From the 1440s the sight of Africans being unloaded as cargo at the Portuguese port of Lagos (on the coast of the Algarve) became a familiar and doleful one. The immorality of the trade troubled at least some observers: in 1444 the chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara recorded his mixed feelings when he watched caravels in Lagos disembarking 235 African men, women, and children, who were cruelly divided up, with families broken and mothers separated from their children, each one taken off for a life of involuntary servitude, hundreds of miles from their homelands.
