![]() ![]() A Spanish priest and economist in Mexico in the mid 1500s, Mercado condemned the slave trade for its human and political consequences, dehumanizing the Africans as well as the Europeans who competed to capture them. In his memoir he blandly describes the capture of five hundred Africans "for traffick of the West Indies," in contrast to Azurara's emotive account of the same experience two centuries earlier. An English sailor in the 1560s, Hortop joined the African expeditions of Sir John Hawkins, the first Englishman to join the Atlantic slave trade. These two excerpts describe the capture and "division" of Africans, including "the first to be taken by Christians in their own land." A Portuguese chronicler and archivist, Azurara compiled accounts of the earliest Portuguese voyages along the coast of West Africa in the 1400s (where he lived himself for a year). Here we read three documents of the early slave trade that you will find reminiscent of the exploration narratives in this section. (The last nation in the western hemisphere to abolish slavery was Brazil in 1888). It remained a critical and brutal element of the Spanish and English economies in North America for over four centuries. As the Native Americans enslaved by the Spanish died by the thousands from overwork and disease, more Africans were captured and shipped to replace them. In 1517 the first slaves sent directly from Africa arrived to do forced labor on the Spanish plantations and mines in the Caribbean islands. The date we recognize for the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia is 1619, but the first recorded arrival in North America occurred 117 years earlier in 1502 when Juan de Córdoba sent several of his black slaves from Spain to Hispaniola. But the marvels give way to matter-of-fact accounts of slave trafficking (Hortop) and tracts on the immorality of slavery (Mercado). A English sailor is awed by the Africans' skill in capturing the "sea-horses" (hippos) that surround their ships. A Portuguese seaman describes the "marvellous sight" of captives gathered on the African shore and recounts how other Africans "marvelled at the sight" of their ship. In addition, the accounts of African exploration and slave captures reflect the same encounter with the new and strange. And, of course, the result of the west African explorations was the transport of hundreds of thousands of Africans to North America over four centuries. We include the Atlantic slave trade here since its beginnings in the 1400s were as much part of the European breakout into the Atlantic Ocean as were the first voyages to North America. Map (zoomable) : West Africa, 1743 ( Guinea propia) Spanish: A priest's condemnation of the slave trade, 1587 1450 (PDF)Įnglish: A sailor's account of slave trafficking, 1567 Portuguese: Accounts of the capture of west Africans, ca.
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