1641 to 1863 · Caribbeanspan
Curacao and its neighbours sold on more people than they kept
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Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao are dry islands with little ground worth planting. The Dutch used them for something else. Between 1641 and 1863 they worked as a transfer point. Ships from West Central Africa and the Gold Coast unloaded there, and more than one hundred thousand people were then shipped onward to other American markets, chiefly the Spanish mainland around the Caribbean and the Guianas. Some captives stayed on the islands. The business was re-export. The vessels were fitted out at Amsterdam, Middelburg and Vlissingen, and the islands gave Dutch merchants a legal foothold inside a Caribbean carved into empires that formally forbade each other's trade. A Spanish colony barred from buying in Africa could buy at Curacao. This is the commercial logic that later made free ports useful to everybody, and it is why the Caribbean, on paper a set of sealed imperial systems, in practice moved goods, people and news across every border it had.
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