1500 to 1866 · Africanspan

The full ledger of the Atlantic trade, counted twice

36,108 recorded voyages. 10,665,568 embarked. 9,202,995 landed. And a gap.

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1500 to 1820 · Africanspan

Four in five people crossing to the Americas were African

Between 1500 and 1820 forced migration outnumbered every voluntary crossing combined.

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1500 to 1518 · Africanspan

African bondage arrives on the island and marronage arrives with it

Ferdinand's first official consignment came in 1510; men were already in the mountains by 1503.

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1500s to 2000s · Africanspan

The lie the slave traders told about Africa is still in circulation

Ehret treats the absence of Africa from world history as a working system, not an oversight.

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1500 to 1850 · Africanspan

The French Caribbean took one African in seven, nearly all to Saint-Domingue

The largest forced migration on record built the colony that became the richest in the world.

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the sixteenth century · African

The Joloff confederation breaks into five smaller kingdoms

Portuguese slaving in northern Senegambia helped pull a large state apart.

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The sixteenth to the nineteenth century · Africanspan

Two in five people shipped across the Atlantic came from Kongo and Angola

The region was nowhere near two fifths of Africa's population.

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sixteenth century to 1894 · Africanspan

Dahomey keeps one dynasty until the French conquest of 1894

The kingdom whose word for spirit, vodoun, crossed the Atlantic and named a religion.

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Around 1500 · Indigenousapproximate

Tawantinsuyu and Anahuac were intact when the Spaniards arrived

The world of 1500 had many centres and no single one imposed itself on the rest.

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23 August 1500 · Caribbean

The Columbus brothers go home to Spain in chains

Bobadilla arrived as royal governor in August 1500 and ended the family's grant of the colony.

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1501 to 1641 · Africanspan

Iberian ports organised nearly every early slaving voyage

Ninety seven percent of European departures in the first century and a half left Spain or Portugal.

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1501 to 1830 · Caribbeanspan

The Caribbean imported nine times more Africans and ended level

By 1830 the Black populations of the islands and the North American mainland were about equal.

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1501 to 1867 · Africanspan

Twelve and a half million people were deported across the Atlantic

Three hundred and sixty six years of shipping, run for sugar, rum, tobacco and cotton.

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1501 to 1867 · Africanspan

Twenty ports handled ninety three percent of the slave trade

Rio de Janeiro and Salvador led a short list that carried off more than 8.3 million people.

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1501 · Caribbeanyear only

The trade to the Americas opens in the Greater Antilles

The first captives sold in the islands were Africans who had been living in Spain.

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1501 · Caribbeanyear only

Spanish ships carry the first enslaved Africans west

The people sold in the Greater Antilles that year had already been enslaved in Iberia.

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1502 · Caribbeanyear only

Ovando lands with 2,500 colonists and a plan to remove the chiefs

The first European families to settle anywhere in the Americas came out with the new governor.

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1502 · Caribbeanyear only

A governor arrives and colonisation becomes an office with files

Girard reads Ovando's 2,500 settlers as the start of formal Spanish administration on the island.

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1502 · Caribbeanyear only

Las Casas arrives as a settler and leaves as the system's critic

He reached Hispaniola in 1502, held indigenous labourers, and spent fifty years attacking the practice.

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1502 · Africanyear only

A Portuguese map shows African women outside the fort

The earliest chart of Portugal's discoveries uses women's bodies to mark what the coast offers.

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1502 · Caribbeanyear only

The year usually given for the official entry of African slaves into Hispaniola

Africans had already crossed with Columbus ten years before the date the records prefer.

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spring 1502 · Caribbeanseason

Columbus sails a fourth time and is barred from Santo Domingo

Released from custody, he worked the coast from Honduras to Panama and lost his ships doing it.

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1503 · Indigenousyear only

Anacaona is invited to a parley and hanged

The Taino queen of Xaragua was taken by deception, and her killing closed indigenous rule.

