I decided to share it first because of its close relationship to the online digital humanities project I used the most for my research on the role of people of African origin in establishing open-range cattle ranching in the Americas (see my 2012 book, Black Ranching Frontiers), namely the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. That digital humanities project produces summary and customizable tables, statistics, and graphs regarding the transport of some 12.5 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean over the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, but it produces maps only of the embarkation and disembarkation ports for the some 35,000 voyages.
In contrast to the the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, the GIS posted below produces maps of the routes of forty-eight slaving voyages during the second half of the eighteenth century. The daily, noontime vessel position and other data come from the Climatological Database for the World's Oceans, 1750-1850 (CLIWOC), a project that assembled maritime weather observations from logbooks in archives in Britain, the Netherlands, and Spain. Forty-six of the forty-eight voyages are Dutch and two British, most of them transporting enslaved people across the Atlantic from Africa to Suriname and the Caribbean. Forty-four of the voyages also appear in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, and clicking any of their daily position markers pops up a box with a link ("More info") to the relevant record in that database (the other four voyages concern vessels that carried slaves on voyages that were not trans-Atlantic). The box also contains date and cargo information as well as, in some cases, an image of the vessel. Clicking the route line of a voyage brings up a box with the vessel name and, in some cases, a description of arrivals, departures, and cargoes from the shipping news sections of newspapers. You can also click on place markers for the archives in Europe that preserve the logbooks, ports along the African coast and in the Caribbean, and so on to bring up images and links to further information about those places.
The GIS thereby facilitates novel visualizations of the slave trade, allowing users to better appreciate the horror of this monumental forced migration. For example, the map layers that show the patterns of death among the enslaved and disposal of their corpses overboard during the Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas help to visualize that aspect of the slave trade. One uses proportional point symbols to convey the number of deaths on a particular day at a particular position in the Atlantic. Another displays the density of deaths and disposals across the entire Middle Passage.
I hope you enjoy the GIS (despite the heinous topic), provide feedback, suggest collaborations, and feel free to use the data and programming to produce non-commercial derivative products.You can modify the GIS and save a new version by opening it in either the free ArcGIS Online map viewer or in ArcMap 10 if you have it installed on your computer. Simply click on the "View Larger Map" link just below the map.
The GIS and blog are © 2013 but open source and licensed through the Creative Commons as attribution-noncommercial 3.0. The logbook data that the GIS maps ultimately derive from archival transcriptions carried out in British and Dutch archives by the CLIWOC project team members, who state that the “aim of the project is to produce and make freely available for the scientific community the world’s first daily oceanic climatological database” (www.ucm.es/info/cliwoc/intro.htm). The CLIWOC 2.1 MS Access database, which you can download from the CLIWOC website, includes fields that identify the archive, document number, and the CLIWOC team member who transcribed the logbook for each of the voyages. Anyone is therefore free to use this GIS as a basis for new, non-commercial, scholarly and creative works as long as each such GIS, website, and/or publication contains a statement that acknowledges Andrew Sluyter as this GIS's creator and CLIWOC as the source of the data.
My next post will be methodological: how I carried out the project, why I made choices I did, and so on. Other GIS postings will follow, each related to another aspect of the project.
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