First Portuguese Slave Raid in West Africa
Antão Gonçalves and Nuno Tristão seized ten or twelve people on the coast of the western Sahara in 1441 and carried them to Portugal — the first Africans taken by Europeans by sea and the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade. Gonçalves had been sent by Prince Henry to hunt seals for their skins and oil. He took captives on his own initiative, on the reasoning that returning with human beings would please the prince more than cargo would, and Tristão, arriving in a caravel with a mandate to explore, joined the raid. Among the captives was a man of some standing named Adahu, who spoke Arabic and was able to negotiate. He offered a ransom in other people, and Gonçalves returned him the following year and received ten Africans in exchange. That transaction established the form. Raiding gave way within a few years to purchase from coastal intermediaries, which was cheaper, safer and scalable. A cargo of 235 captives was auctioned at Lagos in the Algarve in 1444. The chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara described the sorting of families at the quayside — children pulled from parents, husbands from wives — and then explained that their souls were being saved, which was the justification the Church supplied. Papal bulls of 1452 and 1455 authorised the Portuguese to reduce non-Christians to perpetual servitude. Some twelve and a half million people were shipped across the Atlantic over the following four centuries. Portugal built its first fort on the coast at Arguin in 1445 to regularise the trade. Prince Henry took a fifth of every cargo as his share.
- Year: 1441 CE
- Category: Social
