It’s a statement often made, easy to agree with, and hard to process since its truth is lost in its abstraction. But in writing this book, I’ve come to appreciate the assertion anew, to realize the ways that slavery insinuated itself into the soul and sinews of the West. The research for this history was conducted in archives, libraries, and museums in nine countries, including in Spain (in Madrid, Seville, and Calañas, the Andalusian village where Benito Cerreño was born), Uruguay, Argentina (Buenos Aires and Mendoza, Alejandro de Aranda’s hometown), Chile (Santiago, Valparaiso, and Concepción), Peru (Lima and Huacho), Great Britain (Liverpool and London), Senegal (Dakar and Port Saint-Louis), France (Aix-en-Provence), and the United States (Boston, Duxbury—Amasa Delano’s birthplace—Albany, New York, Providence, and Washington, D.C., among other places). I’ve traveled by bus across the pampas and over the Andes, roughly along the route Mori, Babo, and the rest of the West African captives were forced to move by foot and mule, and visited the Huaura Valley in Peru, north of Lima, where Cerreño, having given up sailing after barely surviving his ordeal, took possession of Hacienda Humaya, a sprawling sugar slave plantation.
