Istwa Nou

Ships carrying captives to Brazil were fitted out in Brazil. The first voyages left Portugal, and within a few decades the merchants who owned the business lived in Recife, Salvador da Bahia and Rio de Janeiro. Geography paid for the shift. The winds and currents of the South Atlantic turn in a loop between the Brazilian coast and West Central Africa, so a vessel could cross to Angola, buy, and come home without ever touching Europe. That made the Brazilian route shorter, cheaper and independent of Lisbon. When the Dutch seized Pernambuco in 1630 they learned the same lesson and began fitting out their slaving voyages at Recife instead of sending them south from the Netherlands. By the middle of the seventeenth century the South Atlantic had its own commercial system, with its own capital, its own credit and its own captains, running alongside the northern European trade rather than inside it. Two legs of the famous triangle turn out, in this half of the ocean, to be one straight line worked in both directions.