A Portuguese Raiding Party Sells the First Captive Africans in Lisbon
Antao Goncalves trades two kidnapped Berbers for ten enslaved sub-Saharan Africans, opening a trade that will run for 447 years
Quick facts
- Year
- 1441
- Captain
- Antao Goncalves
- Region
- Rio de Oro, present-day Western Sahara
- Sponsor
- Prince Henry the Navigator
What happened
In 1441, the Portuguese captain Antao Goncalves, sailing under Prince Henry the Navigator's program of exploration down the West African coast, kidnapped a man and a woman from the Rio de Oro region of what is now Western Sahara. When he offered to trade them back, their community gave him ten enslaved sub-Saharan Africans in exchange, whom Goncalves carried to Portugal for resale. It was a small, almost improvised transaction, a handful of people traded on the spot rather than a planned commercial voyage. But it established the pattern the Portuguese crown would formalize within a few years: African captives, purchased or seized along the coast, shipped back to Iberia and sold. Three years later a much larger expedition under Lancarote de Freitas would turn that pattern into an organized market at Lagos.
Why it matters
This single trade is the first documented instance of Europeans transporting enslaved sub-Saharan Africans across open water for commercial resale, the seed of a traffic that would eventually move an estimated 12.5 million people. It also set the template of ransom-turned-commerce that recurs throughout the trade's early decades: raiding gave way to purchasing once Portuguese traders realized African merchants and rulers would sell captives directly.
How we know
The Lowcountry Digital History Initiative's exhibit on Iberia and the Atlantic world, hosted by the College of Charleston, traces the documented sequence of Portuguese voyages down the African coast in the 1430s and 1440s using period Portuguese chronicles and subsequent scholarship on the earliest slaving voyages.
Sources
- Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, College of Charleston. Launching the Portuguese Slave Trade in Africa · Reputable sourceldhi.library.cofc.edu · The domain "ldhi.library.cofc.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, College of Charleston. Slavery in Iberia before the Trans-Atlantic Trade · Reputable sourceldhi.library.cofc.edu · The domain "ldhi.library.cofc.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Related timelines
- The Age of Exploration → · Henry the Navigator's voyages down the African coast were framed as exploration and reconnaissance. They were also, from the very first years, a slaving enterprise.