In 1562, John Hawkins embarked on what English history calls the first English slaving voyage.

He did not go to mainland Africa. He went to Cape Verde.¹

The Hakluyt Society records — published in 1611, within living memory of the voyage — specify that Hawkins obtained his “negroes” from Cape Verde, not from the African coast. This is not a matter of historical interpretation. This is documented fact from contemporary sources.²

But who was on Cape Verde in 1562? The islands had been uninhabited when the Portuguese first arrived. By the time Hawkins reached them, they had a population large enough to supply an English slave ship. Where did this population come from?

The standard narrative says Hawkins was the beginning of English involvement in the African slave trade. The primary sources say he was participating in an already-established system centered on islands that had been receiving displaced populations for over sixty years.

The Hakluyt Society records describe Hawkins’ captives as people who were “of nature very gentle and loving.”¹

This is not the language typically used to describe people captured in warfare on the African mainland. “Gentle and loving” suggests a population that was not hostile, not resistant, not recently captured. It suggests people who had been living peacefully on the islands, possibly for generations.

Indigenous Americans taken from Labrador and the Caribbean had been arriving in Cape Verde since 1501. By 1562, there would have been children born on the islands, grandchildren of the original American captives. People who had never seen America but carried American genetic heritage. People who spoke Portuguese, practiced Christianity, and had been thoroughly integrated into the island population.

Hawkins was not raiding a hostile coast. He was trading with an established population on islands that served as a distribution center for people who had been collected from various locations over six decades.

The islands had American connections that preceded European arrival.

Historical records show that American cotton and other American plant species reached Cape Verde 25 years before Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas.¹ This suggests pre-Columbian contact between Cape Verde and American territories — trade networks that connected the islands to American populations before European “discovery.”

If American crops were already growing on Cape Verde before 1492, then American people may have been traveling to Cape Verde before European intervention. The Portuguese didn’t create the connection between Cape Verde and America; they exploited an existing one.

This context changes the meaning of what Hawkins found in 1562. The “gentle and loving” people on Cape Verde weren’t just American Indians who had been enslaved and transported there. They may have included people who had been connected to the islands through pre-Columbian trade networks, people who treated Cape Verde as familiar territory rather than a place of exile.

By 1562, Cape Verde was operating as a mature slave port.

The Portuguese had been depopulating Labrador for 61 years. Columbus had been shipping Caribbean Indians to the islands for over 60 years. Charles V had authorized the removal of 4,000 people from Cape Verde to Spanish territories 44 years earlier. The system was not new; it was established, routine, and profitable.¹

Hawkins arrived at a functioning distribution center, not a source location. The people on Cape Verde had been collected from multiple places over multiple decades and relabeled as “negroes” without recorded origins. Some were indigenous Americans from the Caribbean. Some were Beothuk from Labrador. Some were Moors and Jews fleeing or enslaved during the Inquisition. Some were their children and grandchildren, born on the islands.

The English were not creating the Atlantic slave trade; they were joining it. And they were joining it at the redistribution point, not the extraction point.

The standard narrative places Hawkins at the beginning of English participation in Atlantic slavery.

The primary sources place him in the middle of an existing system. Cape Verde was already a slave port when he arrived. The islands were already populated with displaced peoples from multiple locations. The mechanism for collecting, relabeling, and redistributing non-Christian populations had been operating for over half a century under papal authority.¹

English involvement in Atlantic slavery did not begin with Hawkins raiding the African coast. It began with Hawkins purchasing people from Portuguese distributors on islands that had been serving as a collection point for displaced populations since 1501.

The people Hawkins purchased as “negroes” and transported to the Caribbean were, in significant part, indigenous Americans returning to American waters. They had been taken from Labrador, shipped to Cape Verde, relabeled without origin, and sold to English traders who transported them back to territories that may have been familiar to their grandparents.

Later English sources would claim that Hawkins obtained his captives from “the Guinea coast.”

Guinea was not a specific location. It was a general term for the West African coastline. But Cape Verde is technically part of the Guinea region — the Cape Verde Islands sit off the Guinea-Bissau coast. When English records say Hawkins went to “Guinea,” they are not necessarily contradicting the Hakluyt Society records that specify Cape Verde.¹

This linguistic ambiguity allowed the English to maintain the fiction that their captives came “from Africa” without lying about geography. Cape Verde is off the African coast. But the population of Cape Verde in 1562 was not African in origin; it was a mix of displaced peoples collected from multiple continents under the religious authority established by papal decree.

The misdirection was not accidental. By the time racial categories became more important than religious ones, it was useful to claim that enslaved people came “from Africa” rather than from a Portuguese distribution center where American Indians had been relabeled as “negroes.”