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Notes
1. The Portuguese were not of course the first ‘Europeans’ in sub-Sahara Africa, only the first Christian Europeans. The first Europeans arrived in much earlier times and were Moslems from Spain, while later arrivals may also have included Moslems from the Caucasus or the Balkans. (The earliest substantial account of interior West Africa was written c.1520 by a Moslem refugee from Granada, allegedly a Christian convert after capture at sea, his account in Arabic translated into and printed in Italian.) Similarly, it is necessary to note that West Africa became known much earlier to one literate civilization, the one that communicated in writing in Arabic; however, it did not become known to all literate societies in the contemporary world (although faint knowledge did leak from the Moslem world to Christian Iberia at least by the time of the Catalan map of 1375) and therefore was not a ‘Discovery’ as defined in the text. In any case, the Moslem sphere of influence in West Africa barely extended to the Guinea coast before 1440, and no Arabic writings on maritime Guinea preceded the Portuguese ‘Discovery’ of that region.
2. For an extremely knowledgeable and perceptive overall view of Portuguese activity in Guinea in this period, see A. Teixeira da Mota, ‘Alguns aspectos da colonização e do comércio marítimo dos Portugueses na África Ocidental nos séculos XV e XVI'F, Anais do Clube Militar Naval, CVI (1976), and Série separatas 98, Agrupamento de Estudos de Cartografia Antiga (Lisbon, 1976); Some Aspects of Portuguese Colonisation and Sea Trade in West Africa in the 15th and 16th Centuries (Bloomington: African Studies Program, Indiana University [Hans Wolff Memorial Lecture], 1978)—the pagination of this translation is hereafter cited. Also, for a more general and less positive view, C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Sea-borne Empire 1415–1825 (London: Hutchinson, 1969), chs. 1 and 4. Knowledgeable and very useful in detail, at least on the Portuguese side, but dominated in approach by a determination to indict whites in Africa, a stance oddly conflated with Marxoid determinism, Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545 to 1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), tends to disdain and neglect Africanist scholarship and offers generalizations that are too a priori to be helpful to either wider or closer historical inquiry. In the more general histories of the European Out-Thrust a premature plunge into discussion of the Atlantic slave trade, encouraged by the conventional resort to easy moralizing, too often tends to replace any serious consideration of the Portuguese period of Afro-European relations in Guinea. Finally, while the present article deals only with Guinea, under-estimation in world history of the pioneering Portuguese experience of out-thrust (in other than terms of navigational technique) also applies to the experience in the Atlantic islands, although this was significantly singular in that all the islands settled by the Portuguese were uninhabited on Discovery.
3. For the Castilian threat in the 1470s, see P. E. H. Hair, ‘Columbus from Guinea to America’, History in Africa [subsequently HIA], XVII (1990), 113–29, at 116–17; for the strong but eventually unsuccessful forays of the English in the 1550s and 1560s, see A. Teixeira da Mota and P. E. H. Hair, East of Mina: Afro-European Relations on the Gold Coast in the 1550s and 1560s, Studies in African Sources 3 (Madison: African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1988); for French forays between the 1560s and 1580s (in larger numbers than previously supposed, despite the civil wars in France), see P. E. H. Hair, ‘French and Spanish Voyages to Sierra Leone 1550–1595’, HIA, XVIII (1991), 137–41. But the Portuguese held Mina against the French, and although the Dutch gradually overwhelmed them after their arrival c.1600, Mina was not lost till the 1640s.
4. The literature on early European relations with America and Asia is considerable, that on the same with Black Africa slight. As instances of the former, see D. S. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, 4 vols. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1965–1977); First Images of America: the Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. F. Chiapelli, 2 vols. (Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1976). Surprisingly, António A. Banha de Andrade, Mundos Novos do Mundo. Panorama da difusão, pela Europa, de notícias dos Descobrimentos Geográficos Portugueses, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1972), has little on Guinea and tends to leap from the Atlantic Islands to Asia and America. But Guinea is relatively well served on the economic aspect, in V. Magalhães Godinho, Os descobrimentos e a economia mundial, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Sá da Costa, 1963, 1965); variant French version, L’économie de l’empire portugais aux XV et XVI e siécles (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1969). On the social and moral aspect, statements on Guinea in C. R. Boxer, Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire 1415–1825 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), although very stimulating, need to be received with some caution.
