Istwa Nou

Merchants at Buenos Aires were buying captives in Angola as early as 1585, and the Rio de la Plata went on receiving Africans into the middle of the 1830s. For most of that time the estuary was a way in rather than a destination. People landed there were marched inland and uphill to the silver districts of what are now Bolivia and Peru, a journey of thousands of kilometres ending above four thousand metres. The silver they were sent to dig was the currency of the entire early modern world, paying for the Asian trade and the European wars alike. In the eighteenth century the Portuguese post at Colonia do Sacramento, planted directly across the water from Buenos Aires, ran a steady clandestine traffic with Brazil that no Spanish official managed to close. Arrivals continued long enough that the last of them supplied labour to the new republic of Uruguay, the final deliveries the Atlantic trade made to the southern cone.