Abstract
"There is certainly no doubt that the overwhelming bulk of Africans imported to the Americas were shipped to Latin American or Caribbean territories. There is also no doubt that men always formed the bulk of these imports. A cursory glance at any Atlantic slave trade database reveals this. In fact, knowing these two points at first hindered me from thinking that something like a clandestine market for trading women who were legally free into slavery could have existed in the late eighteenth-century Portuguese empire. After all, if the most prized African body was always male, and if men were always more prized because of the amount of capital they could be expected to produce, what traders would go through the trouble of repeatedly tricking women to get on ships for what by all accounts should have been a fraction of the pay those same traders would have made if they focused their efforts on capturing free and freed men? And so I pushed the case aside for a time, marking it as something that had grabbed my interest but also as some anomaly that did not quite fit into any narrative that I could recognize."