Important Slave Trade Map with the Infamous Slave Forts and Factories. “A New and Correct Map of the Coast of Africa, For Mr. Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary of Trade & Commerce, Printed for J. & P. Knapton, London, England, 1753.”
This highly detailed map of the Western Coast of Africa shows where the captains of vessels stopped to bargain for and embark Africans captured, detained, and then sold into slavery before starting their arduous voyage, known as The Middle Passage, across the Atlantic Ocean.
Map labels include the Ivory Coast and Grain Coast, with geographical features and coastal towns, plus rivers, including the Senegal, Gambia, Congo, and Niger. There are 34 sub-notes, and an inset of the Gold Coast (enlarged here at lower right), pinpoints its dreaded slave castles, forts, factories, and prison compounds principally owned by the slave trading companies of European nations. Examples include:
“19. Elmina, or St. George Del Mina, the principal Fort on the Gold Coast, belonging to the Dutch Company … 21. Cape Coast Castle, the principal Fort and Factory, belonging to the English African Company … 24. Annemaboe Fort, belonging to the English Company, but relinquished for want of support before the year 1730. Also lately necessary to be rebuilt for English account, the French having supplied their Sugar Colonies from hence, where they have no right to trade, with vast quantities of the choicest Negroes upon the whole coast, and having also attempted to build a Fort there since the English have aband’d it.”
Illustrated at upper right, Fort Elmina, Gold Coast, now Ghana (no. 19 cited above, built by the Portuguese in 1482). Lower left, a 1746 engraving of “Slave factories, or compounds, maintained by traders from four European nations on the Gulf of Guinea,” in what is now Nigeria.
An estimated 12.5 million Africans were uprooted and shipped to the New World over the course of the Atlantic Slave Trade, with 10.7 million surviving their ordeal. Of these, one in twenty-four would be taken to areas that became the United States.