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1503 · Africanyear only

The first colonial complaint about marronage is dated 1503

Ovando reported that Africans who had escaped into the mountains were already a standing danger.

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1503 · Caribbeanyear only

The first enslaved Africans in the Americas come ashore on Hispaniola

Spanish settlers reached for African labour once the island's Taino population had collapsed.

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1503 · Indigenousyear only

The last free chiefdom on the island is destroyed by an invitation

Ovando announced a visit, Anacaona assembled her subjects, and Alcantara set them alight.

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1503 · Africanyear only

The first Africans reach the island as indentured servants from Spain

Mocombe dates the arrival to 1503 and specifies indenture rather than chattel slavery.

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1503 · Indigenousyear only

Las Casas asks for African labour and the first Africans arrive

A priest's protest against Taino slaughter becomes the argument for importing Africans instead.

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1503 · Indigenousyear only

Ovando hangs Anacaona after luring her to a banquet

A Spanish governor turns hospitality into a trap, then spends six months destroying Xaragua.

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1503 · Africanyear only

Marronage begins with the first cargo of Africans, and Ovando notices

The governor complained that Africans had infected the Indians with the idea of freedom.

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autumn 1503 · Indigenousseason

Eighty chiefs are burned in one house at Xaragua

Ovando's massacre and the public hanging of Anacaona ended independent Taino government.

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1504 · Caribbeanyear only

A rock off Haiti's southwest coast becomes American property

Columbus's men found it useless in 1504 and a Baltimore captain claimed it for guano in 1857.

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autumn 1504 · Caribbeanseason

Columbus is taken off Jamaica after a year marooned

His last ships were finished, and he died in Spain two years after the rescue.

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1505 · Caribbeanyear only

Sugarcane reaches Hispaniola and sets the island's next three centuries

The cane came west from the Canary Islands, and it needed more hands than the island had.

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1505 · Caribbeanyear only

The crop planted in 1505 made the richest colony on earth

Sugar turned the western third of Hispaniola into France's largest single source of income.

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1506 · Caribbeanyear only

A Spaniard carries cane from the Canaries to Hispaniola

Gonzalez de Veloza set up the island's first sugar mill soon afterwards.

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1506 · Africanyear only

A Kongo king credits Saint James with an unlikely victory

A battlefield vision in Central Africa puts an armed saint at the centre of Kongo kingship.

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around 1506 · Caribbeanapproximate

The first Africans are landed to replace Indian labour

Gold seekers in the Cibao gorges come two centuries before the trade that brought two million.

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1506 · Africanyear only

Afonso wins the Kongo throne in battle and rules for thirty seven years

The chiefs had chosen his brother, so he marched on the capital and won.

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1508 · Indigenousyear only

Sixty thousand Tainos remain, and forty years later fewer than five hundred

The count of what had been there in 1492 ranges from one hundred thousand to eight million.

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1508 · Caribbeanyear only

Ponce de Leon plants Spanish towns beside Puerto Rico's goldfields

The crown rewarded a gold strike across the Mona Passage with a licence to settle.

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1509 to 1513 · Indigenousspan

Slave raiders empty the Bahamas to feed the mines of Hispaniola

Forty thousand Lucayans were shipped south in four years and the islands were left with nobody.

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1509 · Caribbeanyear only

Columbus's son takes the Indies and sends an army to Jamaica

Diego Columbus governed the Spanish Caribbean while the Taino of Hispaniola disappeared under him.

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1510 · Caribbeanyear only

A Renaissance villa on the Ozama sets a pattern for the Caribbean

Diego Colon's house in Santo Domingo shaped country houses for three centuries.

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1510 · Caribbeanyear only

The first enslaved Africans are landed on Hispaniola

Spain shipped in replacements because the workforce it had been using was dying faster than it could be worked.

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1510 · Africanyear only

Half a million people would follow the first shipload of 1510

The captives came from dozens of nations and had to build a common language before anything else.

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1511 · Indigenousyear only

Spain burns a refugee cacique alive in eastern Cuba

Hatuey crossed from Hispaniola with what he knew about the Spanish and told the Cubans in time.

