Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 2003), 34, 171, 172. In his autobiography, Equiano claimed that he was born in western Africa in about 1745, and then enslaved and sent to the West Indies at about the age of 11. Vincent Cartetta has found evidence to suggest that Equiano may in fact have been born in South Carolina, and that his African identity may have been a composite account of an entire people, constructed from published sources and the personal recollections of others. Whether or not Equiano had direct experience of West Africa, his account of its people and culture is nonetheless both detailed and, in a manner of speaking, authentic. See Carretta, Equiano, The African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2005), xiv–xv.

Ira Berlin, Many Centuries Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1198), 39; David Eltis and David Richardson, ‘The “Numbers Games” and Routes to Slavery’, in Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity and Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (London: Frank Cass, 1997), 1.

Trevor Burnard, ‘E Pluribus Plures: African Ethnicities in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Jamaica’, Jamaican Historical Review, 21 (2001): 8; Michal Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 99; Amy Marie Johnson, ‘Expectations of Slavery, African Captives, White Planters, And Slave Rebelliousness in Early Colonial Jamaica’ (PhD diss., Duke University, 2007), 36.

Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, David Eltis, Martin Lambert et al., http://www.slavevoyages.org/ (accessed April 13, 2011). Initially published as a CD-ROM by Cambridge University Press, and now mounted as a freely accessible web resource by the WEB. DuBois Institute at Harvard University, the Voyages database includes at least partial information about as many as 95 per cent of the slave ships that left British ports, as well as less complete data for the slave ships of Dutch, French and other nations. All told some 35,000 voyages are included in the database, with information about the point of departure, the ethnicity, and the point of sale of hundreds of thousands of African slaves. Estimates drawn from Voyages. Actual numbers, and known percentages of females were drawn from the database on 13 August 2011.

Here, we are taking the known percentages of females assessed from the surviving records of voyages which are available through Voyages, and applying them to the estimates of the total numbers of enslaved Africans proposed by the database compilers, in order to estimate the total number of women from each of these three key regions. One of the best studies of the purchase of enslaved Africans in Jamaica, including consideration of their ethnic identity, is Trevor Burnard and Kenneth Morgan, ‘The Dynamics of the Slave Market and Slave Purchasing Patterns in Jamaica, 1655–1788’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d. ser., 58 (2001): 205–28.

Daryll Forde, ‘Kinship and Marriage Among the Ashanti’, in African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, ed. A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Daryll Forde (London: for International African Institute by OUP, 1956), 261–4. See also Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Kingston: Heinemann Publishers Ltd., 1990), 83–93.

Similar studies have been undertaken for other populations of African descendants in the Americas. See Antonio Salas et al., ‘The African Diaspora: mitochondrial DNA and the Atlantic Slave Trade’, The American Journal of Human Genetics, 74, no. 3 (2004), 454–65; Nicolas Brucato et al., ‘The Imprint of the Slave Trade in an African American Population: Mitochondrial DNA, Y Chromosome and HTLV-1 Analysis in the Noir Maroon of French Guiana’, BMC Evolutionary Biology, 10 (2010), 314; Klara Stefflova et al., ‘Dissecting the Within-Africa ancestry of populations of African Decent in the Americas’, PloS One 6, no. 1 (2011), e14495.

The scope and detail of the mtDNA evolutionary tree is well illustrated by the rendering of the tree on the website http://www.phylotree.org/tree/main.htm. The African branch of the tree is represented by ‘L’, and can be seen at http://www.phylotree.org/tree/subtree_L.htm.

mtDNA is twice as sensitive to genetic drift as nuclear DNA because it is inherited from the mother alone. Only those women who reproduce pass their mtDNA on, and it will pass on to future generations through daughters. Peter A. Underhill & Toomas Kivisild, ‘Use of Y Chromosome and Mitochondrial DNA in Tracing Human Migration’, Annual Review of Genetics, 41 (2007), 539–64.

Salas et al., ‘The African Diaspora’; Isabel Mendizabal et al., ‘Genetic Origin, Admixture, and Asymmetry in Maternal and Paternal Human Lineages in Cuba’, BMC Evolutionary Biology, 8 (2008), 213.

David C. McLean, Jr., et al., ‘Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) Halotypes Reveal Maternal Population Genetic Affinities of Sea Island Gullah-Speaking African Americans’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 127 (2005), 427–38; J. Benn Torres et al., ‘Mitochondial and Y chromosome diversity in the English-speaking Caribbean’, Annals of Human Genetics, 71 (2007), 782–90; Salas et al., ‘The African Diaspora’, 454–65.

