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This is not a particularly pleasant event but in 1672 Charles II granted the Royal African Company a monopoly on the rapidly
expanding slave trade. As a result, Britain would become one of the leading transatlantic slave trading nations. The ships would leave Britain, often from Bristol
and took guns and manufactured goods to West Africa, where these goods were exchanged for people. Some African chiefs would capture people from rival tribes and
have them chained and lined up when the slaving boats arrived.
Then these slaves were taken across the Atlantic, chained in the lower deck of the ships, in cruel conditions, in the dark with the hatch opened once
a day so food could be thrown in (if they were lucky) and sold to the owners of the sugar or tobacco plantations of the Caribbean and North America. Cargoes of
rum, tobacco, cotton and sugar were then carried to England. Historians, now proving they understood maths too, called this the triangle trade.
For the slaves it was a terror-filled journey, often followed, if they survived, by a terror-filled life. There were some owners who treated the
slaves quite well but just as the Britons had been forced to work for their Roman conquerors, so these people had no rights and their life was just one long
day of work and sleep.
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