Bristol Calabar Slave Trade

Bristol – Calabar slave trade

I remember the first time I heard about the slave trade.

How millions of people were taken from Africa on a transatlantic voyage to work on plantations in the New World.

I found it very hard to make sense of what my teacher was saying, and so did the other kids at school. I would later spend weeks, months and years trying to find out what transpired hundreds of years ago.

It all began in the fifteenth century, when the first sets of slaves were shipped out of ports in Africa to Porto Rico. Soon the slave trade became a booming business. More slave ships were built, and ports established. Prominent among these ports was the Calabar slave port in modern day Nigeria, and the Bristol port. Hundreds of thousands of African slaves were transported within these ports for over two hundred years.

Although the Calabar port had been known to Europeans as far back as the fifteenth century, it became a major slave port from the late seventeenth to nineteenth century. Slaving voyages from Bristol were organized by businessmen who invested in the transatlantic slave trade. In order to make profit they would send slave ships to Africa, mostly Calabar, to trade for enslaved Africans and take those Africans to be sold in the Caribbean, North America and sometimes back to Bristol.

Prominent among these slave ships is “The Jason”. Pictured here in her recorded voyage in 1748, she carried seventy crew to look after six hundred slaves. Only three hundred and forty slaves survived the voyage to Jamaica. This could be due to a number of reasons: sickness, slaves committing suicide or poor treatment by the crew.

Eventually, in the eighteen hundreds, Bristol’s trading slaves stopped altogether when the slave trade was made illegal. However, trade in palm oil and artworks continued between Bristol and Calabar till the late nineteen hundreds.

Today I am here in Bristol on an exchange programme between Bristol and Calabar. Supported by The British Council, VSO and CSV, I have travelled thousands of miles with eight other Africans to meet up with eight young people from all over the UK. Soon we will set off on our voyage from Bristol to Calabar. Only this time it won’t be an exchange in humans for goods, but of cultures and ideas.

Answer the following questions on the recording:

1)-         Who is the speaker and what is he talking about?

2)-         Who is he talking about? How many does he mention?

3)-         When did he hear about this for the first time?

4)-         Was it easy for him to understand? Justify.

5)-         Did he have much interest in this? Justify.

6)-         When did it all begin?

7)-         How long did it last?

8)-         What journey did the ships make?

9)-         Who organized the voyages?

10)-        Why did they do so?

11)-        How many slaves could a ship carry?

12)-        What happened to many of them during the voyage? Why?

13)- When was it made illegal?

14)- What's the difference between the voyage he is about to do and those of the past?

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