50 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
It may seem odd to include a map of West Africa in
a history of North America, but the connection is
inextricable. The survival of Virginia came with the
cultivation of tobacco, which depended upon the
importation of slave labor. This places slavery at the
very heart of the American experiment. The early
tobacco farmers used slaves as early as 1619, and
in the 1620s the Dutch founders of New Netherland
brought slaves with them. By the time the slave trade
ended in 1867, over 12 million Africans had been
forcibly removed from their native land and most
of them sent to the Americas. The peak of the trade
occurred in the eighteenth century, when Africans
shipped to the Caribbean and South America were
sold into slavery in North America.
Though the African slave trade was launched by
the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, it was the
subsequent entry of the Dutch that coincided with
the early settlement of America. The Dutch West India
Company was founded in 1621 and initially focused
on ivory, gold, and pepper. Soon the company began
to export slaves to supply the growing demand for
labor on the Dutch sugar plantations of northeastern
Brazil. That slave trade concentrated along the
southern coast of Guinea, here colored in pink at
right. In 1637, the Dutch captured the Portuguese
trading post at Elmina, near the cape marked
“C. Corco” on the map. For the next two decades,
the Dutch dominated the Atlantic slave trade. This
human traffic formed one leg of the profitable
“triangle trade” between Africa, America, and Europe.
The elegance and beauty of this map belies its
deadly serious intent. It was published about 1650
by the engraver Hugo Allardt to celebrate the Dutch
victory over Portugal in West Africa. Indeed, it was
based on a Portuguese map made fifty years earlier.
Large pictorial insets depict a native dance and a
procession of leaders. These insets also displace the
interior of the continent and draw attention to the
THE ORIGINS OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE
Hugo Allardt, “Effigies ampli Regni
auriferi Guineae in Africa siti,”
circa 1650
African coast, where Dutch commercial interests
were peaking. Allardt used color to distinguish the
discernible “nations” of the region, reproducing
divisions that had appeared on earlier European
maps of Africa. He also identified the enclaves
and villages of the interior, perhaps indicating the
potential for further commercial growth and trade
networks. Dutch ships sail along the coast, while two
small Portuguese flags mark the forts that were now
under Dutch control.
By the 1660s, the Dutch were transporting
between 5,000 and 7,000 Africans across the Atlantic
each year. Most were taken from the area east of
the Volta River, near the “Costa Adra” that borders
Benin. These slaves were used to build and cultivate
enormous sugar plantations in Brazil and the West
Indies. In North America, slavery grew more slowly
because of its high cost and the continued reliance
on indentured servants from Europe. In the tobacco
fields of the Chesapeake, African slaves formed a
minority of the labor force until 1680. Thereafter,
Virginia planters began to rely more upon slavery
and the English began to displace the Dutch in
Africa, just as the Dutch had displaced the
Portuguese decades earlier.
The increased dependence upon slavery led the
colonists to pass laws to codify the practice. In 1662
the Virginia General Assembly determined that slave
status would be defined by one’s racial identity, and
“that all children borne in this country shall be held
bond or free only according to the condition of the
mother.” Such a condition ensured that slavery
would reproduce itself in the colonies, and that
bondage would be defined by race. Five years later,
the General Assembly established that Christian
baptism would not free children from bondage,
reassuring masters that that they could evangelize
without fear of losing their slaves. By 1700 slaves
had entirely replaced indentured servants on the
tobacco plantations of Virginia. But slaves were not
confined to the Virginia colony: by 1650 there were
more slaves in Dutch New Netherland than in the
Chesapeake. Slavery continued to grow after the
English rechristened the colony “New York,” and
by the 1740s black slaves made up 20 percent of
its population.