In the four hundred years after Columbus first sailed to the New World, some twelve million Africans were brought to the Americas as slaves. About 500,000 of these people came to mainland North America, what is now the United States. The first Africans to arrive in the colonies came in 1619, when a Dutch ship sold twenty slaves to people living in the Virginian colony of Jamestown. But slavery was not confined to the South. It existed in all thirteen American colonies and for a time in all thirteen of the first states. The transatlantic slave trade was history’s first great global industry. Ships from Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, Holland, and Denmark traveled to the African coast to load their holds with people. The risks of such trade were manystorms, pirates, disease, and rebellions were common—but the profits were great. Much of the wealth of modern western nations flows, either directly or indirectly, from the trade in human cargo: slaves.