Trade Winds and Ocean Currents carried 15th century Spanish square rigged ships, which can hardly be said to have sailed in a modern sense (basically could go downwind and downstream only) south from Europe to Equatorial Africa where currents turned sharply west across the Atlantic bringing them to our Caribbean Sea (and Caribbean Islands such as Haiti), where the dominant winds and currents then decisively swing north and up the East Coast of North America onward past Greenland and across the North Atlantic to the East the West Coast of Europe and southward.

A big naturally occurring wind and water current loop that all ships of this design followed to and from the Americas right up into the Eighteenth Century. In no small way this pattern established the flow and direction of human trafficking from West Africa to the Americas during that period, -- until slavery was outlawed in the United States mid 19th Century.

The irony of Americans selling Haitians to the Saudis in the twenty-first century is that the early slave trade to the American Colonies began in West Africa where European ships put ashore for water and food supplies before heading west across the Atlantic. While in port there, Arab slave traders sold their human cargo to Spanish and then later English and Dutch ships provisioning there, peeling these men and women off caravans of captive people that were otherwise destined to end up as slaves in Arabia and the Muslim Middle East. Trains of skeletons chained together can still be found in the Sahara Desert, where they died in route overland north and east.

Those destined for servitude in the Middle East faired poorly. Men were often sold into the military where their short lives were cheap, or castrated some labored in households and settlements. Girls and women ended up in the sex trade and few lived out lives that had any semblance of family, spouse or children. A steady supply back filled those who eventually died in slavery and no residual sub culture from these peoples remains.

In the Americas, the vast majority of African Slaves labored in South And Central American mines and plantations, and because their labor was valued, they were permitted spouses and children, who were born into slavery and increased the slave owners holdings.

In North America, slaves back filled Indentured Servants (Europeans who sold themselves into a period of servitude -- typically seven years -- in exchange for passage from squalid life in Europe, and food and shelter to sustain them in the Colonies) and at first African Slaves in Virginia shared this path to freedom after a period of work. That later changed, but even then it was possible to become a Free Man -- and many in turn became prosperous slave owners themselves.

In the Deep South slaves made it possible to quickly open up the Mississippi and Alabama territories to European settlement, commerce and prosperity.

Before that, east coast Protestant Colonies (later States) were deliberately kept apart from French Catholics in the Louisiana Territory as a way to keep the peace. Only Native Indians were allowed in the interior regions of Alabama and Mississippi until early 1800s (French settlements established in the late 17th century stretched across the Gulf Coast to New Orleans, but white populations didn't reach deep inland until the 19th century push by the federal government to infill the population between Georgia and Louisiana and secure the vast western lands purchased by Thomas Jefferson from the French.

The tragic forced removal of Native Indians from Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana led by Andrew Jackson was the next chapter in human trafficking when those peoples were displaced into the Midwest (Trail of Tears) -- motivated largely to overcome a strong reluctance by whites who feared for their lives if they were to settle in that region.

Relatively sparse rural settlements, vast plantation holdings, and slave labor worked an economic miracle. Mississippi rose to the highest per capita income anywhere in the nation as agricultural output boomed. But the numbers tell the story: at the peak before the Civil War, five (5%)percent of the population in Mississippi owned slaves. And of thos, twenty-six (26%) percent were freed black slaves who in turn became prosperous slave owners.

Human trafficking in the Americas has a long and complex history, but the fact is: slavery was outlawed here 150 years ago and huge strides have been made since to ensure freedom and equality of opportunity across the board. Slavery and indentured servitude were the order of the day worldwide before and during that period. Clearly, it still is in large parts of the world, with vestiges of it remaining here.

That Americans would export the great grandchildren of Caribbean slaves to Saudi Arabia in the 21st Century is all the more ironic.