The Atlantic Trade Begins

1441 to 1618

This is not a record of hate. It is a record of a system, and this is where it began.

It had many hands from the start. A pope blessed it. Kings and queens chartered it. Merchants sailed it. And some of our own sold it. We name them all, because the record names them. But no one man is on trial here. The system is.

In 1441, Portuguese sailors seized people on the coast of Africa and carried them back to Portugal. In 1444, at Lagos, 235 captives were divided on open ground. A royal chronicler watched as fathers were parted from sons and mothers threw themselves on the ground clutching their children.

In 1452 and 1455, the Pope gave the King of Portugal the Church's blessing to reduce non-Christians to "perpetual slavery".

In 1518, the King of Spain licensed 4,000 enslaved Africans to be shipped to his colonies in the Americas.

In 1526, King Afonso of Kongo wrote to the King of Portugal that merchants were taking "the sons of our noblemen" every day, and his country was "being completely depopulated." He was ignored.

Tap Next to read each record. Every fact in them carries a small [Source] mark. Tap it to see where the fact comes from.

We don't need to raise our voice. The truth, told exactly, is enough.

1441 to 1442 Proven

The First Raid

The trade in our people began with one small raid by one Portuguese ship.

This is where it starts.

In 1441, Prince Henry of Portugal had a young officer of his household, Antão Gonçalves, sail down the coast of Africa. His orders were to bring back a cargo of seal skins and oil. [Source 1]

He brought back people. At Cap Blanc, on the coast of today's Mauritania, Gonçalves and his men seized two Berbers. Nuno Tristão's crew joined them, and the raid took fewer than a dozen captives. [Source 2]

The Portuguese crown's own chronicler, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, wrote it up as a story of honor. He titled the chapter: "How Antam Gonçalvez brought back the first Captives." [Source 1]

In 1442, Gonçalves traded his Berber captives for ten Black Africans and carried them to Portugal to be sold. [Source 2]

Ten people. That is how the count began.

Sources

  1. 1.Primary record. Gomes Eanes de Zurara (trans. C. R. Beazley and E. Prestage), The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, chapter XII: How Antam Gonçalvez brought back the first Captives (Hakluyt Society; Cambridge University Press, 1896), Chapter XII, pp. 39–43. “How Antam Gonçalvez brought back the first Captives”
  2. 2.Scholarly. African Laborers for a New Empire: Pope Nicolas V and the Portuguese (Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, College of Charleston).

1444 Proven

The Division at Lagos

At Lagos in 1444, African captives were divided up in an open field before a crowd, and Portugal's prince took his share.

Three years after the first raid, they came back with 235 people.

The ship landed at Lagos, on Portugal's southern coast. The captives were driven into an open field outside the town to be divided among the men who had paid for the voyage. [Source 1]

Zurara stood there and watched. Even he, writing for the crown, had to ask: "But what heart could be so hard as not to be pierced with piteous feeling to see that company?" [Source 2]

Then came the dividing. "Then was it needful to part fathers from sons, husbands from wives, brothers from brothers." [Source 2] The mothers "clasped their other children in their arms and threw themselves flat on the ground with them," taking the blows to keep their children. [Source 1]

Prince Henry took his share, the royal fifth: 46 souls. [Source 2]

Remember that field. Every auction block that came after stands on it.

Sources

  1. 1.Scholarly. Gomes Eanes de Zurara (trans. Beazley and Prestage), The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea (Hakluyt Society, 1896). “the mothers clasped their other children in their arms and threw themselves flat on the ground with them”
  2. 2.Primary record. Gomes Eanes de Zurara (trans. Beazley and Prestage; ed. J.-C. Duffy), The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea (excerpts on the captives at Lagos, 1444) (Miami University, 1896), Chapters XXV–XXVI. “But what heart could be so hard as not to be pierced with piteous feeling to see that company? … and then was it needful to part fathers from sons, husbands from wives, brothers from brothers.”

1452 and 1455 Proven

The Pope's Orders

In 1452 and 1455, Pope Nicholas V gave the King of Portugal the Church's blessing to take the lands and goods of non-Christians and reduce them to perpetual slavery.

