In August 1518, King Charles I authorized Spain to ship enslaved people directly from Africa to the Americas. The edict marked a new phase in the transatlantic slave trade in which the numbers of enslaved people brought directly to the Americas—without going through a European port first—rose dramatically.Researchers have uncovered new details about those first direct voyages.Historians David Wheat and Marc Eagle have identified about 18 direct voyages from Africa to the Americas in the first several years after Charles I authorized these trips—the earliest such voyages we know about.King of Spain Charles as he grants a license to sell Africans as slaves in Spain's American colonies, 1518.The transatlantic slave trade didn’t start in 1518, but it did increase after King Charles authorized direct Africa-to-Caribbean trips that year. In the 1510s and ‘20s, ships sailing from Spain to the Caribbean settlements of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola might contain as few as one or two enslaved peopl...
