Throughout history, blame for the introduction of slavery to America has been squarely placed upon the male slave traders who ravaged African villages, the merchants who auctioned off humans as if they were cattle, and the male slave owners who ruthlessly beat both the spirits and the bodies of their helpless victims. There is, however, above all these men, another person who has seemingly been able to avoid the blame that is due her. The origins of the English slave trade -- the result of which is often described as America's shame -- can actually be traced back to a woman, England's Queen Elizabeth I. In The Queen's Slave Trader, historian Nick Hazlewood examines one of the roots of slavery that until now has been overlooked. It was not just the money-hungry Dutch businessmen who traded lives for gold, forever changing the course of American and world history, but the Virgin Queen, praised for her love of music, art, and literature, who put hundreds of African men, women, and children onto American soil. During the 1560s, on direct orders from Her Majesty, John Hawkyns set sail from England. His destination: West Africa. His mission: to capture humans. At the time, Elizabeth was encouraging a Renaissance in her kingdom. Yet, being the intelligent monarch that she was, the queen knew her country's economy could not finance the dreams she had for it. An early entrepreneur, she saw an open market before her and sent one of her most trusted naval commanders, Hawkyns, to ensure a steady stream of wealth to sustain all the beauty that was her passion. Like his fellow Englishmen, Hawkyns believed the African people's dark skin stood for evil, filth, barbarity -- the complete opposite of the English notion of beauty, a lily white complexion and a virtuous soul, as exemplified by the queen. To him it was simple. If the white English were civilized and pure, the dark Africans must be savage. It was a moral license for Hawkyns to capture Africans. After landing on the African coast, he used a series of brutal raids, violent beatings, and sheer terror to load his ships. The reward for those who survived the attacks: seven weeks chained together in a space not meant for human beings, smallpox and measles, dehydration and malnourishment. Hawkyns realized the cruelty inflicted on these people, and he hoped they would survive. After all, a dead African was a dent in his profit margin. John Hawkyns was the first English slave trader, and his actions and attitudes toward his cargo set the precedent for how those following him, over the next two hundred years, would act. To fully understand the mind-set of the men who made their living trafficking human souls, one needs to look at the man who began it all -- and the woman behind him.

In this riveting book, Kelsey, biographer of Sir Francis Drake, tells the story of Drake's cousin Hawkins, who was a successful seaman and played a pivotal role in the history of England and the emergence of the global slave trade. 23 illustrations.

Throughout history, blame for the introduction of slavery in America has been squarely placed upon the slave traders who ravaged African villages, the merchants who auctioned off human lives as if they were cattle, and the slave owners who ruthlessly beat their helpless victims. There is, however, above all these men, another person who has seemingly been able to avoid the blame due her. The origins of slavery -- often described as America's shame -- can actually be traced back to a woman, England's Queen Elizabeth I. During the 1560s, Elizabeth was encouraging a Renaissance in her kingdom but also knew her country's economy could not finance her dreams for it. On direct orders from Her Majesty, John Hawkyns set sail from England. His destination: West Africa. His mission: to capture human lives. After landing on the African coast, he used a series of brutal raids, violent beatings, and sheer terror to load his ships. As the first major slave trader, Hawkyns's actions and attitudes toward his cargo set the precedent for those who followed him for the next two hundred years. In The Queen's Slave Trader, historian Nick Hazlewood's haunting discoveries take you into the mind-set of the men who made their livelihoods trafficking human souls and at long last reveals the man who began it all -- and the woman behind him.

