Through venturing the unknown, this journey and adventure could benefit yourself and even the people around you. Prince Henry (the navigator) was born the third son of King John. Around the age of twenty-one, Prince Henry attacked Ceutha in northern Morocco. After this attacks success, he was drawn to explore Africa, an area which most Europeans did not know much about. In about 1418, he founded a school of navigation in Portugal to train those who wanted to sail down to the west of Africa.
Around the year 1420, many sailors dared not to explore past Cape Bojador. This was because of the harsh storms and currents in that area. Not only were there many storms and currents, the sailors that had tried exploring Cape Bojador never returned home
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Gil Eannes was a Portuguese explorer who was the first European to travel past Cape Bojador and return safely. During his first trip down to Cape Bojador, he landed on a desert near the coast, only to find a few plants, which included “Saint Mary’s roses.” He then brought the plants home to show as proof of traveling the western coast of Africa. About one year later, he journeyed back to Cape Bojador and sailed past it. After passing it, they reached a bay and saw men and camels there. When sailing down, he traveled with another man, collecting seal skins to bring back to Europe to trade. This marked the first commericial load being brought back to Europe from the section of Africa. Besides seal skins being brought to Europe, Prince Henry’s crew also captured some Africans to take back to Portugal. When other sailors returned back to the same spot, they also returned with some more Africans to take back to Portugal. A few years later, at the Bay of Argium, Prince Henry built a fort and the Bay became the center of slave trade. When Prince Henry built this fort at the Bay of Argium, he started what is known today as the transatlantic slave trade. During the transatlantic slave trade, more than thirty-five thousand voyages containing slaves were taken. On these thirty-five thousand or so voyages, more than twelve million Africans were transported from Africa between the Americas, making this one of the biggest forced movement of humans in history. After establishing slave trade, Prince Hnery sent a Venetian navigator by the name of Alvise da Cadamosto on two travels. When the first travel, Cadamosto arrived at the Gambia River. One year later on his second travel, he went from the recently explored Gambia River to the Geba River. When he tried to trade with the Africans settled there, he was
Chapter 4, Transatlantic Moment, of Reversing Sail by Michael Gomez was extremely intriguing. As the saying goes numbers never lie. The statistical aspect provided by Gomez of the transatlantic movement was effective in altering my perception of the transatlantic movement as a whole. As the text states the scholarly consensus is that approximately 11.9 million Africans were exported from Africa. Only 9.6 to 10.8 millions arrived alive to America, meaning 10 to 20 percent was loss during the Middle Passage. These numbers show how extensive and outrageous the transatlantic movement was. These numbers represent people with established lives, who were kidnapped and put into forced labor. As Gomez stated serval times and how I now view, the transatlantic
When one queries the assessment of the European commercial activities and its impact in the Atlantic Islands and West Africa between the years 1415 and 1600, trickery, social violence, intrusion and the horrors of slavery comes to mind. There were many negative impacts such as population loss, loss of self worth and loyalty, the Europeans involved caused the demise of the European cloth industry. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to set foot in this area in the fifteenth century. During the history of Portugal (1415-1542), Portugal discovered an eastern route to India that rounded the Cape of Good Hope, established trading
During the age of exploration and colonization, Portuguese mariners first found success in establishing trade along the African coast. They set up trading posts on offshore island using a new ship design, planting a variety of crops and trading commodities with people along the coast. Additionally, Vasco da Gama travelled around the tip of Africa to trade with East Africa and India. While their most of their goods were seen as inferior, da Gama returned with fighting vessels and established trading posts in the Indian Ocean by using force.
Meanwhile in the Americas, European empires were growing, and they realized that they needed a more efficient work force. They had tried using Native Americans, but they usually died from European diseases. Europeans couldn’t work because of the diseases that the tropical climate gave them. It seemed like Africans would be the perfect solution to their problems. They were used to the tropical climate and immune to its diseases, had experience in agriculture, and there was already a market for them. This introduced the slave trade to North America, and in 1619 the first New World slaves were brought to Jamestown, Virginia. Most of the earlier slaves to journey the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade were from Windward Coast and Senegambia (Present-day Mauritania), but later expanded all along the coast of Africa. The Atlantic Slave Trade was also given the name “Middle Passage”, since it was the middle leg in the Triangular trade.
