Recreating the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Data

Scholars and technicians at Lancaster University in Britain and Emory University In Atlanta have collaborated to create a 3D model of an eighteenth-century slave ship.

The model is based on the plans for the Aurore, launched from La Rochelle in August 1784. Those are the only plans for a slaving ship known. The Aurore sailed for Africa and then carried people in captivity to Saint-Domingue, now Haiti.

That trip is item number 32359 in the online reference Voyages, a database of 36,000 slave voyages used in classrooms and museums. The video of the 3D model is now part of that website.

News coverage of this software creation describes “the cramped, dirty and stifling conditions experienced by enslaved Africans.” But the online video is almost antiseptically smooth and unpopulated. It takes us from surviving period images to the topmost of the digital ship and then down into its hold—still empty. The actual conditions are still up to our sympathetic imaginations.

The Voyages website has recently been redesigned and augmented with data on the intra-American slave trade, opening up new areas for research. The next planned expansion is a database called “People of the Atlantic Slave Trade,“ recording information about the individuals known to have been involved in the transatlantic trade, both enslaver and enslaved.