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1511 · Caribbeanyear only

A friar tells the colonists of Santo Domingo they are in mortal sin

Montesinos preached to the men who ran Hispaniola and asked whether the Taino were not human.

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1512 · Africanyear only

A Kongo king wins a battle by calling on Saint James

Afonso then fused his own military festival with the saint's feast on 25 July.

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1512 · Indigenousyear only

Hatuey chooses the fire rather than risk meeting Spaniards in heaven

The cacique who fled to Cuba was caught after years of guerilla war and refused a baptised death.

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1514 to 1526 · Africanspan

Kidnapping in Kongo outruns the king, who complains to Lisbon

Afonso wrote that nobles and his own relatives were being taken and sold every day.

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1514 · Africanyear only

With the king away on campaign, the queen orders the looters killed

Afonso wrote the episode down himself in a letter to Lisbon dated 5 October 1514.

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1514 · Indigenousyear only

The repartimiento of 1514 shares out what is left of the Taino

An administrative list ended Taino society as a thing with its own chiefs and its own land.

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1514 · Indigenousyear only

A labour census counts 22,726 Indians fit for work on Hispaniola

Two in five Spanish men on the island had Taino wives, which took those women off the rolls.

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1514 · Indigenousyear only

Twenty-two years after Columbus, 29,000 people are left

Hispaniola had held several hundred thousand in 1492 and the fall took a single generation.

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1514 · Africanyear only

A papal brief gives Portugal's king more power over the church abroad than at home

The Padroado outlived the empire that produced it and strangled the missions inside it.

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1514 · Africanyear only

Benin asks Lisbon for cannon and is told to open its markets first

The oba wanted guns, the Portuguese wanted captives, and neither got what it came for.

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5 October 1514 · African

A Kongo king asks Portugal for an island so he can educate his own children

The same letter protests the growing slave trade and the conduct of Portuguese residents.

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1515 to 1790 · Datasetspan

For most of three centuries Cuba's captives came from West Central Africa

Over forty percent embarked on the Kongo and Angola coasts before Cuba's sugar boom began.

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1515 · Caribbeanyear only

As the gold runs out, cane arrives from the Canary Islands

The West Indies changed crops the moment the river gravel stopped paying.

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1516 · Caribbeanyear only

Indians are classified as white and Africans as the opposite

Peter Martyr set the terms and Francois Bernier fixed them in 1684.

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1517 to 1801 · Africanspan

Egypt spends three centuries as an Ottoman province in name only

Istanbul took Cairo in 1517, and by 1798 the beys ran the country and Napoleon came for it.

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1517 · Africanyear only

A royal edict licenses four thousand Africans a year for Hispaniola

The monopoly was sold on to a house in Genoa for twenty three thousand ducats.

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1517 · Caribbeanyear only

Charles V licenses fifteen thousand captives for the Spanish islands

A royal signature turns an improvised supply of labour into a standing permission.

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18 August 1517 · Caribbean

Las Casas asks Spain to import Africans to spare the Indians

The most famous defender of indigenous people in the Americas proposed a substitute workforce.

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1518 · Caribbeanyear only

The first asiento licenses shipping captives straight from Africa

Spain sold a monopoly contract and the ships stopped calling at Seville on the way.

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1519 to 1533 · Indigenousspan

A cacique holds the Bahoruco for fourteen years and wins a treaty

Spain could not take the mountains, so it signed terms with Enriquillo and left his people alone.

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1519 to about 1650 · Caribbeanspan

Sugar moves west across the Atlantic and slavery follows it

Cane was already worked by slaves in the Mediterranean long before it reached the Caribbean.

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1519 to 1533 · Indigenousspan

Enrique holds a mountain state against Spain for fourteen years

A quarrel with an enslaver's son becomes a maroon polity joining Ayitians and Africans.

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1519 · Indigenousyear only

Smallpox reaches the Antilles in the year Enriquillo goes to the hills

The epidemic killed most of who was left, and one cacique took his people into the Bahoruco.