The Church gave it a blessing.

On 18 June 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued Dum Diversas, giving King Afonso V of Portugal the right to reduce nonbelievers to "perpetual slavery." [Source 1]

In 1455 he went further. Romanus Pontifex gave the King the power "to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever," to take everything they owned, "and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery." [Source 2]

These were not the words of a slave trader. They were the words of the Church.

It did not say the words were never written. They were written, and they were used.

Sources

  1. 1.Scholarly. Papal Bulls: Dum Diversas and Romanus Pontifex (It's Just History, Smith College, 2023).
  2. 2.Primary record. Pope Nicholas V, Romanus Pontifex (1455), as quoted in "The Doctrine of Discovery" (Minnesota Historical Society, 1455). “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever … and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery”

1455 Proven

Horses for Captives

In 1455, a Venetian trader sailing for Portugal found a West African king selling his own people's wives and children. A horse cost nine to fourteen human beings.

Our own rulers took part. The record says so, and I will not hide it.

In 1455, a Venetian trader, Alvise Cadamosto, sailing for Portugal, reached the coast of West Africa and dealt with a king he called Budomel. He wrote down what he saw. [Source 1]

Horses were scarce there, and worth a fortune. "A horse with its trappings is sold for from nine to fourteen negro slaves." [Source 1]

Where did the king find people to sell? Cadamosto tells us: for the smallest offense, the king seized and sold his people's wives and children. [Source 1]

Cadamosto did his business and sailed on, once he had acquired a certain number of slaves. [Source 1]

A king sold his own people's children for horses. A European bought them. Both hands are dirty.

Sources

  1. 1.Primary record. Alvise Cadamosto (ed. G. R. Crone), The Voyages of Cadamosto (excerpt) (Hakluyt Society, via Macmillan Learning, Thinking Through Sources, 1937), pp. 35 and after. “A horse with its trappings is sold for from nine to fourteen negro slaves.”

about 1486 Proven

Benin and the Oba's Trade

From about 1486, the Portuguese traded at Benin, and its king, the Oba, set the terms.

This is a hard record, and an important one: an African king who traded in people, and decided which ones.

The Portuguese first came to the Kingdom of Benin around 1486, and set up a trading post at its port, Ughoton. [Source 1]

They came for pepper, beads and cloth, and for people. The Oba meant to trade "with whom, and on what terms, he pleased." Opening and closing the market became his way of handling the Europeans. [Source 1]

Sources

  1. 1.Scholarly. A. F. C. Ryder, Benin and the Europeans, 1485–1897 (Longman; held by the National Library of Nigeria, 1969), pp. 30–45. “the Oba's determination to trade with whom, and on what terms, he pleased”

1493 Proven

The Pope Divides the World

On 4 May 1493, Pope Alexander VI gave Spain, forever, the lands found and still to be found in the west, so that "barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself."

One Pope blessed the taking of Africa. The next one gave away the world.

On 4 May 1493, months after Columbus came home from his first voyage, Pope Alexander VI issued the bull Inter caetera. [Source 1]

He gave the kings of Castile and León, "forever," the lands found and still to be found beyond a line drawn "one hundred leagues towards the west and south" of the Azores and Cape Verde islands. [Source 1]

And he said why: so "that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself." [Source 1]

The people living on those lands were not asked. Europe called it the Doctrine of Discovery, and built its claims to the Americas on it. [Source 1] [Source 2]

Sources

  1. 1.Primary record. Pope Alexander VI (English text from F. G. Davenport, European Treaties, 1917), Inter Caetera by Pope Alexander VI (May 4, 1493) (Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanities), Davenport, European Treaties, vol. 1, pp. 75–78. “that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself”
  2. 2.Primary record. Dicasteries for Culture and Education and for Promoting Integral Human Development, Joint Statement on the "Doctrine of Discovery" (The Holy See, 2023), Paragraphs 5–6. “manipulated for political purposes by competing colonial powers in order to justify immoral acts against indigenous peoples”

1494 Proven

The Treaty of Tordesillas

On 7 June 1494, Spain and Portugal split the newly claimed lands of the world between themselves along a line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands.

