Historians have generally assumed that the transatlantic slave trade ended in 1867, but it actually continued into the following decade, according to new research.
Dr Hannah Durkin, an historian and former Newcastle University lecturer, has unearthed evidence that two slave ships landed in Cuba in 1872. One vessel, flying the Portuguese flag, had 200 captives aged from 10 to 40, and the second is believed to have been a US ship with 630 prisoners packed into its hold.
Durkin said she found references in US newspapers from that year to the landings of these ships. “It shows how recently the slave trade ended. The thefts of people’s lives have been written out of history and haven’t been recorded.”
Other newly discovered evidence includes an 1872 Hansard parliamentary record of a British politician challenging “assurances of the Spanish government that there had been no importation of slaves into Cuba of late years”.
Durkin said that, while Spain officially ended its slave trade in 1867, she had come across an account by the explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley, who had travelled to Benin and visited the slave port of Ouidah in 1873. He wrote of seeing 300 people locked in a barracoon, a slave pen, and noted that two slave ships had recently sailed from that port.
Ouidah was the second-most important slave port in the whole of Africa, behind only Luanda, in Angola, Durkin said. “The region bore the European nickname ‘Slave coas