The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database documents more than 36,000 voyages in which enslaved persons were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean. Select any entry in the register and you’ll find a checklist of shockingly precise information: the size of the ship, the name of the captain, the number of enslaved persons initially on the ship as it embarked from Africa—and the number of those who died on the Middle Passage. It’s an eerie testament to the clerical cruelty of the slave trade as big business. “For those Europeans who thought about…
