Álvaro Fernandes
Álvaro Fernandes (sometimes given erroneously as António Fernandes), was a 15th-century Portuguese slave-trader and explorer from Madeira, in the service of Henry the Navigator. He captained two important expeditions (in 1445 and 1446), which expanded the limit of the Portuguese discovery of the West African coast, probably as far as the northern borderlands of modern Guinea-Bissau. Álvaro Fernandes's farthest point (approximately Cape Roxo) would not be surpassed for ten years, until the voyage of Alvise Cadamosto in 1456.
Álvaro Fernandes was the nephew João Gonçalves Zarco, discoverer and donatary captain of Machico (northern Madeira island). Fernandes was brought up (as a page or squire) in the household of Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator.
In 1443, one of Henry's captains, Nuno Tristão, discovered the Bay of Arguin (on the modern coast of Mauritania), which was dotted with small Sanhaja Berber fishing villages, the first native settlements the Henrican captains had seen since passing Cape Bojador ten years earlier. This discovery whet the appetites of Portuguese merchants, who immediately saw the easy and profitable prospect of slave-raiding on those vulnerable settlements. Between 1444 and 1446, a cascade of Portuguese slave-raiding expeditions, organized by private consortiums and armed with Henry's license, ravaged the Arguin banks, seizing the poor Arguin fishing folk as slaves to sell in Europe.
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