Characteristics of Captives Leaving the Cameroons for the Americas, 1822–37

Abstract

On the basis of identifying the likely geographic origins of African names extracted from the Sierra Leone Liberated African registers, this essay estimates the provenance of the transatlantic slave trade that drew on the Cameroons estuary between 1822 and 1837. The sample, drawn from six separate vessels, is broken down by age and sex category and constitutes about 7 per cent of all Africans who left from the region in these years. It makes possible analysis of changes over time, comparisons of age and sex with distance between embarkation point and likely provenance zone, as well as interaction between Old Calabar and the Cameroons regions in the supply of slaves. The great majority of the captives originated within 200 miles of the coast and within 120 miles of the modern border with Nigeria.

Apprentices of freedom: Atlantic histories of the africanos livres in mid-nineteenth century Rio de Janeiro

“…60 Records, including registers of liberated Africans from slave ships freed by mixed commission courts and British Vice-Admiralty courts in Cuba, St. Helena and Sierra Leone in the nineteenth century, have been recognised as an important source of information on slave origins in this respect. 61 They include the African names and personal details of each African as they sounded to the British-and Spanish-speaking court secretaries who compiled these registers with the help of African interpreters. The information available in the registers has enabled the development of a database, giving rise to a more accurate ethno-linguistic analysis of the slaves arriving in the Americas.…”

A Modelling Strategy to Estimate Conditional Probabilities of African Origins: The Collapse of the Oyo Empire and The Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1817–1836

“…While specific documentation for who was on board slave ships do not exist for most ships, starting in 1807 the British Royal Navy captured many slave ships, escorted them into Vice Admiralty Courts and bilateral courts of mixed commission in Freetown, Rio de Janeiro, and Havana, and compiled detailed lists of the enslaved people forced on board. These detailed passenger lists included transliterations of African names which could be interpreted to determine a name's language (whether Yoruba, Fon, Hausa, among others) for use in future analyses surrounding the unique ethnolinguistic composition of individual slave ships, as contemplated in Nwokeji and Eltis (2002). In the future, linguistic data for transliterated African names might be aligned on an annual basis to the internal zones of conflict and probabilistic origins we are attempting to identify in this paper.…”

Estimating conditional probabilities of historical migrations in the transatlantic slave trade using kriging and Markov decision process models

“…While specific documentation for who was on board slave ships do not exist for most ships, starting in 1807 the British Royal Navy captured many slave ships, escorted them into bilateral courts of mixed commission in Freetown and Havana, and compiled detailed lists of the enslaved people forced on board. These detailed passenger lists included transliterations of African names which could be interpreted to determine a name's language (whether Yoruba, Fon, Hausa, among others) for use in future analyses surrounding the unique ethnolinguistic composition of individual slave ships, as contemplated in Nwokeji and Eltis (2002). In the future, linguistic data for transliterated African names might be aligned on an annual basis to the internal zones of conflict and probabilistic origins we are attempting to identify in this paper.…”