Juan de Cordoba of Seville, becomes the first merchant people can identify to send an African slave to the New World. Cordoba, like other merchants, is permitted by the Spanish authorities to send only one slave at one time. While others were allowed to send two or three slaves at one time. The first record of sugar cane being grown in the New World, was in 1509 in the Santo Domingo (modern Dominican Republic). In January 1510, the start of the systematic transportation of African slaves to the New World: King Ferdinand of Spain authorized a shipment of 50 african slaves to be sent to Santo Domingo. In 1516, the governor of Cuba, Diego Velazquez, authorises slave-raiding expeditions to Central America. One group of african slaves aboard a Spanish
