What took shape in the 1970s as data collections on the trans-Atlantic slave trade stored on mainframe computers has made its way to a world-wide audience as an interactive and searchable database on the Internet.
Scholars and data specialists, along with Emory University officials, today unveil an interactive web-based database that provides information on nearly 35,000 voyages which transported enslaved Africans to the New World during the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Entitled “Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Database”, the website expands upon the research originally published in the 1999 “Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade” CD-ROM.
The official launch of Voyages takes place today at the Emory campus, coinciding with a conference that commemorates the 200th anniversary of the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The new website carries twice the information of the CD-ROM, including thousands of recorded African names of enslaved passengers, according to Dr. David Eltis, the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History at Emory University and a lead scholar in the website development. The website has data on the slave ships as well as financial records, maps, images, and other documentation relating to the estimated 12.5 millions Africans transported during the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
“We were able to fill in gaps in the existing data set. It’s been both widened and lengthened….We have African names for about 67,000 captives that got off slave vessels in the 19th century,” Eltis says.
The African names and details on individual captives, coming from the court prosecution records of illegal slave trading following 1808, adds a new component that was not available on the CD-ROM, Eltis adds. He says the data on individuals is providing the foundation of another project “to establish an ethnic profile within Africa of the origins of the captives.”
