Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 by Gregory E. O’Malley (review)

The concept of the Middle Passage has become an iconic image within historical discourses on the Atlantic slave trade, which, according to the latest detailed calculations, accounted for the forced removal of at least 12.5 million enslaved Africans from their home continent between 1500 and 1867. Of those who survived the perilous Atlantic crossing, most would spend their lives laboring in the West Indies, Brazil, and the United States to produce crops of sugar, cotton, and other agricultural goods for export to Europe. Some of those goods would be carried on slave ships returning home to Europe as they completed their triangular slaving voyages. Increasing evidence shows that up to two in five of the many thousands of voyages outfitted for Africa left from the Americas, notably Brazil and Cuba. Their voyages were commonly bilateral rather than multilateral in nature, raising questions about the usefulness of the concept of the Middle Passage as a metaphor for understanding the economics and the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade. Such questioning stems largely from studies that dwell primarily on shipowners’ perspectives on the slave trade. For enslaved Africans, however, wherever the ship that they boarded came from, the Atlantic crossing was always a Middle Passage in their long and tortuous journey into transatlantic slavery. That journey began with enslavement in Africa and a forced march to the African coast, where captives would be sold to new owners of European descent. It would then continue across the four thousand miles of ocean that we know as the Middle Passage and that linked ports of embarkation in Africa and disembarkation in the Americas. And it would continue for significant proportions of those who disembarked ship in the Americas in the form of either another overland trek or another sea voyage to a final place of resale before relocation to the place of work. We are never likely to have more than limited evidence relating to the capture and forced march of captives to coastal markets within Africa, but Gregory E. O’Malley’s study shows that it is possible to piece together in considerable detail the miserable onward journeys within the Americas of some survivors of the Atlantic crossing. O’Malley’s focus is primarily on British America, which before Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 received some 2.7 million enslaved Africans, more than three hundred thousand of whom, if O’Malley’s calculations are correct, were subsequently reshipped to another British or non­British colony. In some respects the study’s findings complement those of other scholars who have worked on the relocation of imported Africans in seventeenth-century mainland Spanish America, on the reexport of captives from Curacao, St. Eustatius, and St. Croix before 1800, and on the movement of slaves southward by sea and land within Brazil from Salvador da Bahia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. O’Malley is not unique, therefore, in reminding us that the first port of disembarkation of captive Africans was in many cases far from their final destination. Another journey, often under similarly brutal and traumatic conditions, commonly awaited them after disembarking ship from Africa.

A number of attributes of O’Malley’s book distinguish it, however, from its predecessors, including the chronological scope of its inquiry and O’Malley’s determination to interpret his evidence wherever possible from the captives’ perspective. The book assembles a rich mixture of quantitative data on slave shipment patterns with personal accounts and reflections, drawn from African narratives and other records, of how slaves experienced their “final passages.” In the process of doing so, it offers by extension new insights into the impact on enslaved Africans of the earlier and often much longer passage from Africa itself. Another attribute of the book is the wide range of intercolonial migration routes and their varying importance and characteristics through time that O’Malley analyzes. He investigates...