![[Amina.jpg]] *Portuguese map featuring "Amina" (Elmina) in Africa.* In 1456 the Portuguese discovered and settled the Cape Verde Islands, and in the next three decades (after Henry's death in 1460) they would continue southward, capturing Portuguese Guinea in 1462 and arriving at the Gold Coast (Ghana) in the early 1470s. São Tomé and Príncipe were discovered in 1470 and 1471. By 1482 they had begun building the first European trading post south of the Sahara, Elmina Castle, and Diogo Cão had reached the Congo River. In 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope and proved a sea route to India was possible. While the Portuguese were expanding down the African coast, trading for gold and hoping to find a route to Asia, they were also building a commercial empire on the "white gold", sugar. The cane was introduced from Sicily to Madeira by Prince Henry in the early 1430s. By the mid-1450s, sugar had become the island's main export. From the late 1450s African slaves were imported in large numbers first from Arguim and the Guinea coast, later from the Congo region. The plantation models developed by the Portuguese on the African islands would be emulated by the Spanish on other archipelagoes like the Canaries in the early sixteenth century, and then exported across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and Brazil. ![[madeira_sugar_labor_1550x1030.jpg]] ----- Next: [[14.11 - Aztecs]] Back: [[14.9 - Ceuta]]