1441 the leader of one expedition, a man named Antáo Gonçalves, skirmished with a man identified as a Moor who was walking with a camel, and then returned to the same site at nightfall, where he captured a woman he described as a “black Mooress.” Some consider this woman of unknown name to have been the index case, or first victim, in the formation of the transatlantic slave trade centered on dark-skinned Africans. This is not because she was sent to the Americas, which of course was then still undiscovered, but because of the significance apparently attached to her race, which from this point
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