Candido estimates that from 1767 to 1832, less than 3 per cent of the crews in the Luso-Brazilian merchant navy consisted of enslaved people, with such a low figure being due to the very limited number of slaves and freedmen in Portugal during that period. The author highlights the low percentage in comparison to the data which Herbert Klein and I provide on black sailors from 1795 and the first half of the nineteenth century (from 14 to 24 per cent) (Candido, 2010, p. 399). By revising the same sources - in other words, the crew records collected by the Portuguese Chamber of Commerce and Industry, in Lisbon - I arrived at a different total: enslaved people represented around 4 per cent of the total registered on the Portuguese merchant ships for the period. Grouping them with those who had been freed, who also had an experience of slavery, produces a total of 6 per cent (Rodrigues, 2015, p. 131). Enslaved people made up 17 per cent, however, of the crews of slave ships leaving Brazil under the slavery regime over a longer period (Rodrigues, 2005, pp. 186-187).