VISUAL ACTIVITY Bristol Docks This painting of the docks in Bristol, England, portrays a scene common at ports throughout the seventeenth-century Atlantic world. Tobacco flooded into Bristol in the seventeenth century while Bristol merchants also became active in the African slave trade, trading British goods on the west African coast for slaves, who were then taken to the New World to be sold to eager sugar and tobacco planters. ©Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery UK / The Bridgeman Art Library. READING THE IMAGE: What kinds of work are being done by the people shown on the dock? CONNECTIONS: Why was transatlantic commerce important to settlers in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake region?