A year later, the two crowns did not wait for the Pope. They drew the line themselves.

On 7 June 1494, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain and King John II of Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas. [Source 1]

It ran a new line from pole to pole, "at a distance of three hundred and seventy leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands." What lay west of it went to Spain. What lay east went to the King of Portugal. [Source 2]

The line ran far west of the Pope's. [Source 3]

Two kings and a queen split the world between them, and Africa fell on Portugal's side of the line.

Sources

  1. 1.Scholarly. Treaty of Tordesillas (UNESCO Memory of the World Register).
  2. 2.Primary record. The Crowns of Castile and Portugal, Treaty between Spain and Portugal concluded at Tordesillas (7 June 1494) (The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, 1494), Article 1. “at a distance of three hundred and seventy leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands”
  3. 3.Reference. Noble David Cook, Tordesillas, Treaty of (1494) (Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture, via Encyclopedia.com).

1495 Proven

Columbus and the Taíno

Columbus came looking for gold, and planned to pay for his voyages in human beings. By 1495, Taíno captives were being shipped to Spain to be sold.

The man the schoolbooks call a discoverer came to sell people.

On 15 February 1493, sailing home from his first voyage, Columbus wrote that he could send the Crown gold, spices and cotton, and "as many slaves as they choose to send for, all heathens." The money was to pay for more voyages. [Source 1] [Source 2]

He came home from his second voyage with more than a thousand captives bound for the slave auctions in Cádiz. Many died on the way, and their bodies were thrown into the sea. [Source 2]

In 1495, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella ordered a halt until the Church told them whether the captives could be sold. [Source 2]

They did not ask whether it was wrong. They asked whether it was allowed.

Sources

  1. 1.Primary record. Christopher Columbus, Letter of Columbus to Luis de Santangel announcing his discovery (15 February 1493) (USHistory.org, Independence Hall Association, 1493), Letter, 15 February 1493. “as many slaves as they choose to send for, all heathens”
  2. 2.Scholarly. Peter Nabokov (reviewing Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery), Indians, Slaves, and Mass Murder: The Hidden History (review of Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery) (The New York Review of Books, 2016). “as many slaves as Their Majesties order to make, from among those who are idolators”

1516 to 1517 Proven

The Oba Holds Back the Men

From 1516, the Oba of Benin made it ever harder for the Portuguese to buy men, though he still sold women.

An African king chose which of us could be sold, and he chose to keep the men.

In 1516 and 1517, Portuguese ships carried hundreds of captives out of Benin, 280 on one ship and 182 on another. About half went to the Portuguese castle at Elmina. [Source 1]

From 1516, the Oba made it harder and harder to buy men. Women he still sold. [Source 1]

Why he held back the men, the record does not say. [Source 1]

Sources

  1. 1.Scholarly. A. F. C. Ryder, Benin and the Europeans, 1485–1897 (Longman; held by the National Library of Nigeria, 1969), pp. 45–65. “the restriction on the export of male slaves developed within a few years into a total embargo which persisted until the close of the seventeenth century”

1518 to 1521 Proven

The 1518 License

Spain's king put his name to the first great shipment of Africans to the Americas.

With one license, a king turned people into a shipment.

The Native people of the islands were dying. On Hispaniola they fell from about 60,000 in 1508 to under 20,000 ten years later. In 1516, the priest Bartolomé de las Casas proposed bringing enslaved Africans instead. He later took it back and condemned the trade. [Source 1]

On 18 August 1518, Charles V, King of Spain, granted Lorenzo de Gorrevod a license to ship 4,000 enslaved people from Africa to the Spanish colonies. [Source 1] The King's own order counted them: "cuatro mil esclavos y esclavas negros," four thousand Black men and women. [Source 2]

The license went to Genoese merchants in Seville, who were to buy the captives at Arguin, on the coast of today's Mauritania. [Source 3]

The first ships to sail straight from Africa to the Americas came between 1519 and 1521, from Arguin to Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico's records count 116 or 117 people landed in 1519 and 1520. At least seven died soon after they arrived. [Source 3]

The Middle Passage had begun.

