On 8 February 1526, after a troubled six-month voyage, the ship Conceição arrived in São Tomé. On board, in deplorable conditions, it carried 466 slaves bought on behalf of the island's contractors in the Kingdom of Congo. En route, eighty-nine were buried at sea, victims of illness, hunger, accidents and the ultimate and desperate means to avoid captivity: suicide.

In a less dramatic tone, this chapter deals with the same topic: the Atlantic Slave Trade. I will analyse a slightly later chronology, the second half of the sixteenth century, and approach the subject from a different perspective: the ports of northern Portugal and their participation in this business, one of the most conspicuous in the history of the early modern era. The main objective is to identify, describe and analyse the slave-trade logistics mobilised by these ports.

This topic remains generally untapped in Portuguese and European historiography, which for a long time has concentrated exclusively on major ports such as Lisbon or Seville. However, when looking at port traffic of the early modern period on the northern coast of Portugal, the slave trade was one of the major business pursuits and became the driving force behind the vigorous new port dynamics.