Pretty much what it looks like. Rhadanite Jews had dominated the slave trade for centuries. Jews had their golden age in Spain, bringing in the Moors to take over when they got powerful enough, who then fled Spain for Portugal, North Africa, South America, islands, England, wherever, and many changed their names & became conversos & 'new christian' morranos hiding their identities. Aaron Lopez was born Duarte Lopez, was an Portuguese-born. He changed it to Aaron when he got to USA because he could be openly Jewish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Lion: "an English privateer operating under a Dutch letter of marque which **brought the first Africans** to colonial Virginia in 1619, a year before the arrival of the Mayflower....The Africans on the White Lion were probably among the thousands who had been captured in 1618-1619 by a slave raiding force primarily consisting of African raiders, under nominal **Portuguese** leadership, who were at war" Portugal gave Jews a monopoly on African slave ports, and other Jews were pirates doing it under the table. "initially, since Portugal had unimpeded rights in West Africa via its 1494 treaty it dominated the European slave trade of Africans." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiento_de_Negros It looks like [they started in the Azores, killing off the native white Guanches there (islands just off Africa & Spain, as a beta test for what they did in the New World): ](https://files.catbox.moe/0lr0zn.png) ["Slavery had virtually disappeared in Western Europe by the 1500s and it looked to be dying where it existed. Only Spain and Portugal still practiced slavery and in a turn of irony, these were the two countries that led the colonizing effort in the Americas, almost ensuring that slavery would be transported from Europe to the New World....After 1400, when the Portuguese turned to West Africa to enslave its people for its sugar plantations in the Azores Islands, they found slavery well entrenched. Muslim traders and powerful coastal African kingdoms held Africans in bondage and sold them as chattel to remote places throughout Africa and the Mediterranean. On the heels of Portuguese exploration, traders extended their reach into Africa, took control of the slave trade, and as a result this source of enslaved human labor expanded sugar production in the Madeira Islands, the Canary Islands, and the Azores throughout the fifteenth century. The slavery that the Portuguese practiced on these islands was different than the slavery that prevailed in Africa. In Africa, slavery was not necessarily heritable or permanent. It was not based on race, but rather war or tribal conflict. The Portuguese, as did all Europeans, changed the practice of African slavery dramatically. " ](https://web-clear.unt.edu/course_projects/HIST2610/content/01_Unit_One/04_lesson_four/05_slavery_colonies.htm)