Final Passages: The Intra American Slave Trade Database

Alex Borucki
History
UC Irvine

Gregory E. O'Malley
History
UC Santa Cruz

The digital project, Final Passages: The Intra American Slave Trade Database, aims to document and make publicly accessible evidence on slave voyages within the Americas through an online database. This project grew out of the successful seven-year operation of Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, which documents transatlantic slave voyages. On average more than one thousand visitors consult Voyages Database each day. Although a great resource, the Voyages website is limited to slave-trading voyages that crossed the Atlantic. The Final Passages project seeks support for adding intra-American slave voyages (e.g. from Jamaica to South Carolina) to the existing Voyages website.With a grant from the NEH, we are constructing the new intra-American database and developing a separate user interface to offer the same tracking and search options for the intra-American slave trade as currently exist for transatlantic ventures on the Voyages website. This addition offers researchers a more complete picture of the slave trade to the Americas since many societies that exploited slave labor acquired captives indirectly rather than straight from Africa.