In 1441, Portuguese captain Antao Goncalves brought back to his voyage’s sponsor, Prince Henry (dubbed “the Navigator” because of his patronage of voyages along the West Coast of Africa), who was an uncle of King Afonso V of Portugal, several Africans who had been kidnapped as slaves. Although this incident is sometimes said to have marked the beginning of the European trade in enslaved Africans, what came to be known as the transatlantic slave trade with the infamous Middle Passage did not actualize until the early 1500s when Europeans, at first mainly Spanish and Portuguese, established vast plantations run on enslaved labor in the Americas.