ABSTRACT

According to the two translated Portuguese manuscripts, during the years 1513 to 1526, merchants in Portugal and its Cape Verde Islands sailed to the Senegal to the Sierra Leone region of West Africa, where they secured Africans and shipped thousands of them as slaves to the Cape Verde colony and then on to Portugal, Spain, and the Spanish Canary Islands. The King of Portugal and knights in the Catholic Church’s Order of Christ legitimized the human trafficking when they collected taxes on enslaved Africans. The translations show that European slave traders lived in West Africa where they operated a maritime trade from African territories not controlled by European kings. Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian colonists living in the Cape Verde Islands organized a system of human trafficking that resembled laissez faire capitalism of later centuries.