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1519 · Indigenousyear only

Fick puts the survivors at one hundred thousand from roughly a million

Estimates of the 1492 population differ sharply and every one describes the same collapse.

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1520 to 1810 · Datasetspan

Cartagena and Portobelo receive the Spanish mainland's captives

West Central Africans dominated the traffic to Spanish South America for nearly three centuries.

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1521 · Caribbeanyear only

The first English slave trader sells two people in Santo Domingo

Thomas Malliard held his licence forty one years before John Hawkins ever sailed.

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1521 · Africanyear only

Afonso's son is consecrated bishop at about twenty five and vanishes within a decade

Henrique went to Lisbon at twelve, came back a bishop, and was dead by 1530.

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26 December 1521 · African

Enslaved Africans rise at Christmas, twenty years into the traffic

The first large African revolt on the island is crushed, and the Spanish answer with an ordinance.

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1522 · Caribbeanyear only

Enslaved Africans on Hispaniola take up arms thirty years after Columbus

The first recorded armed plot in the Americas happened on a sugar estate owned by Diego Columbus.

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The 1520s · Africanspan

Six Nubians walk to Ethiopia to ask for priests and are turned away

The emperor said he received his own bishop from Alexandria and could not pass one on.

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1524 · Indigenousyear only

Archaeology sets 1524 as the date Taino culture stops

A date like this marks the end of a material record, and people outlive their pottery.

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1524 · Indigenousyear only

By the end of Diego Columbus's rule the workforce is African

Within thirty years the labour that built Spanish Hispaniola had been entirely substituted.

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1524 · Indigenousyear only

The Taino disappear as a people and survive as ancestry

The category vanished from the records while the descent carried on into the present.

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1525 · Africanyear only

A ship sails from Africa to the Americas without touching Europe

Cutting out the European leg made the trade faster, cheaper and much larger.

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1526 to 1867 · Africanspan

One label covered dozens of nations in the Kongo and Angola trade

Buyers in the Americas wrote down Congo for people from states and villages hundreds of miles apart.

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1527 to 1842 · Datasetspan

Puerto Rico's captives arrived mostly from other Caribbean ports

Three centuries of trade brought a smaller volume than Cuba's, and it made a different society.

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1529 to 1540 · Africanspan

A twelve year holy war burns the libraries of Christian Ethiopia

Aksum cathedral fell, Dabra Libanos burned, and monks jumped into the flames.

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1530s · Caribbeandecade

The first sugar mills go up on Hispaniola in the 1530s2 sources

A mill is a fixed investment, and it commits its owner to a permanent supply of people.

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1530s · Africandecade

Iberian merchants assemble the three-legged Atlantic voyage

Goods south to Africa, people west to the Americas, sugar and silver back to Europe.

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1534 to 1700 · Datasetspan

Voyage length and death rate do not track each other

Dutch crossings ran longer than British or French ones and buried fewer people.

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1534 to 1862 · Africanspan

The Congo estuary loads captives at the start and at the end

Traders worked the coast north and south of the river mouth rather than the river itself.

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1534 to 1867 · Datasetspan

Ten point seven million people survived the crossing

Brazil took nearly half of them and the future United States took under four percent.

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1539 to 1873 · Diasporaspan

An English population series runs for three hundred and thirty four years

Births beat deaths in every stretch except one, and the exception lasted seventy years.

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1542, disputed · Caribbeandate disputed

A second treaty carries the line of partition into the Pacific

Tordesillas split the Atlantic, and a companion treaty split the ocean on the far side.

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21 February 1543 · African

One shot at Woguera dissolves a Muslim kingdom of Ethiopia

A queen mother bound wounds in the field and then led the survivors back to her son.

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15 July 1543 · African

Afonso I dies after fifty two years as a Christian and thirty seven on the throne

His brother learned of it in Lisbon, where Portugal had blocked him from reaching Rome.

