“The Voice of Agitation Should Roll across the Broad Atlantic”

Abstract Scholars have provided impressive analyses of the transatlantic slave trade to the Americas and its demise over the past four decades, this led by contributions to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database ( https://www.slavevoyages.org/ ). England played a decisive role in the suppression of that traffic after prohibition of British participation in 1808, this partly achieved by British interceptions of slave vessels by its West Africa Squadron (1819–1867) and the establishment of Courts of Mixed Commission for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1819–1871). Given a North Atlantic Ocean current clockwise gyre and South Atlantic counterclockwise gyre, a major northern slave vessel route connected Africa to the Caribbean and a second southern route connected Africa to Brazil.1 Africans disembarked in the Caribbean had diverse origins in West Africa (Sierra Leone, Ghana, Togo, Nigeria) and West Central Africa (Congo, Angola). Brazil received fewer Africans from West Africa (there was a long-term connection between Benin and Bahia), large numbers of African slaves from West Central Africa and a small number from Southeast Africa (Mozambique) at or near Rio de Janeiro. Language difference (Spanish, French, English, Dutch, Danish in the North Atlantic, Portuguese in the South Atlantic) contributed to a conceptual separation of those two regions, particularly evident in historiographies related to slavery and abolition. The Scottish diplomat David Turnbull was one of the few observers of the nineteenth century who connected Caribbean islands with Brazil. Turnbull asserted to the British Foreign Office that subaltern resistance by slaves and free blacks in both the British and non-British Caribbean could aid in England’s quest to extinguish the transatlantic slave trade. Turnbull organized a petition campaign in Jamaica in the late 1840s to pressure England’s Foreign Office to pursue more aggressive actions at sea and on land to halt slave disembarkations in Cuba and Brazil. Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston’s positive response combined with slave resistance in Brazil contributed to Brazil’s imperial government decision to act decisively to halt further slave disembarkations in 1850–1851.