For my third post, I looked at the HGIS Trans Atlantic Slave Trade Visualization. This interactive map really caught my attention. This website was created by a university computer science student and his professor who is a historian of slavery at Georgetown. It was very simple to navigate as well as very user friendly. It showed things in its visuals such as where most of the slaves in the trade were shipped to as well as where they were shipped from and at what time in the world’s history this happened.
The first interactive map on the site shows where all of the Atlantic SLaving Voyages departed from. From the map we can conclude that the departures began first in Portugal and from there expanded to the United Kingdom where the majority of departures came from. The departures also came from the coast of the United States and from South America at the east coast of Brazil.
The second interactive map on the site shows where slavers purchased captive Africans. This map shows us how there was only one main spot where this trading happened and it was along the African coast from Senegal all the way down to Angola. This is already fairly well known though as along the coast would be the only place that the slavers could get their boats so it makes most sense that the high density is all around the ports of Africa.
The third and final interactive map on the site displays where the slavers disembarked their human cargo. It shows how their cargo was first disembarked around South-Central America and the trade got very heavy there and was only there until the mid 1700s when the slavers began to disembark their cargo in South America as well as along the coast of the United States.
Overall I think this website was good becuase it gave the reader all the information they needed as well as being extremely user friendly. They also had a section on their website showing where they got all of their data for anyone who enjoys reading more than just looking at colour coated maps.
HIST2P26 