ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 begins with ships that paid Cape Verde customs duties in April 1514, and ends in November, when the ninth ship had returned to the colony after trading in West Africa. As stated in the introduction, there is a dispute about the identity of the captain of the ship Santa Crara, named Antonio Fernandez. This author transcribes the abbreviation pto, after his name, as preto or a black man. However, the 1990 Portuguese publication of the same customs entry, transcribed pto as the surname Porto. Professor Harvey Sharrer called my attention to a modern dictionary of sixteenth-century Portuguese abbreviations, where pto is preto or a black man. 1 This translation is supported by a 1517 Portuguese royal edict prohibiting free black Cape Verde men from being captains of ships that trade between Cape Verde and West Africa. This showed that there was at least one black ship captain in Cape Verde Islands just before 1517. It says something of the fluidity of race in early sixteenth-century Cape Verde colony.
