 Due to the massive depletion of indigenous labour, plantation owners had to look elsewhere for manpower for these labour-intensive crops.They turned to the centuries-old slave trade of west Africa and began transporting humans across the Atlantic on a massive scale – historians estimate that the Atlantic slave trade brought between 10 and 12 million individuals to the New World.The islands of the Caribbean soon came to be populated by slaves of African descent, ruled over by a white minority of plantation owners interested in making a fortune and then returning to their home country to spend it.