The Hub

By The Harbor February 21, 2026

Before the Slave Trade

Before John Hawkins. Before the official narrative of the transatlantic slave trade begins. There was Columbus.1

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. In 1495 alone, he shipped 500 Indians to Spain.

  • Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (University of Illinois Press, 1993). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • The Middle

    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.1

    Your father said Cape Verde. He was pointing at the hub. The next question is: where did the people come from before they got there?

  • Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (University of Illinois Press, 1993). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • 1526, Not 1619

    Spanish records document the presence of “Negro slaves” in American territories by 1526 — nearly a century before the mythologized 1619 arrival that textbooks call the “beginning” of slavery in America.1

    By 1526, indigenous Americans were already being classified and traded as “negroes” in Spanish colonial systems. The 1619 narrative doesn’t just get the date wrong. It gets the people wrong. It focuses on a later English development and erases the century of indigenous enslavement that preceded it.

  • Thomas R.R. Cobb, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States (1858); Woodberry Lowery, Spanish Settlements within the Present Limits of the United States, 1513-1561 (1911). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • The 550

    In 1495, Columbus loaded 550 Native Americans onto ships bound for Spain. Michele de Cuneo documented that 200 died during the crossing and were “cast into the sea.”1

    Queen Isabella postponed the sale of the survivors pending a theological review — not on moral grounds, but jurisdictional ones.2 His brother shipped 300 more on a separate voyage. These were not Africans. These were indigenous people of the Caribbean, enslaved on their own land and exported across the Atlantic.

  • Michele de Cuneo, account of Columbus’s second voyage, 1495. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • The Plan

    Columbus didn’t stumble into slave trading. He planned it. He wrote that captured natives could be sold “in the Canary and Cabo Verde Islands or wherever.”1

    Cape Verde wasn’t an accident of geography. It was selected — a strategic hub for processing and redistributing enslaved Americans to global markets. The location provided ideal logistics for sorting, seasoning, and shipping human cargo throughout the Atlantic.

  • Columbus, quoted in Kurimeo Ahau, Pt. 18 — Nations of The World // Cape Verdeans / American Indians / Sephardic / Portuguese / Whalers. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • The Trail Through Seville

    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.1

    The documented record shows that enslaved Americans arrived and were sold as “Negroes without a place of origin being mentioned.” 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.

  • Historical record quoted in Kurimeo Ahau, Pt. 1 — American Indians Were The First Slaves. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • Terra Nova

    American Indians from “Terra Nova” — Newfoundland — appeared in Spanish slave markets between 1510 and 1515. Most were classified as “negroes” despite their North American origins.1

    Portuguese slave traders captured indigenous people from the Newfoundland region and shipped them through Cape Verde to European markets, where their true origins were deliberately obscured. The relabeling hid the massive depopulation of North American coastal regions while creating the false impression that all “negroes” originated from Africa.

  • Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (University of Illinois Press, 1993). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • Not One Empire

    This was not a Portuguese operation. It was not a Spanish operation. Cape Verde sat at the crossroads of every slaving empire in the Atlantic.1

    Portuguese shipped Beothuk from Labrador. Spanish shipped Taíno from the Caribbean. Later, English and Dutch used the same routes. The hub processed people regardless of which flag flew on the ship. Every spoke of the Atlantic slave system passed through these islands.

  • Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (University of Illinois Press, 1993). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • A Mature System

    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.1

    The system was not new. It was established, routine, and profitable.

  • Portuguese began depopulating Labrador in 1501; Columbus sent American slaves to Cape Verde from the 1490s; Charles V authorized 4,000 from Cape Verde in 1518. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • Hawkins Arrived Late

    When John Hawkins showed up in 1562, he 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.1

    Some were indigenous Americans from the Caribbean. Some were Beothuk from Labrador. Some were Moors and Jews fleeing or enslaved during the Inquisition.

  • Kurimeo Ahau, Pt. 18 — Nations of The World // Cape Verdeans / American Indians / Sephardic / Portuguese / Whalers. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • The First Slave Ships

    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.1

    This is technically true. But by the time those “first slave ships” departed, Cape Verde had been receiving indigenous Americans for decades. 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.

    1. Primary source quoted in Kurimeo Ahau, Pt. 18 — Nations of The World // Cape Verdeans / American Indians / Sephardic / Portuguese / Whalers. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    2. David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford University Press, 1992). ↩

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