Atlantic slave trade

1441, off the Rio do Ouro

Prince Henry sent Antão Gonçalves to the Rio do Ouro region — around present-day Dakhla in Western Sahara — chiefly to obtain monk-seal skins and oil. In 1441, after loading that cargo, Gonçalves decided to seek human captives as an additional prize and a source of information.

He and nine companions, from a ship's company of twenty-one, seized two people: an Azenegue-speaking man, and a Black woman whom the chronicler Zurara describes as already enslaved by the local group.

The night raid

Nuno Tristão then arrived in an armed caravel, under orders that expressly included capturing inhabitants. The crews made a night attack on two encampments, killed four people and captured ten men, women and children, including a nobleman called Adahu.

The captives spoke what Zurara called the Azenegue language of the Sahara, and the Arabic-speaking interpreter the Portuguese had brought could not initially understand them; Adahu also knew the language the chronicle calls Moorish.

The captives were divided between the Portuguese parties aboard ship. Gonçalves returned to Portugal, and Zurara says both captains afterwards appeared before Prince Henry with them.

What the entry gets wrong

Zurara's chronicle, composed more than a decade later under royal patronage, is the principal narrative source. It is unusually detailed and openly celebrates Henry and the raiders, and it names 1441 without giving a departure, capture or arrival day.

It does not identify Lagos as the arrival port for this group. Lagos is securely associated with the much larger 1444 landing and the public partition of 235 captives there.

Calling all the 1441 captives Black Africans is also inaccurate — Zurara distinguishes an already-enslaved Black woman from Azenegue-speaking Saharan captives — and slavery and African presence in Europe long predated 1441.