Black cargoes

About this book

"This is the story of how the Negro colonists were brought to the two Americas, as the result of a gigantic commercial operation that changed the history of the world. By a conservative estimate the operation cost between thirty and forty million lives. It produced enormous fortunes which helped to finance the industrial revolution in England and France, but in Africa it produced nothing but misery and social disintegration. In America it gave rise to the plantation system, the maritime trade of New England, and the Civil War. Black Cargoes tells how the operation started in the newly settled Spanish island of Hispaniola, how it rapidly expanded after 1650 with the growth of large-scale sugar planting, how it reached a climax in the eighteenth century, how the trade was legally abolished by Great Britain in 1807, how it persisted in spite of Her Majesty's Navy, and how it ended after 1865. The book also tells where the Negroes came from, how they were enslaved, how they were purchased by sea captains, how they were packed into the hold like other merchandise (but with greater losses in transit), and how the survivors were sold in the West Indian and American markets ... It is a story of greed, violence, daring, and incredible callousness, involving as actors or victims white men and black men alike - Sir John Hawkins and the King of Dahomey, American merchant princes, Queen Elizabeth I, Thomas Clarkson the great reformer, and the diabolical Captain Canot - as well as the horrors of the Middle Passage, the dividends of Lancashire cotton mills, and the heroism of the British Navy. The slave trade left us a rich heritage in music, art, science, literature, and American citizens. It also inflicted wounds that are still unstanched."--Jacket.