Sources

  1. 1.Scholarly. African Laborers for a New Empire: Emperor Charles V (Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, College of Charleston).
  2. 2.Scholarly. Antumi Toasijé, La esclavitud en el XVI en territorios hispánicos (BROCAR, Universidad de La Rioja, no. 32, 2008), p. 99 and after. “cuatro mil esclavos y esclavas negros que sean cristianos”
  3. 3.Scholarly. David Wheat, Luso-African Islands and Spanish Archipelagos in the Rise of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ca. 1519–1545 (Itinerario, Cambridge University Press, 2026), pp. 1–19. “the Arguin-Caribbean itineraries of four vessels in 1519-1521”

1521 to 1522 Proven

The Revolt on Hispaniola

At Christmas 1521, enslaved Africans rose up on the sugar plantation of the governor, Diego Colón, son of Christopher Columbus.

We did not wait long to fight back.

During the Christmas holidays of 1521, enslaved Africans rose up at night on the sugar estates west of Santo Domingo, among them one belonging to the governor, Diego Colón, the son of Christopher Columbus. [Source 1]

Oral tradition names two of their leaders, Maria Olofa and Gonzalo Mandinga, both Wolof. [Source 1]

Armed with whatever they could find, and with sharpened poles, they attacked farms and plantations and called on others to join them. Colón himself led the militia that crushed them. The leaders were executed. [Source 1]

On 6 January 1522, the colony answered with law. Its own ordinances, which survive in Seville, say that on a night of the Christmas feast the enslaved rose up "with the intention and purpose of killing." [Source 2]

The punishments were written out. A runaway not back in twenty days would have a foot cut off. Twenty days more, and he would hang. Any of us caught carrying a weapon would get fifty lashes in public. [Source 3] [Source 4]

That same year, the crown banned bringing Wolof captives to its colonies. [Source 5]

Sources

  1. 1.Scholarly. The 1521 Santo Domingo Slave Revolt (BlackPast).
  2. 2.Primary record. Government of La Española, Traslado de las ordenanzas de los negros, Santo Domingo, 6 January 1522 (Archivo General de Indias, Patronato 295, No. 104), transcription by Anthony R. Stevens-Acevedo (First Blacks in the Americas, CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, 1522), fo. 1v. “e se levantaron con yntinçion e p[r]oposito de matar”
  3. 3.Primary record. Government of La Española, Traslado de las ordenanzas de los negros, Santo Domingo, 6 January 1522 (Archivo General de Indias, Patronato 295, No. 104), transcription by Anthony R. Stevens-Acevedo (First Blacks in the Americas, CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, 1522), fo. 2v. “en pena q[ue] le sea cortado un pie”
  4. 4.Primary record. Government of La Española, Traslado de las ordenanzas de los negros, Santo Domingo, 6 January 1522 (Archivo General de Indias, Patronato 295, No. 104), transcription by Anthony R. Stevens-Acevedo (First Blacks in the Americas, CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, 1522), fo. 5r. “les sean dados çinq[uen]ta açotes publica/ment[e]”
  5. 5.Scholarly. David Wheat, Luso-African Islands and Spanish Archipelagos in the Rise of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ca. 1519–1545 (Itinerario, Cambridge University Press, 2026), pp. 1–19. “the Arguin-Caribbean itineraries of four vessels in 1519-1521”

1526 Proven

King Afonso's Letter

In 1526, King Afonso I of Kongo wrote to the King of Portugal: your merchants are taking our people every day, even our noblemen's sons. Our country is being emptied. Stop the trade.

A king of Africa wrote it down himself.

In 1526, Nzinga Mbemba, baptized Afonso I, King of Kongo, wrote to King João III of Portugal. It was one of twenty-four letters. [Source 1]

He told the King what the Portuguese merchants were doing: they were "taking every day our natives, sons of the land and the sons of our noblemen." They would "kidnap even noblemen and the sons of noblemen." [Source 1]

"Our country," he wrote, "is being completely depopulated." [Source 1]

He wanted priests and teachers, and "no other goods except wine and flour for the holy sacrament." And he said it plainly: "it is our will that in these Kingdoms there should not be any trade of slaves nor outlet for them." [Source 1]

The same king kept enslaved people of his own. [Source 2] The record holds both. Portugal had his letter, and the trade did not stop.