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1544 · Indigenousyear only

Spanish officials report the indigenous population gone

Fifty-two years after the first landing, the island's original inhabitants were no longer counted.

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1546 · Africanyear only

A priest born in Sao Salvador writes the first book in Kikongo

Diogo Gomes was ordained three years after Afonso died and his catechism did not last.

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1549 · Caribbeanyear only

A royal order turns forced labour into forced tribute

The encomienda was rewritten after the people it depended on had already died.

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1549 · Diasporayear only

The Inquisition opens an office in Salvador and ignores sorcery for a century

Not one of the 143 Bahian cases tried from 1593 to 1687 concerned sorcery.

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1550 · Africanyear only

King Diogo jails the women whose kinship links the faction plotting against him

An inquest into a deposed king's plotting preserved the intercepted letters.

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the 16th to the 18th century · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

Flight into the mountains, and the mutilations meant to stop it

Ears cut off, the pillory, burning, and none of it discouraged the next attempt.

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1550 · Africanyear only

One Lisbon resident in ten is African by 1550

Portugal was importing captives into its own capital before the plantation system existed.

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1551 · Diasporayear only

A tenth of Lisbon is enslaved and the city has seventy slave marts

Portugal ran an African slave society at home for two centuries before it abolished slavery there.

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1553 · Africanyear only

The first recorded European trade east of the Volta happens at Popo

Allada started selling captives soon after, and kept selling them for a century and a half.

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1556 · Indigenousyear only

A Franciscan's report becomes the key to the Maya script

Diego de Landa's account of Yucatan opened four centuries of work on a writing system.

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1556 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

A French king frees the serfs of Dauphine and sets a precedent

The edict of 1556 fed the doctrine that nobody could be held a slave on French soil.

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1560 to 1642 · Africanspan

The slave trade to Brazil is run out of Brazil

Winds and currents made the Recife to Angola crossing cheaper than any voyage starting in Europe.

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1560 to 1807 · Africanspan

Recife buys captives with rolls of Brazilian tobacco

The first Brazilian port to fit out its own slavers had a trade good Europe could not supply.

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1560 to 1851 · Africanspan

Pernambuco builds the first sugar economy in the Americas

Seven hundred thousand people were landed at Recife, almost all of them from one stretch of coast.

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1560 to 1851 · Africanspan

Bahia trades tobacco for people on a route of its own

Close to 1.4 million captives came ashore at Salvador, most of them from the Bight of Benin.

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the 1560s · Africandecade

Sugar reaches Brazil and points the slave trade south

For the next hundred years most people carried across the Atlantic were landed in one colony.

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the 1560s · Africandecade

Maize reaches West Africa and Hunan seventy years after crossing the Atlantic

Spanish friars were making wine in Chile and Mexican ranches counted cattle in six figures.

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1560 · Datasetyear only

Regular slaving to Brazil begins and never really stops

Rio de Janeiro and Salvador fitted out more slaving voyages than any ports in the world.

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1561 to 1790 · Africanspan

Brazil takes more than two and a half million people by 1790

Recife, Salvador and Rio were the busiest landing places in the New World, and also transfer stations.

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1561 to 1856 · Africanspan

Four point nine million people are landed in South America

The wind settled the route, and the route settled which Africans ended up in which American city.

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1562 to 1571 · Caribbeanspan

Hawkins breaks the Iberian monopoly with quiet crown cover

Spain forbade the trade, its own colonists bought anyway, and England learned the business was worth having.

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1562 · Caribbeanyear only

England enters the slave trade on a tip about Hispaniola

John Hawkins heard in the Canaries that buyers on the island would pay, and found London money for it.

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1563 to 1810 · Africanspan

Britain's slave trade peaks three years before it is abolished

Liverpool, Bristol and London were carrying more people than ever when Parliament shut the business down.

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the late 1560s · Caribbeandecade

Enslaved workers outnumber Spanish settlers three to one on Hispaniola

Twenty thousand captives, six thousand colonists and five hundred indigenous survivors shared one island.

