ABSTRACT
Just a few years after Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World in 1492, Queen Isabella of Spain issued an interesting decree. In this manner, in the early 1500s both Spain and Portugal began to lay the foundations for the greatest forced migration in human history, the African Atlantic Slave Trade. New families were created to take the place of families that were uprooted and separated by the voyage across the Atlantic. Brazil was the largest Portuguese colony in the New World. But the Portuguese did not initially find very many things in Brazil that were profitable or valuable. When a slave owner punished or abused recalcitrant slaves, they did have ways of getting revenge or reprisal against their owners, although these methods were sometimes dangerous and could lead to serious retribution by slave owners. But by the early 1800s, slavery had risen to nearly 30 percent of all Atlantic trade.