5. A. F. C. Ryder, Materials for West African History in Portuguese Archives (London: The Athlone Press, University of London, 1965), at p.7. Under the auspices of the Lisbon Centro de Estudos de História e Cartografia Antiga, and edited by the present Director, Dr Maria Emilia Madeira Santos, a series of volumes of archive documents on Guinea, to be entitled Portugaliae Monumenta Africana, is planned, and the first volume (with English translations of the summaries of documents) should appear soon. This represents a continuation of the collection and publication organized and planned by the former director, Vice-Admiral Teixeira da Mota. The series will reveal a certain amount of documentation which has survived but which was previously untraced, as well as assembling the material published heretofore in a variety of printed works.
6. The majority of the most informative accounts of western Guinea, for instance, those by André Álvares de Almada (c.1594), André Donelha (1625), and Francisco de Lemos Coelho (1669, 1684), were written in Guinea (on the Cape Verde Islands) and no doubt were accordingly thought less of in Portugal, which may provide one explanation of why they were not published contemporaneously. Almada's account was raided by the Jesuits c.1600, however, and summaries of part of it, without any explanation of the source, were published by them widely, in many European languages.
7. Teixeira da Mota's original articles, prepared while the author was serving in Portuguese Guiné, were reprinted, with revisions, in A. Teixeira da Mota, Mar, além Mar, Memórias 11 (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos de Cartografia Antiga, Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1972), ‘A descoberta da Guiné’, 99–273.
8. A. Teixeira da Mota, Topónimos de origem portuguesa na costa ocidental de África, Memórias 14 (Bissau: Centro de Estudos da Guiné Portuguesa, 1950). Moves to replace some of these ‘colonialist’ names with alleged indigenous names have been recently made: Annobon was renamed Palagú in the 1970s but appears to have reverted to its former name, perhaps an instance of the difficulty in finding or inventing a name in an individual African language which does not stir up ethnic jealousy in a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual ‘nation’.
9. A. Z. Cortesão and A. Teixeira da Mota, Portugaliae Monumenta Cartographica. 5 vols. (Lisbon: Comissão Executiva das Comemorações do V Centenário da Morte do Infante D. Henrique, 1960–1962). For certain stretches of the coast the toponyms are listed; for a detailed listing of early toponyms of the western coast, see Teixeira da Mota, Mar, além Mar (note 7 above), opp. 122. The statement by Pedro Nunes—predating by a couple of centuries Dean Swift's comment that ‘Afric's maps . . . [had] elephants for want of towns’—is cited from D. B. Quinn, Explorers and Colonies: America, 1500–1625 (London: Hambledon Press, 1990), ‘Artists and illustrators in the early mapping of North America’, 50.
10. Duarte Pacheco Pereira, Esmeralda de situ orbis: Côte occidentale d’Afrique du Sud Marocain au Gabon, ed. R. Mauny, Memórias 19 (Bissau: Centro de Estudos da Guiné Portuguesa, 1956) (Portuguese and French); Manuel de Figueiredo, Hydrografia … com os Roteiros de … Guiné … (Lisbon: V. Alvarez, 1614, 1625); António de Maris Carneiro, Regimento de Pilotos … (Lisbon: L. de Anueres, 1642, 1655); Luís Serrão Pimentel, Arte prática de navegar … (Lisbon: A. Craesbeeck, 1681); Manoel Pimentel, Arte … (Lisbon: R. da Costa de Carvalho, 1712,1746, 1762, 1819). Note that the comment in the text applies only to the Guinea roteiro, which forms a small part of the later works. For other Guinea roteiros, see Os mais antigos roteiros da Guiné, ed. D. Peres (Lisbon: Academia Portuguesa da História, 1953); A. Viegas, ‘Roteiro da Costa da Guiné (1635)’, O Instituto, LXX (1923), 97—102 (in translation, G. Thilmans and N. I. de Moraes, ‘Le Routier de la côte de Guinée de Francisco Pirez de Carvalho (1635)’, Bulletin de L’Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire [hereafter BIFAN], sér. B, XXXII [1970], 343–69). For recent interest in the first work, see J. D. Fage, ‘A Commentary on Duarte Pacheco Pereira's Account of the Lower Guinea Coastlands in his Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis and Some Other Early Accounts’, HIA, VII (1980), 47–80; and for recent studies of Pacheco Pereira and his account, although more from the literary than the Africanist angle, see Joaquim Barradas de Carvalho, ‘O “Esmeraldo de situ orbis” de Duarte Pacheco Pereira’, Revista de História (São Paulo), [five articles in parts] (1965–1970), 62–81. Note that, when citing in this present article works in Portuguese, translations into English or French will also be cited whenever possible, to aid African historians who do not read Portuguese.