Precise information about town, parish and county of birth is known for 344 (86 per cent) of the volunteers. The percentages of these 344 who were born in each parish are as follows, with that parish's percentage of the Jamaican population in 2010 in brackets (as revealed in the 2010 census): Kingston and St Andrew, 36 per cent (25 per cent); St Thomas, 3 per cent (3 per cent); Portland, 1 per cent (3 per cent); St Mary, 3.5 per cent (4 per cent); St Ann, 4 per cent (6 per cent); Trelawny, 4 per cent (3 per cent); St James, 4 per cent (7 per cent); Hanover, 1 per cent (3 per cent); Westmoreland, 4 per cent (5 per cent); St Elizabeth, 13.5 per cent (6 per cent); Manchester, 8.5 per cent (7 per cent); Clarendon, 7 per cent (9 per cent); St Catherine, 10.5 per cent (19 per cent). For Jamaican parish populations as revealed by the 2010 census, see ‘Population by Parish 2010’, Demographic Statistics, Statistical Institute of Jamaica, http://statinja.gov.jm/populationbyparish.aspx (accessed August 19, 2011).

For a technical description of the DNA extraction procedure, see Appendix 1. For information about the statistical methodology, see Appendix 2.

Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992); Edward Braithwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); John W. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). For further examples of scholars following Thornton's lead in exploring ethnic clustering in slave arrivals, and cultural retention and survival in slave communities see Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), and James Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the Afro-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). For an excellent discussion of this historiography, see Trevor Burnard, ‘The Atlantic Slave Trade and African Ethnicities in Seventeenth-Century Jamaica’, in Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery, ed. David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz and Anthony J. Tibbles (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 139–40.

Thomas Phillips, ‘A Journal of a Voyage Made in the Hannibal of London, Ann. 1693, 1694, from England to Cape Monseradoe in Africa: And thence along the Coast of Guinney to Whidaw, the island of St. Thomas. And so forward to Barbadoes', in A Collection of Voyages and Travels, Some Now Printed from Original Manuscripts, Others Now Published in English, ed. Awnsham Churchill and John Churchill (London: 1732), VI, 214; Edwyn Stede and Stephen Gascoigne to Royal African Company, Barbados, May 30, 1681, Abstract of Letters, October 22, 1678 to May 30, 1681, Records of the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading With Africa and Its Successors, National Archives, T70/15, 63; Peter Thomson, ed., ‘Henry Drax's Instructions on the Management of a Seventeenth Century Barbadian Sugar Plantation’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d. ser., 66 (2009): 585.

Francis Grant to James Rogers & Co., December 30, 1778, Miscellaneous Accounts, Papers and Correspondence of James Rogers, Merchant of Bristol, National Archives, C107/7, Box 2; Simon Taylor to Robert Taylor, December 29, 1803, quoted in Audra Abbe Diptee, ‘Atlantic Connections: An African Cohort in the Making of a Slave Society, Jamaica, 1775–1807’ (PhD. diss., University of Toronto, 2006), 60–1; Return Relation to the General State of the Trade in Africa (1777), Records, National Archives, T70/177, 4. Johnson, ‘Expectations of Slavery’, 34; Robert P. Stewart, ‘Akan Ethnicity on Jamaica’, The Maryland Historian, 28 (2003): 72–3.

David Eltis and David Richardson, ‘West Africa and the Transatlantic Slave Trade: New Evidence of Long-Run Trends’, in Routes to Slavery, 20; Johnson, ‘Expectations of Slavery’, 143; Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 9; Diptee, ‘Atlantic Connections’ (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2006), 1; Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 8.

Eltis and Richardson, ‘The Numbers Game’, 6; Eltis and Richardson, ‘West Africa and the Transatlantic Slave Trade’, 16.

John Thornton, ‘The Coromantees: An African Cultural Group in Colonial North America and the Caribbean’, The Journal of Caribbean History, 32 (1998), 161–2; D.B. Chambers, ‘Ethnicity in the Diaspora: The Slave Trade and the Creation of African “Nations” in the Americas’, Slavery & ABolition, 22 (2001), 25–39.

The Royal Gazette of Jamaica (Kingston), April 28–May 5, 1781, January 5–12, 1793, quoted in Diptee, ‘Atlantic Connections’, 131, 62; Edward Long, The History of Jamaica: Or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of that Island (London: for T. Lowndes, 1774), II, 472.

Eltis and Richardson, ‘West Africa and the Transatlantic Slave Trade’, 20–1; Douglas B. Chambers, ‘“My own nation”: Igbo Exiles in the Diaspora’, in Routes to Slavery, 73, 73–5, 84–5; Diptee, ‘Atlantic Connections’, 66–7, 136; Ugo Nwokeji, ‘The Atlantic Slave Trade and Population Density: A Historical Demography of the Biafran Hinterland’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 34 (2000), 616–55. Diptee claims that between 1775 and 1800, Bonny exported approximately 68,000 slaves to Jamaica, compared to 16,500 from Old Calabar and 8000 from Elem Kalabari: Diptee, ‘Atlantic Connections’, 66.

Simon Taylor to Robert Taylor, March 26, 1804, and Simon Taylor to Robert Taylor, December 29, 1803, quoted in Diptee, ‘Atlantic Connections’, 62–3; Ugo Nwokeji, ‘The Biafran Frontier: Trade, Slaves, and Aro Society, c.1750–1905’ (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1999), 38–66. See also Diptee, ‘Atlantic Connections’, 67–8.

