Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2025
Published In
Charting The Future: Atlantic Studies And Global Currents
Abstract
In 1765, enslaved Africans boarded the Roi Guinguin in Badagry as part of a restitution agreement between a Nantesian slave trading company and an African ruler. These captive Africans endured treacherous journeys from West Africa’s interior to Badagry, then Príncipe, then toward Saint Domingue before being rerouted to Cayenne in Guyane (French Guiana), and then the Îles du Salut for a smallpox quarantine. The captain of the Roi Guinguin and French imperial officials’ fears of smallpox outbreaks and other contagious diseases prompted them to halt and reroute the voyage to refreshment centers and quarantines along the West African and South American coasts. The African captives took these stopovers as opportunities to flee and otherwise resist their enslavement. The enslaved Africans felt West African and European imperialism and commerce come to bear on and in their bodies as slave traders and colonial officials exploited the African and South American coastal geography.
Published By
Routledge
Editor(s)
E. Berquist Soule, R. G. Davis, D. Fischer-Hornung, and N. Millett
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Elise A. Mitchell.
(2025).
"Across The Atlantic: Morbidity, Geography, And The Eighteenth-Century French Atlantic Slave Trade".
Charting The Future: Atlantic Studies And Global Currents.
90-114.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003644040-6
https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-history/570
Comments
This work is freely available under a Creative Commons license.
Reprinted from: Elise A. Mitchell. (2024). "Across The Atlantic: Morbidity, Geography, And The Eighteenth-Century French Atlantic Slave Trade." Atlantic Studies. Volume 21, Issue 1. 90-114. https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2023.2265762.