 The first enslaved Africans arrived in Hispaniola in 1501.After Portugal had succeeded in establishing sugar plantations ("engenhos") in northern Brazil c. 1545, Portuguese merchants on the West African coast began to supply enslaved Africans to the sugar planters.While at first these planters had relied almost exclusively on the native Tupani for slave labour, after 1570 they began importing Africans, as a series of epidemics had decimated the already destabilized Tupani communities.