Slave Trade Statistics
The actual number of men, women and children who were snatched from their homes in Africa and transported in slave ships across the Atlantic, either to the Caribbean islands or to North and South America, will never be known. Writers vary in their estimates, but there is no doubt that their number runs into millions. The following figures are taken from Morel's calculations as reproduced by Professor Melville J. Herskovits and cover the period 1666-1800:
| 1666-1776: | Slaves imported only by the English for the
English, French and Spanish colonies: 3 million (250,000 died on the voyage). |
| 1680-1786: | Slaves imported for the English colonies in America: 2,130,000 (Jamaica alone absorbed 610,000). |
| 1716-1756: | Average annual number of slaves imported for the American colonies: 70,000, with a total of 3.5 million. |
| 1752-1762: | Jamaica alone imported 71,115 slaves. |
| 1759-1762: | Guadeloupe alone imported 40,000 slaves. |
| 1776-1800: | A yearly average of 74,000 slaves were imported for the American colonies, or a total of 1,850,000; this yearly average was divided up as follows: by the English, 38,000; French, 20,000; Portuguese, 10,000; Dutch, 4,000; Danes, 2,000. |
"The Slave Trade in the Caribbean and Latin America." in The African Slave Trade from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century Reports and papers of the meeting of experts organized by Unesco at Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 31 January to 4 February 1978.
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