The short answer
About 4.9 million enslaved Africans reached Brazil alive between 1501 and 1866, according to the SlaveVoyages database, whose estimate is 4.86 million. That is almost half of the 10.7 million who survived the crossing to the Americas, more than any other country, and roughly twelve times the 390,000 taken to the United States.
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The numbers
The figures historians use come from SlaveVoyages, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, an international project that pulls together the surviving records of slave ships and their voyages. For the whole period from 1501 to 1866, it estimates:
- Shipped by force from Africa: about 12.5 million people
- Reached the Americas alive: 10.7 million
- Brazil: about 4.86 million, almost half of them
- The entire British Caribbean: 2.3 million
- The United States: about 390,000
- Died at sea: about 1.8 million
Put those side by side and the scale is hard to take in. For every African carried to what became the United States, about twelve were landed in Brazil. No other country in the Americas comes close. Some sources give 4.8 million; the SlaveVoyages estimate used here is 4.86 million, which rounds to 4.9.
Where the ships went, and who owned them
The ships loaded captives mainly at Luanda and Benguela, in today’s Angola, and on the Mina coast of West Africa. It is easy to picture this as a Portuguese or foreign business. It was also a Brazilian one. Many voyages began in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Recife, with local owners and crews, in a direct trade across the South Atlantic, as the historian Luiz Felipe de Alencastro has shown.
The people they carried built every boom of colonial and imperial Brazil: first the sugar of Pernambuco and Bahia, then the gold of Minas Gerais, and finally the coffee of the Paraíba Valley. Their languages stayed too. Brazilian Portuguese took everyday words from Kimbundu and other Bantu languages, among them senzala (slave quarters), cafuné (a head rub), moleque (a kid) and quilombo, the word for a community of runaways.
The crossing
The voyage across the South Atlantic took weeks. Hundreds of people were packed into each hold, with almost no air and no clean water. Of the 12.5 million shipped, about 1.8 million never reached land. One man who survived the trip to Pernambuco around 1845, Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, later escaped in New York and published his life story in English:
Its horrors, ah! who can describe? None can so truly depict its horrors as the poor unfortunate, miserable wretch that has been confined within its portals.
His book is the only known autobiographical account by a person enslaved in Brazil.
Where the numbers became a place
About 900,000 of those Africans, by UNESCO’s estimate, came ashore at a single landing place in Rio: the Valongo wharf, used from 1811. It was paved over in 1843, rediscovered by construction workers in 2011 and declared a World Heritage site in 2017. Even a ban did not stop the flow. A law of 1831 declared every newly arrived African free, yet more than 700,000 were landed illegally by 1850, the year a new law, pushed by the British navy, finally began to shut the trade down. Why abolition itself took until 1888 is the subject of Was Brazil the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery?.
Sources
- SlaveVoyages, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, estimates 1501–1866
- Mahommah G. Baquaqua and Samuel Moore, Biography of Mahommah G. Baquaqua (Detroit, 1854)
- UNESCO, Valongo Wharf Archaeological Site (World Heritage, 2017)
- Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, O trato dos viventes (2000)