Istwa Nou

The first sales of African captives in the Americas took place in the Greater Antilles in 1501, and the ships came from Spain rather than from the African coast. Many of the people landed had been living on the Iberian peninsula for years, so they arrived speaking Spanish and knowing Catholic practice, which is one reason the earliest colonial records treat them differently from Africans who came later. The importance of these voyages is legal and commercial. They set the licensing arrangements, the duties and the accounting conventions that the far larger trade used for the next three centuries. Eltis and Richardson also point out how much geography decided. Taking part in the early trade depended on where a port sat in relation to the wind systems of the Atlantic, since a ship leaving Seville could reach the Caribbean easily and a ship leaving the Baltic could not. The map of the traffic was drawn by the winds before anyone drew it by policy.

In 1525 a slaving vessel crossed from the African coast directly to the Americas for the first time on record. Earlier voyages had run captives to Lisbon or Seville and re-shipped them west, which doubled both the time at sea and the cost. Removing that leg changed the economics, and the volume carried across the Atlantic began to climb and kept climbing for two and a half centuries. The route also had to obey the wind. Atlantic winds and currents circulate clockwise in the northern half of the ocean and anticlockwise in the southern, so a ship leaving the Bight of Benin runs naturally toward the Caribbean while a ship leaving Angola runs naturally toward Brazil. Two largely separate trading systems formed on either side of the equator, and a captive's African port of departure went a long way to fixing which side of the Americas he woke up on. Wind sorted human beings by destination for three hundred years.