Sources

  1. 1.Primary record. Nzinga Mbemba (Afonso I), King of Kongo, Excerpt of letter from Nzinga Mbemba to Portuguese King João III (World History Commons, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, 1526). “our country is being completely depopulated”
  2. 2.Scholarly. Kingdom of Kongo 1390-1914 (South African History Online (drawing on Linda M. Heywood, Journal of African History, 2009)).

1528 Proven

Slaves by Contract: the Asiento

In 1528, Spain sold German merchants the right to bring four thousand of our people to its colonies.

Our lives were written into a business contract, and the contract was sold.

The asiento was a contract. With it, the Spanish crown sold a merchant, or another power, the sole right to supply enslaved Africans to its colonies in the Americas. [Source 1]

In 1528, the crown made a deal with Germans. [Source 1] Spain's own records name Enrique Eynguer and Jerónimo Sayller, licensed to bring in fifty German miners and "4.000 esclavos negros," four thousand enslaved Africans. [Source 2] They paid the crown 20,000 ducats a year, and each person could be sold for no more than 45 ducats. [Source 1]

Human beings, sold by contract, by the thousand, at a fixed price a head.

Sources

  1. 1.Reference. Asiento de negros (Encyclopaedia Britannica).
  2. 2.Scholarly. Antumi Toasijé, La esclavitud en el XVI en territorios hispánicos (BROCAR, Universidad de La Rioja, no. 32, 2008), pp. 99–116. “cincuenta alemanes mineros y 4.000 esclavos negros”

1562 to 1568 Proven

John Hawkins and the Queen's Ship

The Crown lent its own ship to these voyages, and honored their captain for them.

England's slave trade began with one man, and a queen behind him.

In 1562, John Hawkins sailed for Sierra Leone, backed by leading men such as Sir William Wynter. There he took "three hundred negroes at the least," "partly by the sword and partly by other means," and sold them all in the ports of Hispaniola. [Source 1]

In 1564 he went again. This time the Queen lent him her own ship, the Jesus, of seven hundred tons. He sold our people at Burburata and Rio de la Hacha, on the coast of South America. [Source 1]

In 1565, England granted him a coat of arms. On it was "a demi-Moor, proper, in chains." Our chains became his honor. [Source 1]

In 1567 he sailed a third time. Job Hortop, a gunner on that voyage, wrote it down himself: at Sierra Leone, "we tooke and carried thence for trafficke of the West Indies five hundred Negroes." [Source 2] To take them, the English set fire to a town of eight thousand people. [Source 1]

Sources

  1. 1.Reference. J. K. Laughton, Hawkyns, Sir John (Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 25 (Macmillan), via Luminarium, 1891), pp. 212–219. “partly by the sword and partly by other means”
  2. 2.Primary record. Job Hortop, The Travailes of an English Man (History Matters, George Mason University, 1591), pp. 5–9. “we tooke and carried thence for trafficke of the West Indies five hundred Negroes”

1568 to 1570 Proven

Kongo's Kings and the Trade

Kongo's kings sold their war captives. When invaders and famine struck in 1568, our people were driven to sell their own children, and Portuguese merchants bought them.

The record names our own hands too.

Around 1512, Kongo went to war with its neighbor, the Mbundu kingdom of Ndongo. Most of the captives Kongo sold came from those wars, and most were shipped to Portugal. King Afonso, the same king who would protest to Lisbon in 1526, kept many enslaved people for himself. [Source 1]

In 1568, invaders the Portuguese called the Jagas overran Kongo. The account set down from Duarte Lopes, a Portuguese trader who lived there, says: "And thus were the Giachis become Lords and masters of the City Royal, and of the whole Realm." [Source 2] [Source 1]

Famine followed. In that famine, "the Father was of necessity constrained to sell his own son, and the brother, his brother." [Source 3]

"The persons that were sold for the satisfying of other men's hunger, were bought by the Portugal Merchants." [Source 4]

Kings who sold their war captives, and a people driven by hunger to sell their own. Both are in the record.

