345 years ago, on September 27, 1672, King Charles II of England granted the Royal African Company a monopoly on the trade in human goods. Over the next 80 years, this company transported about a million African "tourists" across the Atlantic to the New World. It was the golden age of the slave trade.
For several hundred years, almost all European countries that had access to the sea were engaged in this worthy business. Generalized statistics, of course, no one kept, so estimates of the volume of the slave trade are very vague. According to various sources, from 8 to 14 million slaves were exported from Africa to the American continent, of which from two to four million died on the way. The rest have greatly changed the ethnic picture of the Western Hemisphere and influenced its culture no less.
It should be noted that Russia was one of the few European states whose merchants did not trade in "ebony". Moreover, since 1845 the sea slave trade in the Russian Code of Punishments was equated to piracy and was punished by eight years of hard labor. However, we had our own "beam in the eye", because up to 1861 the internal trade in serf souls, in principle not much different from the slave trade, was carried out on a completely legal basis.
Below is a selection of pictures that illustrate the romantic process of turning just Africans into African Americans.
Buying up slaves on the African coast and sending them to a slave ship. Painting by the 19th century French artist Francois-Auguste Bayard.
Typical scheme for placing slaves on a ship and means of calming them.
Promotional video:
Layout of live goods on the British slave ship "Brookis". Not surprisingly, with this arrangement, an average of 10 to 20% of "passengers" died during a voyage across the Atlantic.
Section of a 17th century Dutch slave ship. The negroes were accommodated in the space between the hold and the upper deck.
Cross sections of English and Dutch slave ships. A plank wall partitioning off the deck (on the Dutchman it has spikes) separates the team's territory from the site, where slaves were allowed to walk. This precaution was far from superfluous, since slaves sometimes started uprisings.
Suppression of a riot on an English slave ship.
Plans for the decks of a French merchant ship, for which slaves were a type of commercial cargo.
A small but well-armed slave-trading boat, in which the "goods" are packed especially tightly. Surprisingly, even in such hellish conditions, most slaves tended to survive a sea voyage that could last several weeks.
The main routes for the export of slaves from Central Africa in the 17th-19th centuries