"I am a human being; I am a woman; I am a black woman; I am an African. Once I was free; then I was captured and became a slave; but inside me, here and here, I am still a free woman." During a period of four hundred years, European slave traders ferried some 12 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. In the Americas, teaching a slave to read and write was a criminal offense. When the last slaves gained their freedom in Brazil, barely a thousand of them were literate. Hardly any stories of the enslaved and transported Africans have survived. This novel is an attempt to recreate just one of those stories, one story of a possible 12 million or more.Lawrence Hill created another in The Book of Negroes (Someone Knows my Name in the U.S.) and, more recently, Yaa Gyasi has done the same in Homegoing. Ama occupies center stage throughout this novel. As the story opens, she is sixteen. Distant drums announce the death of her grandfather. Her family departs to attend the funeral, leaving her alone to tend her ailing baby brother. It is 1775. Asante has conquered its northern neighbor and exacted an annual tribute of 500 slaves. The ruler of Dagbon dispatches a raiding party into the lands of the neighboring Bekpokpam. They capture Ama. That night, her lover, Itsho, leads an attack on the raiders’ camp. The rescue bid fails. Sent to collect water from a stream, Ama comes across Itsho’s mangled corpse. For the rest of her life she will call upon his spirit in time of need. In Kumase, the Asante capital, Ama is given as a gift to the Queen-mother. When the adolescent monarch, Osei Kwame, conceives a passion for her, the regents dispatch her to the coast for sale to the Dutch at Elmina Castle. There the governor, Pieter de Bruyn, selects her as his concubine, dressing her in the elegant clothes of his late Dutch wife and instructing the obese chaplain to teach her to read and write English. De Bruyn plans to marry Ama and take her with him to Europe. He makes a last trip to the Dutch coastal outstations and returns infected with yellow fever. On his death, his successor rapes Ama and sends her back to the female dungeon. Traumatized, her mind goes blank. She comes to her senses in the canoe which takes her and other women out to the slave ship, The Love of Liberty. Before the ship leaves the coast of Africa, Ama instigates a slave rebellion. It fails and a brutal whipping leaves her blind in one eye. The ship is becalmed in mid-Atlantic. Then a fierce storm cripples it and drives it into the port of Salvador, capital of Brazil. Ama finds herself working in the fields and the mill on a sugar estate. She is absorbed into slave society and begins to adapt, learning Portuguese. Years pass. Ama is now totally blind. Clutching the cloth which is her only material link with Africa, she reminisces, dozes, falls asleep. A short epilogue brings the story up to date. The consequences of the slave trade and slavery are still with us. Brazilians of African descent remain entrenched in the lower reaches of society, enmeshed in poverty. “This is story telling on a grand scale,” writes Tony Simões da Silva. “In Ama, Herbstein creates a work of literature that celebrates the resilience of human beings while denouncing the inscrutable nature of their cruelty. By focusing on the brutalization of Ama's body, and on the psychological scars of her experiences, Herbstein dramatizes the collective trauma of slavery through the story of a single African woman. Ama echoes the views of writers, historians and philosophers of the African diaspora who have argued that the phenomenon of slavery is inextricable from the deepest foundations of contemporary western civilization.” Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book.

Because of the growing need for labor in the South and an overabundance of slaves in Maryland and Virginia, Baltimore became the main port for the selling and shipping of slaves to New Orleans.

For use in schools and libraries only. What sight sent shivers down the spines of 16th-century Spanish sailors? The masts of any ship belonging to Sir Francis Drake the slave trader, pirate, and looter known as "The Dragon," who prowled the seas from the Mediterranean to the Pacific Ocean.

This book traces the inland origins of slaves leaving West Central Africa at the peak period of the transatlantic slave trade.

The story of the longest and most complex legal challenge to slavery in American history For over seventy years and five generations, the enslaved families of Prince George’s County, Maryland, filed hundreds of suits for their freedom against a powerful circle of slaveholders, taking their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. Between 1787 and 1861, these lawsuits challenged the legitimacy of slavery in American law and put slavery on trial in the nation’s capital. Piecing together evidence once dismissed in court and buried in the archives, William Thomas tells an intricate and intensely human story of the enslaved families (the Butlers, Queens, Mahoneys, and others), their lawyers (among them a young Francis Scott Key), and the slaveholders who fought to defend slavery, beginning with the Jesuit priests who held some of the largest plantations in the nation and founded a college at Georgetown. A Question of Freedom asks us to reckon with the moral problem of slavery and its legacies in the present day.

Well into the early nineteenth century, Luanda, the administrative capital of Portuguese Angola, was one of the most influential ports for the transatlantic slave trade. Between 1801 and 1850, it served as the point of embarkation for more than 535,000 enslaved Africans. In the history of this diverse, wealthy city, the gendered dynamics of the merchant community have frequently been overlooked. Vanessa S. Oliveira traces how existing commercial networks adapted to changes in the Atlantic slave trade during the first half of the nineteenth century. Slave Trade and Abolition reveals how women known as donas (a term adapted from the title granted to noble and royal women in the Iberian Peninsula) were often important cultural brokers. Acting as intermediaries between foreign and local people, they held high socioeconomic status and even competed with the male merchants who controlled the trade. Oliveira provides rich evidence to explore the many ways this Luso-African community influenced its society. In doing so, she reveals an unexpectedly nuanced economy with regard to the dynamics of gender and authority.

ESCAPE FROM THE SLAVE TRADERS Introducing David Livingstone An urgent call for help cut through the morning mists that floated along the shore of Lake Shirwa. Two young African boys, Wikatani and Chuma, had been captured by slave traders, but the desperate cry would never reach their village. Easily overpowered by their captors, the boys' only hope is to endure a ruthless march through the jungles that takes them far from their village to a destination unknown. Where are the cruel Red Caps taking them? What chance might the boys have to escape? If they manage to escape, how will they ever find their way home again? Fortunately for Wikatani and Chuma, there is help on the way. David Livingstone, a missionary and British government official, is doing everything he can to put a halt to the slave traders who are devastating southeastern Africa during the 1860s. But is there any reason to hope that he might help two young boys? Will they have the courage to face the phenomenal adventure and peril before them?