Sources

  1. 1.Scholarly. Kingdom of Kongo 1390-1914 (South African History Online (drawing on Linda M. Heywood, Journal of African History, 2009)).
  2. 2.Primary record. Filippo Pigafetta and Duarte Lopes, A Report of the Kingdome of Congo, a Region of Africa (London, 1597), Abraham Hartwell's English of Filippo Pigafetta's account (Rome, 1591) of what Duarte Lopes saw (EarlyPrint text (Distant Reader), 1591), Book II. “And thus were the Giachis become Lords and masters of the City Royal, and of the whole Realm.”
  3. 3.Primary record. Filippo Pigafetta and Duarte Lopes, A Report of the Kingdome of Congo, a Region of Africa (London, 1597), Abraham Hartwell's English of Filippo Pigafetta's account (Rome, 1591) of what Duarte Lopes saw (EarlyPrint text (Distant Reader), 1591), Book II. “the Father was of necessity constrained to sell his own son, and the brother, his brother”
  4. 4.Primary record. Filippo Pigafetta and Duarte Lopes, A Report of the Kingdome of Congo, a Region of Africa (London, 1597), Abraham Hartwell's English of Filippo Pigafetta's account (Rome, 1591) of what Duarte Lopes saw (EarlyPrint text (Distant Reader), 1591), Book II. “The persons that were sold for the satisfying of other men's hunger, were bought by the Portugal Merchants”

1579 Proven

The Runaways of Panama

In Panama, Africans who escaped slavery built free communities in the forest and fought Spain for years. In 1579, the king had to make peace with them.

Some of us did not wait for freedom to be given. We took it, and held it.

Between 1553 and 1555, Panama's royal court waged a campaign against a large community of people who had escaped slavery, led by an African named Bayano. Bayano was captured. [Source 1]

Around 1560, Luis Mazambique, likely born in southeastern Africa, fled his owners in Nombre de Dios. By the 1570s he led a free community near Portobelo. [Source 1]

In 1572, Englishmen sailing with Francis Drake met these free people, the Cimaroons. They wrote that they were "a black people, which about eighty years past fled from the Spaniards their masters, by reason of their cruelty." [Source 2]

In 1576 they helped the English privateer John Oxenham cross the isthmus. Spain answered with a war of "blood and fire," burning what it could not take. Most of the free people slipped deeper into the forest. [Source 1]

Spain could not finish them. In 1579, King Philip II agreed to make peace: those who swore loyalty to the king and settled where he said would be free. On 30 June 1579, Mazambique walked into Panama City with his wife, Francisca, and more than fifty followers. He was named governor for life of the free Black town of Santiago del Príncipe. [Source 1]

Sources

  1. 1.Scholarly. Robert Schwaller, Don Luis Mazambique (Enslaved.org: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade).
  2. 2.Primary record. Philip Nichols, Sir Francis Drake Revived (London, 1626): the account of his voyage of 1572 to 1573, set down by men who sailed with him (Project Gutenberg, 1626), The voyage of 1572. “a black people, which about eighty years past fled from the Spaniards their masters, by reason of their cruelty”

1595 to 1601 Proven

The First Asiento

Spain granted its first official asiento in 1595, and in 1601 the contract was for 38,250 people.

The contract grew. Now it counted us by the tens of thousands.

In 1595 came the first official asiento, granted to Pedro Gomes Reynel. In 1601 the contract went to Rodríguez Coutinho, for 38,250 people. [Source 1]

From 1580, while Spain and Portugal shared one king, Portuguese merchants held the asientos and controlled practically every stage of the trade. [Source 2]

Sources

  1. 1.Scholarly. Antumi Toasijé, La esclavitud en el XVI en territorios hispánicos (BROCAR, Universidad de La Rioja, no. 32, 2008), pp. 99–116. “cincuenta alemanes mineros y 4.000 esclavos negros”
  2. 2.Scholarly. Norma Angélica Castillo Palma, Las estrategias del contrabando de esclavos en Nueva España (Relaciones. Estudios de historia y sociedad, vol. 37, no. 145, 2016), pp. 153–217. “monopolizaron prácticamente todas las fases del tráfico negrero”