The Atlantic World

Trace the web of maritime connections between western Europe, western and central Africa, and the Americas that made up the Atlantic world.

Details from “The Western Ocean,” a map published in The English Pilot, the Fifth Book, 1720

Courtesy of the Mariners’ Museum

Birchbark Canoe

Native Americans depended on North America’s rivers and lakes for food and transportation. They fashioned tough, lightweight bark canoes for fishing, hunting, fur trading, and warfare. By the early 1600s, the French had adopted Indian canoes for their own fur trading.

This model, made by an unknown native maker around 1803, represents the type of canoe built by the Micmac people in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Canada.

Lent by the Peabody Essex Museum

South American Canoe

Native peoples in coastal South America and the Caribbean made canoes of logs, bark, and reeds. This model shows a type of canoe used by the Akawai Indians on the Demerara River, which empties into the Atlantic in Guyana.

Lent by the Mariners’ Museum

The Santa María

Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic in 1492 hoping to find a shorter route to the riches of Asia. Instead, he found the islands of the Caribbean Sea, which he claimed for Spain, though they were already inhabited. Waves of conquerors and colonists—both free and enslaved—followed. What was a triumph for Spain was a catastrophe for native peoples. New livestock, plants, diseases, and beliefs unsettled centuries-old communities and ecosystems, changing and destroying the lives of millions of native people.

The Susan Constant

In May 1607, men from the Susan Constant and two other ships founded Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in North America. They made the dangerous 3,000-mile voyage in slow, uncomfortable cargo vessels, hoping to find gold and spices. The next month, when they sent the ship home, it was filled with timber.

Ketch

Magnificent catches of fish drew colonists to New England’s shores, and some made their fortunes selling fish in overseas markets. Salt-preserved cod was the region’s main product. It fed plantation slaves in the West Indies and was traded there for molasses. During the 1600s, New England fishers set out in small boats like this two-masted vessel called a ketch.

The Mediator

Coastal commerce linked North America’s largest cities and towns. Fast Chesapeake Bay sloops such as the Mediator regularly called at ports from New Hampshire to Georgia, and in many British, French, and Dutch harbors in the Caribbean. The sloop’s design was adapted from small, swift vessels developed in the West Indies.

The Chaleur

Great Britain was often at war in the 1600s and 1700s, and Britain’s enemies attacked ships from the American colonies. To outrun danger, New England shipbuilders developed fast-sailing schooners. The Chaleur, a Marblehead schooner, represents a common type in the Massachusetts fishing fleet.

Sloop

Sloops formed the backbone of the trade along the coasts and to the West Indies. They often sailed as smugglers and warships, too. This armed example from the 1760s, with oars to maneuver in calms, is similar to craft used by Caribbean pirates a century earlier.

The London

Settlers exported vast amounts of timber cut from forests in the Americas, and such naval stores as turpentine and tar. With so much wood close at hand, colonial shipbuilding prospered, and American ships sold well overseas. English owners ordered the London, a fast-sailing general-cargo ship, directly from builders in New York.

The Swift

The Swift was designed for speed and had little cargo capacity. The vessel may have been a packet, which carried mail and government dispatches.

The Berbice

Connected by the sea, farmers and fishermen in the continental colonies fed the residents of the Caribbean islands in exchange for molasses, sugar, and rum. The British captured this merchant vessel in the West Indies during the American Revolution.

The Diligente

The slave trade created vast misery and wealth. For nearly 400 years, merchants in Europe and America financed slaving voyages, some African peoples sold their enemies into bondage, and American planters exported valuable crops without paying their workers. Even after international treaties banned slave importing, vessels like the Diligente continued this lucrative, inhuman trade.

. . . Turn’d away and Sent to Sea, 1747

In this 18^th-century print, a young man is shown the brutality of seafaring by three unsavory sailors. While one rows, another taunts him with the lash, used for discipline on ships. The third points to the body of a pirate hanging from the gallows. His mother weeps, perhaps at the prospect of losing her son to the sea.