Beginning in 1419, Prince Henry of Portugal, also known as “The Navigator”, began financing sailors, mapmakers, and shipbuilders that were devoted to finding new lands. These men were from different nationalities, ranging from Italy, Arabia, and Germany. Their primary focus was to sail around Africa, and land in India. Although at first they failed to go to India, they were successful in sailing down the west African coast, which was the beginning for one of the worse trades in the history of mankind, which is slavery. In 1444, the first 200 slaves from Africa were shipped to Portugal. Later, in 1488, Portuguese captain Bartholemeu Dias sailed around Africa, passing by the Cape of Good Hope. One decade later, Vasco de Gama went farther than Dias and came back to Portugal loaded with spices from the East. Then the Spanish came along. Unlike Portugal, that based its empire off of naval capabilities, the Spanish based theirs off conquest and colonization. There were many Spanish conquistadors, but the most famous of them all is Christopher
“The Slave Ship: A Human History” written by Marcus Rediker describes the horrifying experiences of Africans, and captains, and ship crewmen on their journey through the Middle Passage, the water way in the Atlantic Ocean between Africa and the Americas. The use of slaves to cultivate crops in the Caribbean and America offered a great economy for the European countries by providing “free” labor and provided immense wealth for the Europeans. Rediker describes the slave migration by saying, “There exists no account of the mechanism for history’s greatest forced migration, which was in many ways the key to an entire phase of globalization” (10). African enslavement to the Americas is the most prominent reason for a complete shift in the
This Revolt brought attention to the issue of slavery. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, approximatelyn expected 12 million Africans were persuasively dispatched over the Atlantic Sea to the New World. Of those, no less than 1.5 million are said to have died before reaching shore. Many states had made the importation of slaves illegal. However, since bondage itself stayed lawful in the greater part of those spots, unlawful exercises flourished. Along the shore of present-day Sierra Leone, for instance, Spanish slave merchant Pedro Blanco kept his business thriving with the assistance of a capable nearby pioneer who gathered together his human freight. This was a legal, and lucrative
In 1492, Christopher Columbus’ western expedition under Ferdinand and Isabella sparked the exchange of diseases, crops, ideas, livestocks and people. This included the beginning of the Transatlantic slave trade. It was known as the Triangular Trade because it has three main ports. The beginning of the triangle was the export of goods from the European mother country to African rulers. The African rulers would in turn be paid a variety of goods from Europe. These included firearm, ammo, alcohol and other European made goods. The second leg of the triangle exported enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas and the Caribbean Islands. The third and last part of the triangle was the export of goods from the colonies back to its mother country in Europe. The first shipments of slaves went to the southern Spanish colonies. The Spanish first began trying to enslave the local Indian population, which proved
Prior to Prince Henry, voyages only covered small areas because of primitive navigation technology. There were no charted route to Asia by sea. Prince Henry, known as “the Navigator” was a skilled and experienced navigator, he came up with new ways to navigate the ocean. Henry was successful in mapping the west-African coast. Initially, Prince Henry was more concern about exploring and mapping new territories.
Columbus made an especially daring trip when he set sail for the Indies. He knew he was headed for some rough water, bad weather, and maybe even an unwelcoming crowd of people.
This enormous increase in slave trade came from the chartered companies (given trade monopolies in exchange for fees), as well as from new maritime knowledge gained by repeated travels across what became known as the “The Middle Passage”, a stretch of water between the gold and slave coasts, the region of Angola, and Brazil and the West Indies.
The Transatlantic transition for Africans to the New World was horrific. They were forced to partake in the march to the sea to start their journey on the sea voyage that would bring about a new lifestyle. It was stated that this journey represented modernity itself. The European’s power and expansion prospered which eventually lead many people of the working class from different cultures and homelands coming to the Americas to give their contribution, but it was the enslaved Africans hard labor that paved the way for the others. In the chapter Enslavement, Brazil and Portuguese was considered the starting point with having the largest amount of slaves. Soon after many of the slaves from Brazil were transported to islands such as Barbados,
All through the African Slave Trade there have been numerous huge occasions that happened amid 1450-1850. Three of which I will be expounding on in this theme. The center section was the first key occasion in which Africans were sent to the New World. The slave treatment and resistance of African men and ladies who were viewed as not as much as human was the second key occasion. The Fugitive Slave Law which permitted recover of slaves was the third key occasion. An expected 12 million Africans were transported over the Atlantic toward the Western Hemisphere from 1450 to 1850. Of this number, around five percent were conveyed to British North America and, later, to the United States, the greater part of them landing somewhere around 1680 and 1810. A little number of Africans went first to the British West Indies and afterward to North America.
For many years African slaves were traded, mistreated, and killed innocently. Two events in which Africans were involved in slave trade were the Triangular Trade & the Middle Passage. The Middle Passage, the forced voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World. It was a route from the Triangular Trade that took goods (including knives, guns, ammunition, and cotton) from Europe to Africa, Africans to work as slaves in the Americas and West Indies, and items, mostly raw materials, produced on the plantations (sugar, rice, tobacco, and indigo back to Europe. From the mid-19th century, millions of African men, women, and children made the 21-to-90-day voyage aboard grossly overcrowded sailing ships manned by crews mostly
Marco Polo went on a 20 year voyage to what he thought was Asia and returned with stories of the mysterious land that further pushed Europeans to find a new trade route. Before the 15th century sub Saharan Africa was unknown to Europe. However; due to new and improved ships the journey became more plausible. Portuguese quickly set up trading posts for gold and enslaved African. Slave trading soon became big business. And finally Portuguese sailor Vasco de Gama made it to India around the tip of Africa in 1498. Meanwhile the unification in Spain inspired them to also look for a