Abstract
ABSTRACT In 1627 and 1628, Francisco de Prada carried out a royal commission to investigate illicit arrivals of slaving voyages to Santo Domingo and San Juan over the previous five years. The witness testimony he gathered during the course of his investigation reveals that—even though Cartagena and Veracruz had become the primary official destinations for enslaved Africans transported to Spanish America—these ports remained closely connected to Portuguese African territories and to regional trade circuits due to periodic emergency entries by slaving vessels using them as alternate entry points to the Spanish Caribbean. While Prada's records obscure the human stories of thousands of enslaved Africans taken to Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, they contain a variety of valuable insights into informal slaving routes and practices in a multinational Caribbean prior to the end of the Portuguese asiento period in 1640.
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