1534 to 1867 · Datasetspan
Ten point seven million people survived the crossing
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Counts assembled from ships' papers, port records and customs returns put the number of Africans who came ashore alive in the Americas at just over ten point seven million between 1534 and 1867. Something like a million and a half more died at sea. The distribution surprises most readers. Brazil received close to forty-five percent of all arrivals, the British and French Caribbean the next largest shares, and mainland North America about three and a half percent. The United States nevertheless held one of the largest enslaved populations in the hemisphere by 1860, because there the enslaved population grew by natural increase, while in the sugar colonies it did not. Sugar killed people faster than they were born and the shortfall was covered by buying more. Saint-Domingue was landing roughly forty thousand people a year in the late 1780s simply to hold its numbers steady. That is the sentence behind every figure on this page.
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