In 1562, John Hawkins embarked on what English history calls the first English slaving voyage.

He did not go to mainland Africa. He went to Cape Verde.¹

The Hakluyt Society records — published in 1611, within living memory of the voyage — specify that Hawkins obtained his “negroes” from Cape Verde, not from the African coast. This is not a matter of historical interpretation. This is documented fact from contemporary sources.¹

But who was on Cape Verde in 1562? The islands had been uninhabited when the Portuguese first arrived. By the time Hawkins reached them, they had a population large enough to supply an English slave ship.

Where did this population come from?

The standard narrative says Hawkins was the beginning of English involvement in the African slave trade. The primary sources say he was participating in an already-established system centered on islands that had been receiving displaced populations for over sixty years.

The Hakluyt Society records describe Hawkins’ captives as people who were “of nature very gentle and loving.”¹

This is not the language typically used to describe people captured in warfare on the African mainland. “Gentle and loving” suggests a population that was not hostile, not resistant, not recently captured. It suggests people who had been living peacefully on the islands, possibly for generations.

Indigenous Americans taken from Labrador and the Caribbean had been arriving in Cape Verde since 1501. By 1562, there would have been children born on the islands, grandchildren of the original American captives. People who had never seen America but carried American genetic heritage.

People who spoke Portuguese, practiced Christianity, and had been thoroughly integrated into the island population.

Hawkins was not raiding a hostile coast. He was trading with an established population on islands that served as a distribution center for people who had been collected from various locations over six decades.

The islands had American connections that preceded European arrival.

Historical records show that American cotton and other American plant species reached Cape Verde 25 years before Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas.¹ This suggests pre-Columbian contact between Cape Verde and American territories — trade networks that connected the islands to American populations before European “discovery.”

If American crops were already growing on Cape Verde before 1492, then American people may have been traveling to Cape Verde before European intervention. The Portuguese didn’t create the connection between Cape Verde and America; they exploited an existing one.