HE slave trade was thriving in Angola long before the first Africans were brought to Bermuda against their will.

The Portuguese first landed in the area of south-western Africa that is now known as Angola, in 1482. In the 16th century, they started the slave trade, which had a massive impact on the region over the following 300 years.

Although at that time they controlled only an area of Atlantic coastline, the Europeans' influence spread deep into the interior, as they travelled to trade their textiles and guns in exchange for African people to be used for forced labour.

Luanda, the capital of Angola, was founded on the slave trade in 1576 and over the years millions passed through the port, most en route to a new life of slavery in Brazil, another Portuguese colony on the opposite side of the Atlantic, or in the Spanish Americas.

It is estimated that the Portuguese extracted seven million people from the Angola-Congo area in an era of slave -trading that lasted until the late 19th century.

Thanks to the work of Boston University professor John Thornton, a missing piece in the historical jigsaw was discovered, revealing that some of those unfortunate Angolans were some of the earliest slaves to arrive in Bermuda.

According to the , in the late 1990s a retired California historian, Engel Sluiter, was trawling through the Spanish archives as he was researching a book on Spanish America. He discovered a shipping document that told of how, in 1619, a Portuguese slave ship called the had been carrying about 350 slaves towards Veracruz in modern-day Mexico, when it was robbed of some of its human cargo by two unidentified pirate ships.

Professor Thornton managed to identify those two ships as the and the , through records of a legal dispute between the two privateering vessels.

Both ships went to Jamestown and traded the Africans, the first black slaves to be brought to Virginia, for provisions. The then went on to Bermuda, where more slaves were landed, before it returned to Virginia to trade the last ten or so.

Thornton has been working with his wife Linda Heywood, another Boston University historian, on a book about the first generation of Africans in the English and Dutch colonies in the Americas.

It was while doing the research for the book, scheduled to come out next year, that he found the nugget of information which linked the to the and wrote a new line into the 400-year-old history of both the US and Bermuda.

And Professor Thornton believes that a majority of Bermuda's early influx of African slaves came from Angola.

"For our period, which is before 1660 or so, what is perhaps most interesting about Bermuda is first, that like other parts of the English-speaking New World, it received the lion's share of its Africans from Angola," Professor Thornton told the this week.

"This is because the vast majority of the slaves, more than 85 per cent of them between 1610 and 1641, were from that region. This is a long story involving contracts between the Spanish crown and slave suppliers, and the relations between the governors of Angola and Madrid.

"All the slaves who came to English- and Dutch-speaking America were captured from the shipments made from Angola to the Spanish colonies in the Circum Caribbean. The and were just among the earliest to do this."

BERMUDIAN Dr. Clarence Maxwell, a scholar of slavery, has read the case for the Angola link, set out by Dr. Thornton and Dr. Heywwood.

"Basically, it is an extremely detailed and well supported argument that explains several issues regarding the 'Negroes' that showed up in Bermuda in 1619 ? one of them their Iberian names and access to Christianity," Dr. Maxwell said.

"Even more interesting is that they more than likely would have spoken Portuguese, given what Drs. Thornton and Heywood have discussed about the growth of the Catholic Church and Portuguese presence in the kingdom of the Kongo and surrounding states."

Sir Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick, one of the founding members of the Bermuda Company and one of the first landlords to own slaves on the island as well as in Virginia, was a central figure in the arrival of Africans in 17th-century Bermuda. Not only did he own slaves, but he also sponsored privateers to procure them.

He owned 600 acres of Bermuda land on which he grew tobacco and bought the slaves to provide the labour for his enterprise.

The was Warwick's ship and he sent it out, under Captain Daniel Ellffryth, to raid Spanish American colonies, under a special "commission". In 1619, Ellffryth returned to the island with the captives.

Professor Thornton said this type of operation was popular in Bermuda.

"Bermuda was a real centre for these privateers, thanks to the relationship between the Earl of Warwick and Bermuda, and he and his circle of friends and privateering," the historian said.

"We think that it is probably the strategic position of Bermuda, and Warwick's privateers that gave Bermuda such a large population of Africans so early ? much larger than any other colony until Warwick and his friends established Providence Island in 1635.

"From 1635 until 1641 Providence Island (off Nicaragua), and to a lesser extent Tortuga (near Haiti), then became the centre of privateering. Providence Island's African-born population actually became the majority by about 1638, something which could have happened in Bermuda had it remained at the centre.

"But as it was, we think maybe Bermuda had about a 25 per cent African share when the centre moved, tobacco crashed, and a self-sustaining African and then Creole population developed."

Professor Thornton travelled to Bermuda in 2000 to carry out research for his and Dr. Heywood's book, which is being published by Cambridge University Press and is scheduled to come out next year.

To take into account the Angolan link, the Jamestown Settlement is revamping its museum display to include a crucial part of history that had featured little before ? the background of the Africans.

That story was highlighted last week by the which reported that a re-created Angolan village will be depicted in the museum's new 30,000-square-foot gallery, which will open next month.

"We went entirely back to the drawing board," Tom Davidson, senior curator of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, told the . "The problem has always been that all of the things that make for a human story (of the Africans) were missing. Now we can talk about the Africans with the same richness as we talk about the English and the Powhatans."

THE Angola area of Africa was made up of a group of powerful kingdoms before the Europeans invaded. They traded iron, among other products, and their economies were based on farming, raising cattle, hunting and fishing, and the manufacture of tools.

As the slave trade to the Spanish New World became progressively more profitable, the Portuguese waged war against the kingdoms of Ndongo and Kongo in the early 17th century. Some Angolans co-operated with the Portuguese. Others, like Queen Nzinga, fiercely resisted them.

Some Bermudians may well be descended from some of those unfortunates who were seized at that time and forced to undergo a hellish transatlantic voyage to a life of slavery.