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