Chapter 1: The Slave Port
The Cape Verde Islands sit roughly 350 miles off the West African coast. When the Portuguese first arrived in the mid-fifteenth century, the islands were uninhabited. As one historical account records: “Cape Verde Islands were barren of people but not vegetation.”1
Within decades, that would change. The islands would become one of the most important slave ports in the Atlantic — not because of proximity to Africa, but because of what the Portuguese were bringing from the other direction.
Primary source quoted in Kurimeo Ahau, “Pt. 18 - Nations of The World // Cape Verdeans / American Indians / Sephardic / Portuguese / Whalers” (YouTube: qpVtRcwDhCo). Original source context: historical records on Cape Verde settlement. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
Before John Hawkins. Before the official narrative of the transatlantic slave trade begins. There was Columbus.
Columbus was the major supplier of American slaves prior to 1500, sending between 3,000 and 6,000 enslaved indigenous Americans to Europe, the Azores, the Canary Islands, and the Cape Verde Islands.1 In 1495 alone, he shipped 500 Indians to Spain. Queen Isabella postponed their sale pending a theological review — not on moral grounds, but jurisdictional ones.2
His brother was no different, shipping 300 natives to Spain on a separate voyage.1
These were not Africans. These were the indigenous people of the Caribbean, enslaved on their own land and exported across the Atlantic. Most were sent to the Seville area, where, as the historical record notes, “they seemed to show up in the slave markets as Negroes without a place of origin being mentioned.”3
No place of origin. Indigenous Americans, arriving in European slave markets, catalogued simply as “Negroes.” The identity erasure began at the point of sale.
Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (University of Illinois Press, 1993). Cited across multiple videos including Pt. 18 (qpVtRcwDhCo) and Pt. 1 (sSMvz5gAYj8). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford University Press, 1992). Referenced in Pt. 1 (sSMvz5gAYj8). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
Historical record quoted in Kurimeo Ahau, “Pt. 1 - The Real Slave Trade / American Indians Enslaved And Labeled As Negros & Africans in History” (YouTube: sSMvz5gAYj8). ↩ ↩
In 1501, the Portuguese began to systematically depopulate Labrador.
The source is direct: “In 1501 the Portuguese began to depopulate Labrador, transporting the now-extinct Beothuk Indians to Europe and Cape Verde as slaves.”1
Labrador. Newfoundland. Nova Scotia. What the Portuguese called Terra Nova. The indigenous people of northeastern North America — Beothuk, Mi’kmaq, and others — were kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic. Some went to European slave markets. Others went to Cape Verde.
This was not a single event. It was a sustained operation. The Portuguese had established beachheads along the North American coast and were systematically removing the population. The people they took were transported to islands that had been uninhabited fifty years earlier.2
The Beothuk are now classified as extinct. The historical record says they were “transported.” The destination was Cape Verde.
James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (The New Press, 1995). Quoted across multiple Kurimeo Ahau videos: Pt. 18 (qpVtRcwDhCo), Pt. 14 (40aS8o9qFlQ), Pt. 16 (Htzcb3HZ2bk), Pt. 1 (sSMvz5gAYj8), and others. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
Forbes, Africans and Native Americans. Cross-referenced with Loewen across multiple video analyses. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
The trail leads through Seville.
Columbus and the Portuguese sent indigenous Americans to the slave markets of southern Spain — the largest in Europe at the time. The documented record shows that enslaved Americans arrived and were sold as “Negroes without a place of origin being mentioned.”1
This is the mechanism. An indigenous person from the Caribbean, or from Labrador, or from Nova Scotia, arrives in Seville. No origin is recorded. They are sold as a “Negro.” From that point forward, any historical trace of their American origin is erased. They are now, in the documentary record, African.
Others were sold in the Azores, the Canary Islands, and Cape Verde — “partly to supply the plantation labor force that the Portuguese were developing on these islands.”2 The infrastructure was already in place. The islands were being converted into agricultural operations, and they needed labor. The labor came from America.
Historical record quoted in Kurimeo Ahau, Pt. 1 (sSMvz5gAYj8) and repeated across Pts. 14, 16, 18 of the “From Indigenous American to African American” series. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
Forbes, Africans and Native Americans. Referenced in Pt. 1 (sSMvz5gAYj8). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
The standard narrative says the transatlantic slave trade began with the shipment of Africans from the West African coast to the Americas. The first slave ships, the textbooks say, departed from the Cape Verde Islands.
This is technically true. As one source records: “The first slave ships presently known to have sailed with captives directly from Africa to the Americas embarked from the Cape Verde Islands.”1
But who was on those ships? By the time those “first slave ships” departed, Cape Verde had been receiving indigenous Americans for decades. The Portuguese had been transporting Beothuk from Labrador since 1501.2 Columbus had been sending Caribbean natives to the islands since the 1490s.3 Sephardic Jews and Moors had been exiled there from the Iberian Peninsula.4
The ships leaving Cape Verde were not carrying Africans. They were carrying the displaced population of the islands — a population that was, in significant part, indigenous American.
The slave port was not the beginning of the story. It was the middle. And the people passing through it had already been stripped of their names, their origins, and their identity.