BAPTISMAL RECORDS DATABASE FOR SLAVE SOCIETIES

Visualization tools


BARDSS will allow scholars of Atlantic slavery to access data on hundreds of thousands of individual African slaves and their descendants who lived and died in Latin American slave societies. The quantity of data in BARDSS means that historians and social scientists will be able to use baptismal records as a kind of census, opening many possible avenues for research. We currently envision three main type of visualization components: a graph, a bar chart, and a pie chart. They are especially useful for showing trends over time or across regions.




Studying Slave Societies with BARDSS


In many circumstances, the majority of baptized individuals were newborn infants, whose parents’ names (often including ethnonyms) and birthdates were recorded by the priest performing the baptism ceremony. This allows historians a glimpse into the intimate lives of enslaved people. For example, the archives of San Carlos in Matanzas record 368 infants born in the year 1830--a frequency of 1.01 per day. By month, the number of births ranged from a low of 22 in August to a high of 38 in October. Adjusting for the length of each month, the frequency of births ranged from 0.71 per day in August to 1.23 in September--an increase of 73 percent. What might account for the steep decline in Matanzas births during the summer of 1830 and the dramatic rise in autumn? With BARDSS, a inquiring researcher would be able to compare birth rates from one year to the next and across geographical locations in order to determine whether and where this pattern was repeated. If so, he/she might begin to identify environmental, social, or economic explanations for this pattern.



BARDSS and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade


BARDSS can offer new insights into the transatlantic slave trade. This section explores how one can combine data from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database with BARDSS data in order to reach new conclusions on the forced human traffic from Africa to Cuba




One exciting possibility for historians of the slave trade is to employ BARDSS data to fill gaps in our existing knowledge of Atlantic slave trade patterns. One cannot understate the impact of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database on our understanding of the Atlantic slave trade. However, due to the fragmented nature of the sources, the data is often quite incomplete. For example, out of the 902 transatlantic slave voyages that arrived in Cuba from 1789 to 1820, during the era of the legal slave trade, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database can only tell us the African region of embarkation for 229. Thus, the African origin for more than three-quarters of the Cuban transatlantic slave trade is a puzzle. However, by examining the contents of BARDSS’ Origin attribute, we can begin to assemble the missing pieces and complete our picture of African forced migration to Cuba. Churches usually baptized African slaves soon after their arrival in the Americas, and, as noted above, the vast majority of these slaves were identified as belonging to an African nation. While these nations may not have corresponded to contemporary African polities or ethnic groups, they correlated closely with the African regions where slave ships embarked their captives


1- Priests usually recorded baptized individuals as either adults or infants. Less frequently, they baptized children too old to be considered babies. With a few exceptions, adults were Africans that had recently arrived in Cuba. On the other hand, infants were almost always born in the Americas and, following the conventions of the time, we categorize them as criollo or creole. This bar graph shows the distribution by age categories of individuals baptized in the Church of the Espiritu Santo in Havana during the year of 1808.

2- When the baptized individual was an adult, the document refers to his or her place of origin as a nationality, or “nation.” Different “nations” referred to different areas of the African coast familiar to Spanish bureaucrats through the Atlantic slave trade. This bar charts shows a distribution of baptized individuals by nation, or origin. The high number of "criollos" is attributable to infants born in Cuba.



For the year of 1808 the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database contains information on seven slave ships landing captives in Cuba. Of these seven, one arrived from the Bight of Biafra, one from the coast of present-day Sierra Leone, and the other four were of unknown origin. By looking at the baptisms performed in just one church in Havana, Espiritu Santo, during 1808, we can begin to make educated guesses about the unknown embarkation regions of the remaining two ships. Surprisingly, a plurality of the African slaves baptized in the Church of Espiritu Santu were identified as Congo, a national origin corresponding to a sprawling region of West Central Africa. We can be fairly certain, then, that at least one ship carried slaves from the coast of present-day Angola and Gabon.


3 -This bar chart shows adult baptized individuals according to their African “nations." The noticeable presence of Congos suggests a slave-trading vessel recently arrived carrying slaves originally acquired from West Central Africa. There were fewer arrivals of slaves in Cuba from other American ports. However, when put together, the number of Mandingas, Gangas, and Guineas indicates that a large number of slaves were arriving from Upper Guinea during this period


4 - This map by Jesus Guanche shows roughly how colonial authorities in Cuba imagined the map of Africa. The continent was divided into discrete "nations." These nations should not be confused with what we now understand as African ethnicities, even when in some cases Cuban nations and African ethnolinguistic categories overlap.

  • I - Guinea, Ganga, Mandinga
  • II- Mina
  • III- Arara, Carabali, Lucumi
  • IV- Congo
  • V- Macua

5 -BARDSS’ ability to tell us about the African origins of slaves in the Americas is even more crucial for the era of the illegal slave trade, which continued on a large scale in nineteenth-century Brazil and Cuba. In many cases, details about illegal slaving voyages are only known thanks to the interdiction of mainly-British naval vessels tasked with hunting down slave ships. In 1830, Matanzas was a thriving center of Cuban coffee and sugar production--industries dependent on the labor of enslaved Africans. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database contains information on only the schooner Santa Rosa, which in 1830 unloaded slaves of unknown origin in Matanzas. The data comes from the records of British officials tasked with tracking the slave trade in Cuba. However, the baptismal records of the San Carlos Cathedral in Matanzas offers new insights. In 1830, 284 adult African slaves were baptized at San Carlos. As this figure shows, they belonged to more than seven different nations corresponding to every major slave trading region on the Atlantic coast of Africa with slave ships bringing captives from Upper Guinea and Sierra Leone (Mandinga and Ganga), the Bights of Benin and Biafra (Arara, Carabali, Lucumi, and Mina).