A Digital History of the Suppression of the Slave Trade
Sketches of slave ships were a popular way of publicizing the horrors of the slave trade and galvanizing support for the suppression campaign. The following image provides a bird’s eye view of the hold of a slave ship, showing how slaves were chained to the deck. The Illustrated London News, 26 August 1848. Courtesy of […]
The Congo River was always an important point of slave embarkation. In the nineteenth century, however, its importance as a source of slaves further increased as the legislation to suppress the traffic initially focused on the North Atlantic. The following image shows a British man of war preparing to rescue Africans who were previously on […]
Encounters of naval vessels with slave ships on the coast of Africa were frequent and provided exciting reading material for anti-slavery audiences. The following image shows an example of such encounters. Here a boat from British man of war engages with a slave felucca, a smal slave ship on the coast of Africa. The Illustrated […]
As the suppression campaign progressed, slave traders sought new points of embarkation along the coast of Africa. The more hidden and discreet they were, the better for them. Fish Bay, in present-day Angola, is an example of such points. It was located in a remote region, but not too far from previous and more important […]
One of the most successful cruisers in the campaign, the H.M.S. Waterwitch was a British naval vessel that pursued slavers in the Atlantic and Indian oceans. The following image shows the launch of the Waterwitch during the peak period of the suppression. The Illustrated London News, 22 June 1844. Courtesy of University of Missouri Libraries.
Hunters in east Africa traveled three miles in order to track and kill the depicted elephant. The Illustrated London News, 30 December 1843. Courtesy of University of Missouri Libraries.
Ethiopia was long involved in the slave trade from the Horn of Africa. Several of the slaves that the kingdom sold into the trade were originally war prisoners, captured in wars and crusades waged against its neighbors, many of them Muslims. The Illustrated London News, 30 December 1843. Courtesy of University of Missouri Libraries.
Ethiopia, or Abyssinia, as Europeans commonly called it in the nineteenth century, was an old Christian kingdom located in the Horn of Africa. It was long involved in the slave trade across the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and the Saharan Desert. As the suppression of the African slave trade gradually shifted to the east, Ethiopia […]
Montevideo, Uruguay, emerged as an important slave trade port in the nineteenth century. Located at the mouth of Rio de la Plata, it provided easy access to cattle ranches, plantations, and trade routes to the Andes and other places in South America. The Illustrated London News, 30 December 1843. Courtesy of University of Missouri Libraries.
Washington was the capital of the United States. This picture shows the partly completed Capitol building in the 1840s. The Illustrated London News, 18 May 1844. Courtesy of University of Missouri Libraries.
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