A new website established by Emory University in the United States has set itself the ambitious task of documenting the entire Atlantic slave trade from the 16th to the 19th centuries.

Voyages (www.slavevoyages.org) provides searchable information on nearly 35,000 trans-Atlantic slave trading voyages, as well as maps, images and personal information about some of the Africans transported.

The site is the work of David Eltis, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History at Emory University, and Martin Halbert, director of digital innovation for the university.

The database, which includes details such as the names of ships, captains and owners, the number of slaves transported, and the number who died en route, will be of enormous interest to researchers, educators and not least to African Americans eager to trace their African roots.

"Everyone wants to know where their ancestors came from," Eltis says. "There are more data on the slave trade than on the free migrant movement simply because the slave trade was a business and people were property, so records were likely to be better. What the database makes possible is the establishment of links between America and Africa in a way that already has been done by historians for Europeans."

Voyages will be formally launched on December 5 at an academic conference timed to coincide with the bicentennial of the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808.

Henry Louis Gates, Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University said Voyages will shed important light on the hidden history of 12.5 million slaves.

"The greatest mystery in the history of the West, I believe, has always been the Africans who were enslaved and shipped to the New World," he said. "Their ancestries, their identities, their stories were lost in the ships that carried them across the Atlantic. The multi-decade and collaborative project that brought us [the Voyages] site has done more to reverse the Middle Passage than any other single act of scholarship possibly could."

(China.org.cn by John Sexton,November 25, 2008)