![]() ![]() São Tomé was a colonial island port off the west coast of Africa that Portugal established in the mid-1400s. ![]() “Some of the same really horrible and violent and brutal aspects of the slave trade that was seen much later on, we’re seeing them already in these voyages from São Tomé in the 1520s.” “This is also some of our earliest examples of enslaved people throwing themselves overboard, people dying of malnutrition,” Wheat adds. It’s difficult to trace what parts of Africa the captives on board came from, since many were captured on the mainland and shipped to island ports off the coast before Spanish boats took them to the Americas. “By the mid 1520s, we’re seeing 200-sometimes as many as almost 300-captives being brought on the same slave ship ,” says Wheat, a history professor at Michigan State University. In the 1510s and ‘20s, ships sailing from Spain to the Caribbean settlements of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola might contain as few as one or two enslaved people, or as many as 30 or 40. The transatlantic slave trade didn’t start in 1518, but it did increase after King Charles authorized direct Africa-to-Caribbean trips that year. Historians David Wheat and Marc Eagle have identified about 18 direct voyages from Africa to the Americas in the first several years after Charles I authorized these trips-the earliest such voyages we know about. King of Spain Charles as he grants a license to sell Africans as slaves in Spain's American colonies, 1518. ![]()
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