The discovery of America has greatly increased the appetite of Spain and Portugal for slave labor.

On the islands of the Caribbean, the Spaniards had at first enslaved indigenous peoples to work plantations and dive for pearls.

Similarly, on the American mainland, natives were made to work in the Spaniards’ gold and silver mines.

They soon died, however, and the Portuguese and Spanish colonists in the Americas thus sought enslaved Africans as replacements.

Especially after 1550, when demand for labor begins to grow exponentially, the Iberian merchants of the highly profitable Atlantic slave trade establish fortified warehouses along the Gold Coast (present Ghana).

At these warehouses and on ships, floating warehouses, along the eastern Nigerian coast, goods of the interior—eventually mostly enslaved people from the lands in and around present Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, and Angola—begin to be traded for the Europeans’ copper, cloth, and guns.