1501 to 1641 · Africanspan
Iberian ports organised nearly every early slaving voyage
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Through the first century and a half of the Atlantic trade, ports in Spain and Portugal fitted out ninety seven percent of the slaving voyages leaving Europe. The earliest ships to carry Africans to the Americas sailed from Spanish harbours in 1501 with captives who had already been brought to Spain from the African coast, so the first crossings were re-exports of people held on the peninsula. By the 1530s Iberian merchants had reorganised the business. One voyage now sailed from Europe to Africa, bought captives there, carried them to Spanish America, and loaded produce for the return leg, which is the triangular pattern the Dutch, the English and the French all copied afterwards. Eltis and Richardson stress the continuity. The system that eventually delivered several hundred thousand Africans to Saint-Domingue was designed in Seville and Lisbon before any northern European nation held a colony worth the name.
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