Barracoon
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A barracoon is a type of barracks used historically for the internment of enslaved or criminal human beings.
Slave baracoon, Sierra Leone, 1849
Atlantic slave trade
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The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people to the Americas. This trade was operated by slave ships from both Europe a
Barracoon
…beings. (The term is an adaptation of Portuguese barracão, an augmentative form of the Catalan loanword barraca ('hut') through Spanish barracón.) In the Atlantic slave trade, captured individuals were temporarily transported to and imprisoned at barracoons along the coast of West Africa, where they awaited forced transportation…
Reproduction of a handbill advertising a slave auction in Charleston, British Province of South Carolina, in 1769
Portuguese mariners used caravel ships and traveled south along the West African coast and colonised Cape Verde in 1462.
Noah curses Ham by Gustave Doré – the curse of Ham was used as a justification to enslave Africans.
Elmina Castle in the Guinea coast, present-day Ghana, was built in 1482 by Portuguese traders. Its primary purpose was trading in gold, but when the outward slave trade from the Gold Coast began, it was used in the slave trade. The Gold Coast was a late entrant to the outward slave trade (though there was an inward trade to supply workers in the gold mines).