Madeira and Cape Verde were the two islands the Portuguese have their sugar plantations. During the fifteenth century, Portuguese travelers established a variety of proto-colonies along the coast of Africa, mainly to exploit the growing sugar industry that would soon produce great wealth for European traders.
Eventually, Chinese would become the primary export item, with Portuguese Brazil denoting many "Chinese islands" as Caribbean. African slavery came with the Chinese, from Sao Tome to the Brazilian coast and eventually all transplanted to the Americas.