The Gullah people are descendants of enslaved West Africans abducted and then brought against their will to America via the Middle Passage from countries like Angola and Sierra Leone.
Often captured by warring tribes, these people of color were sold into slavery to British merchants engaged in the transatlantic slave trade. Many of the slaver ships used to transport the newly enslaved were funded by those with deep pockets in New York and Newport, Rhode Island. The vessels had horrific conditions, using torturous devices to maintain order. Captives were raped, tortured and starved throughout the journey. Large numbers, sometimes as much as one-third, died on along the voyage. The bodies of the .dead, and the dying, were carelessly tossed overboard without thought or solemnity. Their remains were then commonly consumed by sharks following the ships awaiting an easy meal.
The Gullahs were sought out by those engaged in human trafficking due to their particularized knowledge of growing rice, a highly profitable crop in the Carolinas. For more than 2,000 years they had been cultivating rice and had become quite adept at it; something Americans of British decent had never managed to accomplish. These crops were supplemented by tobacco and indigo, then ultimately replaced by Sea Island cotton.
Rice is a very complicated crop to grow entailing five different stages, all of which require constant vigilance and tending. The newly enslaved developed irrigation systems and created flood gates. They built banks to avoid erosion. The Gullahs knew how to pound the harvested rice with a mortar and pestle to remove the shell, then separate the grain from the hull by using a large sweetgrass fanner basket.
The hot, moist semi-tropical heat the Lowcountry and surrounding coastal regions was ideal for this crop. Hence, a long strip of land from Wilmington, NC down to northern Florida near Jacksonville has been established as the Gullah/Geechee Corridor, a nationally recognized region. The Gullah/Geechee people have a rich culture and their own creole language still spoken today in the Sea Islands along the coast of the Carolinas.