Diptee, ‘Atlantic Connections’, 29; David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 245–50; Thornton, Africa and Africans, 189–90; Burnard, ‘The Atlantic Slave Trade’, 143–6. See also Greg O'Malley, ‘Final Passages: The British Inter-Colonial Slave Trade, 1619–1807’ (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2007).

Burnard, ‘The Atlantic Slave Trade’, 142.

Ibid., 146–54. See also, Burnard and Morgan, ‘Dynamics of the Slave Market’, 208, 211–9.

Michael Craton, ‘Jamaican Slave Mortality: Fresh Light from Worthy Park, Longville and the Tharp Estates’, Journal of Caribbean History, 3 (1971), 5, 24; Barry Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 76.

Long, The History of Jamaica, II, 474, 475; W.J. Gardner, A History of Jamaica: From Its Discovery by Christopher Columbus to the Year 1872 (London: E. Stock, 1873), 184; Long, History of Jamaica, II, 474. See also Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation ad Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736–1831 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 270–1; Mervyn Alleyne, ‘Language in Jamaica’, in The Language, Ethnicity and Race Readers, ed. Roxy Harris and Ben Rapton (London: Routledge, 2003), 56–7; R.B. LaPage and David De Camp, Jamaican Creole (London: Macmillan, 1960), 77; Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550–1750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 22–4; Stephanie E. Smallwood, ‘African Guardians, European Slave Ships, and the Changing Dynamics of Power in the Early Modern Atlantic’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 64 (2007), 679–716. See also Mullin, Africa in America, 270–71.

David De Camp, ‘African Day-Names in Jamaica’, Language, 43 (1967), 139–43; Trevor Burnard, ‘Slave Naming Patterns: Onamastics and the Taxonomy of Race in Eighteenth Century Jamaica’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 31 (2001), 325–46.

Stewart, ‘Akan Ethnicity’, 85–6.

Diptee, ‘Atlantic Connections’, 1–4.

Barbara Kopytoff, ‘The Development of Jamaican Maroon Ethnicity’, Caribbean Quarterly, 22 (1976), 40; Kopytoff, ‘The Maroons of Jamaica: An Ethnohistorical Study of Incomplete Polities, 1655–1905’ (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1973), 71; Craton, Testing the Chains, 67, 77–8.

David Dalby, ‘Ashanti Survivals in the Language and Traditions of the Windward Maroons of Jamaica’, African Language Studies 12 (1971), 31–51.

Kristin Mann, ‘Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and Culture’, Slavery & Abolition 21 (2001), 3–21; Diptee, ‘Atlantic Connections’, 33, 38–40.

Burnard and Morgan, ‘Dynamics of the Slave Market’, 208; Burnard, ‘E Pluribus Plures’, 10; Philip D. Morgan, ‘The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional Origins, American Destinations and New World Developments’, in Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity and Mortality in the Atlantic World, 1400–1680, ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (London: Frank Cass, 1997), 122–45.

The buccal swabs are rigid fibrous swabs attached to small rods. Either the subject or the researcher scrubs the inside of the cheek rigorously for a minute or two to collect buccal cells. The small rod is fitted with a quick release system for depositing the swab into a centrifuge tube containing cell lysis solution, a liquid used to break open the cell walls. These were provided by Medical Packaging Corporation, Camarillo, CA.

Using a series of chemical washes and specially designed filters, human genetic material was isolated while oral bacteria, salivary enzymes and other general debris were removed (Qiagen Ltd., Crawley, UK).

For details, see Robert Scott et al., ‘Mitochondrial DNA Lineages of Elite Ethiopian Athletes’, American Journal of Human Genetics, 140, no. 3 (2005), 3, 497–503.

Richard M. Andrews et al., ‘Reanalysis and Revision of the Cambridge Reference Sequence for Human Mitochondrial DNA’, Nature Genetics, 23, no. 2 (1999), 147.

The sequencer was produced by FMC Bio-Products, Rockland, Maine, USA.

Chromas Lite is produced by Technelysium, Queensland, Australia. Thomas Hall, ‘Bioedit: A User-Friendly Biological Sequence Alignment Editor and Analysis Program for Windows 95/98/NT’, Nucleic Acids Symposium Series, 41 (1999), 95–8.

Mannis van Oven and Manfred Kayser, ‘Updated Omprehensive Phylogenetic Tree of Global Human Mitochondrial DNA Variation’, Human Mutation, 30, 2 (2009), E386–94. Antonio Salas et al., ‘Charting the Ancestry of African Americans’, American Journal of Human Genetics, 77, no. 4 (2005), 676–80.

The exact test of population differentiation is an accurate and unbiased method to calculate any difference between the distribution of groups by exploring the probability with a Markov chain, a method introduced in Michael Raymond and Francois Rousset, ‘An Exact Test of Population Differentiation’, Evolution, 49 (1995), 6, 1280–3.

The definition stated in David P. Rowell, ‘Teleconnections between the Tropical Pacific and the Sahel’, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 127 (2001), 575, 1683–706.

Salas et al., ‘The African Diaspora’, 456.

Mendizabal et al., ‘Genetic origin, admixture, and asymmetry’.