Gorée Island is where the slave ships anchored, cramming their holds with Africans to be shipped across the Atlantic to work the fields and tend their "owners" throughout the Western Hemisphere; Gorée Island is where the enslaved Africans were held until the ships were ready to receive them. This documentary tells the history of the slave trade: the arrival of the first Europeans, the origins of slavery in the Americas, the development of Gorée as a center of the expanding slave trade, the wealthy merchant women who controlled the slave trade on the island. Today, the island is a monument to an ignoble past. The program visits the colonial buildings, the homes of the slave traders still standing, the trading warehouse called the House of Slaves, and the infamous Door of No Return, the door through which most of America’s enslaved people passed on their way to the New World. (30 minutes)