Europeans onward, but they realized that the desert route would never
become economic or even safe because the Berber middlemen jealously
guarded it.
The Portuguese decided that the sea was the better way. It was partly in
quest of gold that Prince Henry of Portugal, known as Henry the Navigator,
encouraged expeditions along the African coast. Finding gold was a dream;
but more practically, Henry, who had invested in the first Portuguese sugar
refinery in 1452, looked for places where he could grow sugar cheaply.
Overcoming the conflicting winds and currents on the uncharted African
coast, his captains plunged south. Strong African societies prevented them
from establishing colonies on the mainland, but they discovered islands
that were well adapted to sugarcane. After Henry died in 1460, the advance
continued under a private charter, and in 1471 the Portuguese set up the
first significant trading station on what came to be known as the Gold
Coast. From São Jorge da Mina (later known as Elmina), they were soon
importing much of Africa’s gold.
Growing and refining sugarcane was hard work and of a kind not con-
genial to the merchants of Genoa, the warriors of Spain, or the sailors of
Portugal. Thus, to the earlier search for gold and sugar a third quest was
added: for slaves to hoe and cut the cane, carry it to mills, and grind and
boil it; and for slaves themselves, to become a commodity to be sold to oth-
ers. Within a few years, the Portuguese were shipping about 2,000 black
slaves a year to work their new plantations in the Azores, Madeira, and the
Cape Verde islands. Half a century later, Lisbon itself had a population of
10,000 black slaves.
In his explorations, Henry had made use of the Genoese, who were
among the most aggressive of the Europeans. The Genoese had to be
aggressive, as they had little to keep them at home. As the French explorer
Sammuel de Champlain later memorably noted, Genoa was “built in a
region surrounded by mountains, very wild, and so sterile that the inhabi-
tants were obliged to have soil brought from outside to cultivate their gar-
den plots, and their sea is without fish.” So the Genoese became Europe’s
“sailors of fortune.” By the fifteenth century, they had arrived in Portugal,
Spain, France, and England, where their experience with the sea fitted
them to be sailors, navigators, and mapmakers. Columbus is the example
Sugar, Slaves, and Souls 41