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No longer were Africans slipped into the Americas by the handful. The rise of sugar production in Mexico and the concurrent rise in Brazil opened the floodgates. Between 1550 and 1650—the century after Cortés’s contract, roughly speaking—slave ships ferried across about 650,000 Africans, with the total split more or less equally between Spanish and Portuguese America. (England, France, and other European nations as yet played little role in the slave trade.) In these places, the number of African immigrants outnumbered European immigrants by more than two to one. Everywhere Spaniards and Portuguese went, Africans accompanied them. Soon they were more ubiquitous in the Americas than Europeans, with results the latter never expected.

Africans walked with Spanish conquistadors—some as soldiers, some as servants and slaves—as they assailed Guatemala and Panama. They poured by the thousands into Peru and Ecuador—Francisco Pizarro, conqueror of the Inka, and his family received more than 250 licenses to import slaves in the first years of conquest. On the Rio Grande, Africans assimilated into Indian groups, even participating in attacks on their former masters. Luring them to native life, according to one appalled report, was peyote, “which stirs up the reason in the manner of drunkenness.” (Some Spaniards joined the Indians, too.) Juan Valiente, born in Africa, enslaved in Mexico, joined conquistador Pedro de Valdivia’s foray into Chile in 1540 as a full partner and was rewarded after its success with an estate and his own Indian slaves. He was in the midst of buying his freedom from his owner in Mexico when he died alongside Valdivia in the native uprising of 1553. African slaves were part of the first European colony in what is now the United States, San Miguel de Gualdape, established by Spain in 1526, probably on the coast of Georgia. First colony, first slaves—San Miguel de Gualdape was also the site of the first slave revolt north of the Rio Grande. The insurrection burned down the colony within a few months of its founding, putting it to an end. It is widely thought that the slaves ran away and made their homes with the local Guale Indians. If so, they were the first long-term residents of North America from across the Atlantic since the Vikings.

By the seventeenth century, Africans were everywhere in the Spanish world. Six companies in Argentina were sending slaves up to the Andean silver town of Potosí; slightly more than half of the people in Lima, Peru, were African or of African descent; and African slaves were building boats on the Pacific coast of Panama. All the while more Africans were pouring into Cartagena, in what is now Colombia—ten to twelve thousand a year, the Jesuit Josef Fernández claimed in 1633. At the time the city held fewer than two thousand Europeans. Most of those people’s livelihood depended on the slave trade. Bribes paid to land Africans illegally were a major source of income. Portuguese Brazil turned to Africans more slowly. Indians were so plentiful there that slaves weren’t imported in any number until the end of the sixteenth century and slowly for a few decades after that. The colony’s powerful Jesuit priests were partly responsible for the turn to Africans; enslaving Indians was a sin, they explained, whereas Africans were fair game. (The Jesuits practiced what they preached: in their sugar mills, Africans alone were in bondage.)

Cortés established what may have been the first cattle ranch in Mexico. To tend the animals, he did not select native workers—they had no experience with cows or horses. Africa has been a center of cattle-herding and horse-riding for thousands of years. Cortés’s first ranch hand, possibly the first cowboy in the mainland Americas, was an African slave. Thousands of others followed. In Argentina Africans fled the restrictions of the cities and plantations to the grasslands of the pampas. Driving herds of stolen cattle with stolen horses, these roaming vagabonds reproduced a pastoral way of life that was familiar in the West African