The Slave Port
The Cape Verde Islands sit roughly 350 miles off the West African coast. When the Portuguese first arrived in the mid-fifteenth century, the islands were uninhabited. As one historical account records: “Cape Verde Islands were barren of people but not vegetation.”1
Within decades, that would change. The islands would become one of the most important slave ports in the Atlantic — not because of proximity to Africa, but because of what the Portuguese were bringing from the other direction.
Primary source quoted in Kurimeo Ahau, Pt. 18 — Nations of The World // Cape Verdeans / American Indians / Sephardic / Portuguese / Whalers. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
Before John Hawkins. Before the official narrative of the transatlantic slave trade begins. There was Columbus.
Columbus was the major supplier of American slaves prior to 1500, sending between 3,000 and 6,000 enslaved indigenous Americans to Europe, the Azores, the Canary Islands, and the Cape Verde Islands.1 In 1495 alone, he shipped 500 Indians to Spain.
Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (University of Illinois Press, 1993). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
Queen Isabella postponed their sale pending a theological review — not on moral grounds, but jurisdictional ones.1
His brother was no different, shipping 300 natives to Spain on a separate voyage.2
These were not Africans. These were the indigenous people of the Caribbean, enslaved on their own land and exported across the Atlantic.
David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford University Press, 1992). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
In 1501, the Portuguese began to systematically depopulate Labrador.
The source is direct: “In 1501 the Portuguese began to depopulate Labrador, transporting the now-extinct Beothuk Indians to Europe and Cape Verde as slaves.”1
Labrador. Newfoundland.
James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (The New Press, 1995). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
Nova Scotia. What the Portuguese called Terra Nova. The indigenous people of northeastern North America — Beothuk, Mi’kmaq, and others — were kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic. Some went to European slave markets. Others went to Cape Verde.
This was not a single event. It was a sustained operation. The Portuguese had established beachheads along the North American coast and were systematically removing the population.
The people they took were transported to islands that had been uninhabited fifty years earlier.
Cape Verde became a processing center where displaced populations from multiple continents converged. Indigenous Americans from Labrador and the Caribbean. Sephardic Jews expelled from Iberia. Moors fleeing religious persecution.1
Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (University of Illinois Press, 1993). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (University of Illinois Press, 1993). ↩
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