2,054 slave voyages from balanta lands
List of all 2,054 voyages from the ports of Cacheu, Bissau, St. Louis, Cassamance, Bissagos, Gambia, Rio Grande and Cape Verde
Click: Trans Atlantaic Slave Trade Database
If you are a descendant of Balanta taken during the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, the most likely scenario is that your ancestor was a prisoner of war on one of these 2,054 slave voyages.
Many of the first slaves in North Carolina were brought to the colony from the West Indies or other surrounding colonies, but a significant number were brought from Africa.
With the help of English capital, Barbados quickly developed an immensely successful sugar industry, and became the first plantation boom-economy in English-speaking North America. Barbados quickly became the richest colony in North America, with exports that were more than double that of all other island colonies combined; however, with over 55,000 people inhabiting 166 square miles, it also quickly became the most congested. Small farmers found it increasingly difficult to compete with large plantations, and available land became expensive and scarce. Many of these small farmers left for New England, Virginia, Surinam in South America and other Caribbean islands, particularly Jamaica. The need for new land renewed ideas of exploration of a Carolina colony. Eight Lords Proprietors had been the driving force behind earlier efforts to establish a colony on the continent. The Proprietors were noblemen who had received land grants and higher ranks in English nobility as a reward for helping to restore King Charles II to the throne of England after his father, King Charles I, was executed during the English Civil War. The names of these eight men – Edward Hyde, first earl of Clarendon; George Moncks, first duke of Albemarle; William Craven, first earl of Craven; Anthony Ashley Cooper, first earl of Shaftesbury; John Berkeley, first baron Berkeley of Stratton; and his brother Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia; Sir George Carteret; and Sir John Colleton – still mark many of the counties, towns, streets and rivers throughout the Lowcountry of South Carolina.
Initially, most of the colonists were English, with a few from Barbados. But over the next two years more than half of the white colonists and the enslaved Africans came from the tiny island. The Barbadians constituted a majority in the colony for the first two decades, but after the turn of the century the number of white settlers from other European countries would overtake the majority of Carolina’s the white population.
The commerce at Bissau and Cacheu between 1758 and 1797, under the near-total monopoly of the Companhia General do Grao Para e Maranhao whose slaving business was part of a vast enterprise of interconnected activities in Portugal and Brazil. Its profits were impressive: starting with a capital base of 465,600,000 reis, the company succeeded in paying out 17,396,600 reis to its shareholders between 1759 and 1777, with a rate of profit running at 11.50 percent from 1768 to 1774.
The Guinea-Bissau region produced a disproportionately large number of captive Africans from the early-18th century until 1810, populations which were distributed throughout the Chesapeake region, Carolinas, and Georgia. The evidence reflects that the majority of African captives taken from Guinea-Bissau were sourced from the coastal littoral regions inhabited by the Balanta and other acephalous societies. A large percentage of these captives were therefore ethnic Balanta, Diola, and Bijago, ethnic groups who were renowned for their tidal rice farming techniques.
1776 The American Revolutionary War begins, and Americans increase imports of rice and cotton from Maranhao, which requires more slaves from Guinea.