In 1725 the English Captain George Roberts wrote a description of the Cabo Verde islands off the coast of West Africa (hereafter, Cabo Verde). He offered a glimpse of the former “glories” of this archipelago, which had been at the heart of the Atlantic world when that world was in the process of its tortured formation. In the late sixteenth century, Roberts wrote, there was “great Trade at St. Jago [the largest and most populous island, today called Santiago], Fuego [Fogo], Mayo, Bona Vista [Boavista], Sal and Brava … especially in Negros. They had Store of Sugar, Salt, Rice, Cotton, Wool, Ambergrease, Civet, Elephants’ Teeth, Brimstone, Pumice-Stone, Spunge, and some Gold”. A close reading of Roberts’s text reveals the source of such riches, for, he wrote, “Saint Jago formerly was the great Market for Negro Slaves, which were sent from thence immediately to the West Indies”.

Just four years before Roberts’s book was published, an English surgeon, John Atkins, travelled between the peninsula of Cape Verde (where present-day Dakar is located; hereafter, the Cape Verde peninsula) and Whydah (present-day Benin). He described how “panyarring is a Term for Man-stealing along the whole Coast”. The headmen he met in the region of present-day Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia were called caboceers. The term panyarring derived from the Portuguese apanhar, meaning to “catch” or “seize”, and may also have been related to the term penhorar, to “pledge”. Its use, along with caboceer – derived from the Portuguese cabeça, meaning “head” – showed how important the Portuguese role had been in procuring slaves and negotiating with African authorities. Research has indeed shown how slaves in Atlantic West Africa were usually either seized in warfare, offered for ransom after a raid, or pledged as security for credit and then sold into the Atlantic trade if the credit was not repaid. Atkins’s definition of panyarring suggests that by the eighteenth century the emphasis was increasingly on violence. As Atkins’s compatriot Roberts implied, this process had begun on the African coast adjacent to Cabo Verde.