1561 to 1856 · Africanspan
Four point nine million people are landed in South America
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Roughly 4.9 million captive Africans were landed in South America across three centuries. Where they came from was largely decided by the weather. The South Atlantic turns in a great clockwise loop, and a ship leaving Rio de Janeiro or the Rio de la Plata is carried toward the coast of West Central Africa and carried home again. So West Central Africa, the largest single source for the hemisphere as a whole, was overwhelming for the southern markets in particular. The same currents made the Brazilian coast one continuous marketplace. A vessel bound for Rio could put in at Pernambuco or Bahia and sell part of its cargo on the way past, and the Brazilian ports traded people among themselves and southward to the mainland in a busy internal traffic that touched neither Africa nor Europe. Ocean physics rarely appears in accounts of the slave trade. It determined which languages were spoken in which American cities, and which parts of Africa lost their populations to which parts of the New World.
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