1460-1500

1460 Antonio and Bartolomeo da Noli, Genovese navigators in the service of Portugal, claim the Cape Verde Islands. The Islands were officially described as "uninhabited". However, given the prevailing winds and ocean currents in the region the islands may well have been visited by Moors or Wolof, Serer, or perhaps Lebu fishermen from the Guine Coast. Folklore suggests that the islands may have been visited by Arabs or Phoenicians centuries before the arrival of the Europeans. The Portuguese explorer Jaime Cortesao reported a story that Arabs were known to have visited an island which they referred to as "Aulil" or "Ulil" where they took salt from naturally occurring salinas. Some believe they may have been referring to Ilha do Sal. Whatever the case may have been there was no population sufficiently well established to resist complete penetration by the Portuguese.

1462 King Afonso V of Portugal granted the archipelago to his brother Prince Fernando who later divided the island of Santiago between two land grantees (donatarios). European settlement began at Ribeira Grande ("the great stream") on the leeward side of Santiago Island which offered a reliable fresh water supply and a moderately protected harbor. An assortment of Portuguese exiles and reprieved convicts, Genovese and Flemish adventurers and Sephardic Jews were included among the first European settlers.

1466 Settlers in Cape Verde from the Algarve region of southern Portugal petition the Crown and receive authorization to trade in slaves. In 1469 the first Crown "contract of lease" for buying and trading in slaves is issued. The Royal Warrant of 1472 gives "existing inhabitants" (moradores estantes) of Santiago the privilege of being able to " have slaves, male and female, to work for them, to enable them to live and settle better". Portugal granted the authority to trade anywhere in Western Africa except Arguim, on the Mauritanian coast. The mainland Africans forced into bondage and taken to Cape Verde tended to be Balanta, Papel, Bijago and Mende peoples from the Guine Coast. The only restrictions imposed on the Cape Verdean colonists by the Crown was a duty of 25% on all imports from the Coast and strict adherence to the ancient embargo on the sale of arms, iron, ships, and naval equipment to "heathens".

Many of the early white settlers had been banished to Cape Verde without their families and formed liaisons with slave women, increasing the mulatto population sector. Some of the settlers or their mulatto offspring crossed over to Upper Guinea and formed a class of middlemen (lancados) who would play a pivotal role in expanding the slave trade and in establishing the "place" of Cape Verdeans in economic history of West Africa. Many of these middlemen would marry African women to solidify their social position within various West African societies. Portuguese political and economic interests in the region most often overlapped with those of the lan«ados.

1469 - Fernando Gomes, a Lisbon merchant, granted exclusive rights over the trade in slaves, gold and other valuables of the Guinea Coast on the condition that he "discover" 100 leagues of the coast and pay a fixed sum to the Crown for each of the five years of this contract. The area of the coast facing Cape Verde was exempt from his domain, along with that near the fortress of Arguim, the first having been allotted to Santiago traders. In 1472, Gomes succeeded in getting the Crown to expand the scope of his individual trading contract by restricting trade by Cape Verdeans only to Cape Verdean products. Partnerships between Cape Verdeans and foreigners were forbidden. This system of would continue until the mid-seventeenth century.

Slaves sold on the Santiago slave market were categorized in three types. In order of ascending sale value, these were bocais [from bocal: ignorant], slaves recently imported who spoke only their native languages; ladinos, slaves of longer residence in Santiago who had learned Kriolu, had been baptized and "taught to work"; and naturais [natural: native-born], those born in Cabo Verde (Carreira 1972: 267 cited in Meintel)

1475-1479 War of the Spanish Succession. Castellan ships pillage Ribeira Grande and carries off many white inhabitants for ransom and blacks to be sold again into slavery.

Historical interpretations and historical accuracy are not always one and the same. Scholarly research has recently been reported by Peter Dickson and commented on by John Hebert, senior specialist in Hispanic bibliography in the Hispanic division, Library of Congress in Washington, DC. (Washington Post, Oct. 12, 1995: C5) which raises serious questions and may eventually compell us to dramatically alter our description of the context of events which led to the "discovery" of America by Christopher Columbus. These recent findings shed new light on the life of Columbus before 1492.

1478 Christopher Columbus married into the most powerful family in Portugal, the Braganza-Norona clan. By 1485 most of the Braganza family (Columbus's in-laws) had fled Portugal for Spain. They plotted to kill Portugal's King Joao but were unsuccessful. The King responded by executing the twelve conspirators, ten of whom were related to Columbus's wife. No evidence has been found to implicate Columbus in the conspiracy.

King Joao refused to finance Columbus's voyage of exploration. Spain's Queen Isabel showed a particular interest in Columbus and agreed to finance his voyages. The mother of Queeen Isabel was Portuguese by birth and of the House of Branganza and distantly related to the wife of Columbus.

The web of European political relationships and the ideological underpinnings of European expansion played a major role in setting the stage for social and economic development in Cape Verde and everywhere else that the European explorers set foot.

In addition to family relationships it is enlightening to examine the "political theology" of Spain, Portugal, England, France and most of Europe's royal courts at that time. Columbus wrote of being "an instrument of God in recovering of Jerusalem.... The royal mission was presented as divine, universal and directed toward uniting the world under a single ruler, who was to recapture Jerusalem from the Moslems, thereby fulfilling history's culmination and end. This vision was put out competitively by Europe's royal courts, but Castile was seen to be implementing it most literally at the time - in instituting the Inquisition, conquering the Muslim KIngdom of Grenada, and, in tandem with sending out Columbus in 1492, expelling the Jews. (Peggy K. Liss, Washington Post Oct. 19, 1995 p. A22).

1479 The Treaty of Al‡acovas and later the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) established the territorial domains of Portugal and Spain along a longitudinal line 370 leagues west of Cape Verde.

1483 The first French ships reach Cape Verde.

1492 Christopher Columbus, the Genovese navigator, lands in the Bahamas and claims the "new lands of the western seas" for Spain. In 1498 Columbus stops in Cape Verde for provisions on his third voyage to America. During the same period the expulsion of Jews from Iberia began. Some would eventually migrate to Cape Verde.

1495 Our Lady of the Holy Rosary Church is established in Ribeira Grande (Cidade Velha), the first permanent place of Christian worship in sub-Saharan Africa. Later, a seminary, convent and eventually the first cathedral in Africa were built.

1497 Vasco DaGama, the Portuguese navigator, stops in Cape Verde on a voyage of exploration which would take his ships around Africa and on to India.