Slavery brought to light — and to life – in harrowing detail

Nearly two decades of Rice professor’s work undergirds website on slaving expeditions

The Amistad is arguably the best known of all the ships that carried slaves to the U.S. Memorialized in Steven Spielberg’s 1997 film of the same name, it was also at the center of the landmark 1841 Supreme Court case United States v. Schooner Amistad, which was second only to Dred Scott v. Sandford in its legal impact on the abolition of slavery in America.

Research by Rice Assistant Professor of History Daniel Domingues undergirds the Voyages website, which will re-launch later this month.

But anyone interested in learning more about the Amistad through Voyages, the world’s leading online resource on slaving vessels, came up empty-handed. Searching the website and its list of 37,000 trans-Atlantic expeditions produced nothing on the infamous ship.

That’s because the Amistad, like many other slaving vessels, was on an intra-American course. And until recently, the Voyages website was limited to slave-trading voyages that crossed the Atlantic Ocean.

That’s one reason Voyages will relaunch later this month. The website will boast a new database of information on intra-American expeditions, 3D modeling of a trans-Atlantic slave ship and a new interface that makes it easier to find specific facts on each vessel. Among the details: mortality rates aboard slave ships, how many children they transported, how many guns were mounted on board and information on resistance and insurrections.

“So now if people come here to the intra-American slave trade database, they’ll find the well-known Amistad of 1839,” said Rice assistant professor of history Daniel Domingues as he clicked through the new website. “Another one that is here now is the White Lion, the ship that brought the first Africans to what would become the United States 400 years ago. That’s the foundational moment of the African-American experience.”

Important information on the intra-American slave trade has been added to the Voyages database.

Voyages is a project Domingues has worked on for the past 18 years, ever since his undergraduate days at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. As a young history student aiming to study ancient Greece, his Greek and Latin studies were interrupted in 2001 when a professor enlisted his help collecting records from local archives and libraries on slaving expeditions that began and ended in Brazil.

Domingues’ work boosted an ongoing effort to add to a database that had first been published on CD-ROM in 1999 by David Eltis, a historian at Emory University who in turn had been inspired by the work of Philip Curtin, a fellow historian of slavery at Johns Hopkins University. Curtin’s most famous work, 1969’s “The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census,” was one of the earliest scholarly estimates of the size of the trans-Atlantic slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries.

But what Eltis’ newly digitized database lacked — in addition to a worldwide audience due to the limitations and expense of its format — was a thorough geographic representation of the voyages’ final destinations.

“Regions like Brazil and other parts of Latin America were significantly underrepresented,” Domingues said.

Regions like Brazil and other parts of Latin America were significantly underrepresented in previous slave trading research.

Brazil, the last country in the Western world to abolish slavery, imported more slaves during the Atlantic trading era than any other nation. An estimated 4.9 million Africans were forcibly relocated there to mine gold and harvest sugar cane between 1501 and 1866. These routes had been traditionally overlooked by American scholars, who had limited access to the Portuguese records a Brazilian historian like Domingues was able to research.

Eventually, Domingues followed Eltis to Emory, where he received his Ph.D. And in 2008, Eltis’ CD-ROM project was transformed into a website, Voyages, bringing years of research compiled by Domingues and a few other scholars to a global audience.

Voyages is still hosted by Emory, and Domingues continues to meet with his fellow researchers every week as they share news and prepare to relaunch the website for a new generation. In many ways, it’s the culmination of 50 years of work that began with that first Curtin estimate in 1969.

And for Domingues, it’s a project with a scope that extends far beyond the boundaries of the U.S. slave trade.

“It was an important part of the history of the whole of the populations of the Americas, of the making of this New World as we call it now,” he said. “Not only the United States, but Cuba, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Haiti — it is a foundational piece of the history of the modern world.”

The Voyages database contains an abundance of details about each vessel, its journeys and the people aboard.

In addition to remaking the composition and population of these countries, the slave trade also marked the largest forced migration in history.

“We now estimate that some 12 million people embarked on ships and some 10 million disembarked in the Americas,” Domingues said. “The 2 million difference refers to people who died in the middle passage.”

On the new Voyages website, visitors can take an intimate look at the savagely cramped quarters and torturous living conditions — which, along with brutality by the ship’s crew, led to many of those middle passage deaths. Detailed plans for the French slave ship L’Aurore serve as the model for this first-person point of view.

Rendered in lifelike detail, a video shows L’Aurore, a typical 18th-century slaver, before slaves were loaded aboard in Malembo, on the African coast in what is now Angola. An overlay of the hold from the Marie-Séraphique, another ship from the period, shows the inhumane cargo holds for slaves below deck.

Detailed plans for the 18th-century French slave ship L’Aurore serve as the model for a new video.

What the video doesn’t show, however, are the slaves themselves. Domingues and his fellow Voyages scholars wrestled with how to depict the slaves, who were typically naked and shackled together. They debated not only whether to show slaves with or without clothes, but also whether to surround them with the excrement and filth that epitomized the misery of their  trans-Atlantic voyage.

“Because all of these are very sensitive questions, we decided to respect the historical record and show the ship on its maiden voyage, at the moment before it loaded slaves,” Domingues said. “These are some of the questions people working in the humanities can raise for people who are doing projects or research on the data sciences, on representation, on how to depict these ethical and social questions when you are using new technologies, to give meaning to present-day or historical experiences.”

In a year when the U.S. is observing the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first slaves on its shores, the work is more important than ever.

For more information on Voyages, visit www.slavevoyages.org.