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1566 to 1865 · Africanspan

Revolt on one voyage in ten changes where the ships buy

Fear of the people in the hold set crew sizes, armament, and the map of the trade itself.

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1566 to 1865 · Africanspan

Upper Guinea sends a twelfth of the captives and two fifths of the revolts

Ships loading on that coast rebelled far out of proportion to the number of people they carried.

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1566 to 1865 · Africanspan

Most shipboard revolts happen before the ship leaves Africa

Nearly 63 percent broke out at anchor, while the vessel was still filling its hold.

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1566 · Caribbeanyear only

Ninety two people land in Puerto Rico and seventy seven are women

The Santiago sailed from Sierra Leone, and islanders attacked it at its watering stop.

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1567 to 1568 · Africanspan

Hawkins burns a town of eight thousand and is robbed in the night

An African king helped him take the place, then quietly removed the best of the captives.

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1568 · Africanyear only

Kongo asks Portugal for troops against invaders and gets permanent settlers

Most of the rescuing army stayed on, armed, skilled, and outside royal control.

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1570 · Caribbeanyear only

Ortelius shows the planet from above with the Atlantic at the centre

Never before had the seas and landmasses of the earth been taken in at a single glance.

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1571 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

A French court rules that France holds no slaves

The Parlement of Guyenne called France the mother of liberty, and the colonies carried on regardless.

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1578 · Indigenousyear only

A French traveller files Brazil under the carnival Europe was banning

The demonology of the old world crossed the Atlantic before the planters did.

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1580 to 1640 · Africanspan

Under one crown, three quarters of the trade sails Portuguese

Spain and Portugal shared a king for sixty years, and Brazil carried the traffic.

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1581 to 1856 · Africanspan

Rio owns the ships as well as the wharf

Almost everyone landed in southeast Brazil came through one port, on vessels that port had fitted out.

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1581 to 1851 · Africanspan

Bahia buys from a different Africa than the rest of Brazil

Tobacco and sugar from the Reconcavo bought people at Ouidah while Rio and Recife bought at Luanda.

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1582 to 1850 · Africanspan

Luanda ships more people than any other place in Africa

Founded in 1575, the Portuguese port sent captives west for three centuries on terms that barely changed.

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1582 to 1851 · Africanspan

One and a half million people are landed at Rio de Janeiro

No port in the history of the Atlantic took more, and its busiest years came after the ban.

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1584 · Africanyear only

Visiting friars find four priests serving an entire Christian kingdom

Franciscans, Augustinians, Jesuits and Dominicans had all come and gone by then.

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1585 · Africanyear only

A daughter of the king asks the Carmelites to found an order of nuns in Kongo

Only men could be ordained, and the request offered women the one religious office left.

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1586 to 1629 · Caribbeanspan

Thirteen smugglers at the Mole and Spain cannot stop them

Champlain counted foreign ships trading openly on a coast where the penalty was death or the galleys.

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1587 · Caribbeanyear only

A Flemish cartographer gives Europe its first planetary view

Before 1500 there was no single reference point against which alternatives could be imagined.

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1590 to 1634 · Caribbeanspan

A Frankfurt workshop supplies Europe with its picture of the Indies

Theodore de Bry never crossed the Atlantic and set the visual terms for those who did.

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1590 · Indigenousyear only

A Jesuit publishes a natural history of something the Andes did not have

Jose de Acosta wrote about nature; Aymara and Quechua had no concept that matched the word.

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1591 · Africanyear only

A shipwrecked ambassador's notes become the book that made Europe notice the Kongo

Duarte Lopes was blown across the Atlantic and wrecked in the West Indies on his way to Rome.

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1595 · Africanyear only

Mbandza Kongo becomes the first diocese in Black Africa

A Jesuit college for six hundred pupils trained African priests and printed catechisms in Kikongo.

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1596 · Africanyear only

Rome gives the Kongo its own diocese and the first bishop dies within a year

It was the one diocese in the Portuguese scheme that sat outside the empire.

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