Justene Hill Edwards

And so you have these ideas kind of colliding.

with the real experiences of the enslaved.

And when I say imprisoned, these were called kind of floating slave prisons, that they were incredibly violent.

They were incredibly unhealthy.

The transatlantic voyage was incredibly physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually traumatic for the enslaved.

And so in many ways, it was that trauma of being warehoused and imprisoned, being shipped across the Atlantic that in enslavers and slave traders mind kind of transition them from being a person on the Atlantic African side to being a slave on the New World side.

At times more.

It would be a lesser amount of time from places like Angola to Brazil.

It could be from places on the Gold Coast to Jamaica or Barbados, four or five months.

And then getting up to the English colonies of mainland North America, that could add an additional month or two.

And so we are talking about months-long process.

Yeah.

Well, historians call this the triangular trade.

And this is a trade of goods from Atlantic Africa to perhaps regions of South America or the Caribbean, up to regions of mainland North America, and then perhaps to Western Europe.

And so...

This is a triangular trade of goods and commodities from slaves to gold to guns to gunpowder to sugar to the byproducts of sugar.

We're talking about rum was incredibly popular.

And so this triangular trade really defined Atlantic commerce in this period of time.

Historians will often say 1619 is this pivotal moment in terms of examining this history for the colonies that would become the United States.

1619 was the first recorded instance in August of that year.