The first Black man to arrive in the Americas, Alonso Prieto, landed in 1493 on a Spanish vessel, as a free member of Columbus’s second expedition. By 1501, the enslavement of Africans had clearly been introduced into the New World, beginning in the settlement that Columbus founded, Hispaniola. That was nearly a quarter century before the first direct shipment of slaves from the continent to the New World, via São Tomé, which did not occur until 1525.
