In the year 1730, in the region of present-day Senegal, a man named Ayuba Suleiman Diallo traveled down to an English port on the coast to purchase paper, likely manufactured in Europe, an important item for his Muslim cleric father. To purchase the paper, his father had given him a pair of slaves to trade, but on the way home, however, Ayuba encountered a roving band of Mandinka raiders who took him prisoner and sold him into slavery to an English captain in turn, making him one of the many millions who fell victim to the Atlantic Slave Trade. Ayuba’s account, written down years later as Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon…Who was a Slave About Two Years in Maryland…, does not describe the likely atrocious journey across the ocean to North America, where, on average, between 12% and 15% of slaves crossing the Atlantic died while in transit. The memoir is useful nonetheless for its brief glimpse into how the slave trade actually operated on the African continent. Far from existing in isolation, the Atlantic Slave Trade was interwoven into a vast, intercontinental mercantile system commonly called the Triangular Trade. 

When Europeans began sailing further out onto the open ocean in the early-to-mid 15th century, they discovered that navigating the ocean required utilizing a series of perpetual wind cycles and ocean currents, such as the North Atlantic Gyre and the Gulf Stream. Portuguese navigators in particular established a kind of triangular route while exploring the western coast of Africa with the aid of the Northeast trade winds that dominate the tropics, returning to Europe not by reversing course, but sailing northwest to the Azores and catching the Southwest Westerlies home. Christopher Columbus himself became the first person to apply this principle to a transatlantic voyage, sailing north after making landfall in the Caribbean before returning to tell the world his discoveries. It is possible that Columbus also brought enslaved Africans with him on his first voyage, making him the first “triangle trader,” and as the various European powers began establishing their colonies in North and South America, introducing cash crops like sugarcane and adopting others like tobacco. In the meantime, the process of triangular maritime routes became the standard practice of transatlantic navigation. Continue reading.