In Search of the 1619 African Arrivals: Enslavement and Middle Passage

A year later, English ships captured a slave ship of the coast of Honduras.4 It was in this context that two English privateers set out in 1619 to attack Spanish shipping. Because of the formal truce between Britain and Spain, they did not get their letters of Marque (license to capture enemy shipping) from England. Since the fifteenth century, Portugal had a monopoly on the slave trade from Africa. Antonio Fernandes d'Elvas won the Asiento in 1615, and he then obtained the contract for the Angolan trade. [...]all slaves legally shipped to Spanish colonies would come from Angola.6 The Portuguese colony of Angola, established in 1575, was based on a charter from the king of Portugal given to Paulo Dias de Nováis, grandson of the famous explorer Bartolomeu Dias. In addition to concentrating people directly by warfare, the kings of Ndongo also demanded about a dozen slaves each year from its several hundred local political leaders, called sobas.7 The people who were captured in war were enslaved-and called mubika (plural abikd), a word derived from a term that means subordinate or under someone's rule-and could be sold.