The first recorded New England slave voyage sailed from the city of Boston, Massachusetts in 1644. By the 1670s, Massachusetts traders were regularly carrying slaves between Africa and the Caribbean. Rhode Islanders entered the trade in about 1700. By the middle of the eighteenth century, upwards of twenty ships per year sailed for Africa from the tiny colony, most of them from the city of Newport. Two-thirds of Rhode Island’s fleet was engaged in the slave trade. Over the next century, more than 60 percent of the North American ships involved in the African slave trade were based in Rhode Island. As a proportion of the transatlantic trade as a whole, the Rhode Island slave trade was quite modest. In all, perhaps one hundred thousand Africans were carried to the New World in Rhode Island ships. However, in a small colony like Rhode Island, the slave trade became a crucial economic engine. The trade brought great wealth to some merchants and investors and created jobs for thousands of others. In addition to the sailors employed in the trade, many people worked in industries dependent on the slave trade, from rope making to iron forging, from candle manufacturing to carpentry. Distilling provides perhaps the best example. By the 1760s, the Rhode Island city of Newport alone boasted nearly two dozen distilleries, transforming Caribbean molasses into rum