Geography, map making, navigation, cartography, shipbuilding, and instrument making. He sponsored Nuno Tristao’s exploration of the African coast, and Antao Goncalves’s hunting expedition there in 1441. The two men captured several Africans and brought them back to Portugal.

He hoped to find rumored Christian allies, add to geographic knowledge, and perhaps find a sea route to the Orient. But he also hoped to find gold. For centuries gold objects from sub-Saharan Africa had made their way to Europe.

Their goals were to expand Catholicism and to gain a commercial advantage over Portugal. To those ends, Ferdinand and Isabella sponsored extensive Atlantic exploration. Spain’s most famous explorer, Christopher Columbus, was actually from Genoa, Italy.

Both of these factors prompted the Portuguese interest in Morocco, since, 1, Morocco was a fertile country and a grower of wheat; and 2, the Portuguese hoped that through sailing along the coast of West Africa, they might find access to West African gold supplies and protect their currency.

Portugal

Henrique began selling African slaves in Lagos in 1444. In 1455, Pope Nicholas V gave Portugal the rights to continue the slave trade in West Africa, under the provision that they convert all people who are enslaved. The Portuguese soon expanded their trade along the whole west coast of Africa.

The death rate on these slave ships was very high – reaching 25 percent in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and remaining around ten percent in the nineteenth century – as a result of malnutrition and such diseases as dysentery, measles, scurvy, and smallpox.

Of those Africans who arrived in the United States, nearly half came from two regions: Senegambia, the area comprising the Senegal and Gambia Rivers and the land between them, or today’s Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau and Mali; and west-central Africa, including what is now Angola, Congo, the Democratic Republic of …

Africans carried to North America, including the Caribbean, left mainly from West Africa. Well over 90 percent of enslaved Africans were imported into the Caribbean and South America. Only about 6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America.