The Portuguese sailor Fernão de Oliveira, in Arte de Guerra no mar (The Art of War at Sea), denounces the slave trade as an ‘evil trade’. The book anticipates many of the arguments made by abolitionists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Jacques Francis becomes the first known African to give evidence in an English court of law when his Venetian master, Peter Paulo Corsi, is accused of theft by a consortium of Italian merchants based in Southampton.
Jacques Francis, an enslaved African salvage diver, arrives in Portsmouth as part of a team hired to salvage guns from the wreck of the Mary Rose.
Hernando de Soto lands on the coast of Florida with about 1200 men in his expedition, around 50 were African slaves.
Francisco Pizaro massacres the Incas at Caxamalca (modern Caxamarca) and captures King Atahuallpa, an event that marks the Spanish conquest of Peru.
Juan de la Barrera, a Seville merchant, begins transporting slaves directly from Africa to the New World (before this, slaves had normally passed through Europe first). His lead is quickly followed by other slave traders.
Esteban (or Estevanico) becomes the first African slave to step foot on what is now the United States of America.
Earliest records of sugar production in Jamaica, later a major sugar producing region of the British Empire. Sugar production is rapidly expanding throughout the Caribbean region at this time – with the mills almost exclusively worked by African slaves.
Enslaved Africans were part of a Spanish expedition to establish an outpost on the North American coast in present-day South Carolina.
Hernan Cortés captures King Cuahutemotzin, Aztec empire is overthrown and Mexico comes under Spanish Rule.