11. For a reproduction of a 1468 Benincasa map, see Teixeira da Mota, Mar além Mar (note 7 above), estampa 1; and for a list of Benincasa maps, see M. Emiliani, ‘Carte nautiche dei Benincasa’, Bolletino della R. Societa Geografica Italiana, LXXIII (1936), 485–510.
12. Francisco Leite de Faria and Avelino Teixeira da Mota, ‘Novidades náuticas e ultramarinas numa informação dada em Veneza em 1517’, Memórias da Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, Classe de Ciências, XX (1977), 7–75, reprinted as Série separatas, no. 99 (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos de Cartografia Antiga, 1977)–the reference to Calabar on 23, 62–63; Richard Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations … of the English Nation (London: Christopher Barker, 1589), facsimile reprint, ed. D. B. Quinn and R. A. Skelton (London: Hakluyt Society, 1965), 90, 101.
13. A study of the toponyms of the coast between Capes Verga and Palmas was prepared by myself in the 1960s but only one part has appeared, P.E.H.H. and P. K. Mitchell, ‘Historical Toponymy of the Scarcies Area’, Sierra Leone Geographical Journal, XIV (1970), 31–37.
14. André Álvares d'Almada, Tratado breve dos Rios de Guiné, ed. L. Silveira (Lisbon: Oficina Gráfica, 1946); or, a shorter version, ed. António Brásio (Lisbon: Editorial L.I.A.M., 1964), also in A. Brasio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana, 2nd ser., 3 (Lisbon: Academia Portuguesa da História, 1964), 229–378; Brief Treatise on the Rivers of Guinea (c.1594), ed. and trans. P. E. H. Hair, with additional notes by Jean Boulègue, 2 vols. (Liverpool: ‘interim edition, issued from the Department of History, University of Liverpool’, 1984)–the extract in chapter 9, paragraph 37.
15. Francisco de Lemos Coelho, Duas descrições seiscentistas da Guiné, ed. Damião Peres (Lisbon: Academia Portuguesa da História, 1953); Francisco de Lemos Coelho, Description of the Coast of Guinea (1684), vol. 1, trans, and ed. P. E. H. Hair (Liverpool: Department of History, University of Liverpool, 1985)–the extract from chapter 4, paragraph 9. For the value of Coelho's accounts, see also ‘La Petite Côte d'après Francisco de Lemos Coelho’, ed. Nize Isabel de Moraes BIFAN, sér. B, XXXV (1973), 239–68.
16. The expression is that of an anonymous ‘Portuguese Pilot’ who supplied information to a compiler and editor of ‘voyages’, Giacomo/Giovanni Battista Ramusio, which the latter published at Venice in 1550; but the pilot appears to have been active around the 1520s: Serge Sauvageot, ‘Navigation de Lisbonne à l'île São Tomé par un Pilote portugais anonyme (vers 1545)’, Garcia de Orta, IX (1961), 123–38 (this article supplies a facsimile of Ramusio's Italian text as well as an annotated French translation, and is to be preferred to the English version in The Voyages of Cadamosto and Other Documents on Western Africa in the Second Half of the Fifteenth century, trans, and ed. G. R. Crone (London: Hakluyt Society, 1937).
17. Coelho (as previous note), chap. 2. On the opening of routes to the interior, or their being kept open for trade (when threatened by African wars), see Maria Emilia Madeira Santos, ‘Contactos e caminhos commercials na Costa da Mina durante as duas primeiras décadas do século XVI’, in A abertura do mundo: estudos de história dos descobrimentos Europeus, ed. Francisco Contente Domingues and Luís Filipe Barreto (Lisbon: Editorial Presença, 1987), 109–22; and, for a later period, Texeira da Mota and Hair, East of Mina (note 3 above).
18. See the references in Maria Emilia Madeira Santos, Viagens de exploraçao terrestre dos Portugueses em África (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos de Cartografia Antiga, Instituto de Cultura Portuguesa, Junta de Investigações Científicas do Ultramar, 1978), ch. 3; see also A. Teixeira da Mota, ‘D. João Bemoim e a expedição portuguesa ao Senegal em 1489’, Boletim Cultural da Guiné Portuguesa, XXVI (1971), 63–111, reprinted as Série separatas no. 63 (Lisbon: Agrupamento de Estudos de Cartografia Antiga, 1971). Note also the inquiries about the interior made by the first Portuguese expedition to ascend River Gambia: Diogo Gomes, De la première découverte de la Guinée, ed. T. Monod, R. Mauny and G. Duval, Memorias 21 (Bissau: Centro de Estudos da Guinè Portuguesa, 1959), ff.276v–277 (this text has the original Latin and a French translation).
19. See Hugh Tracey, António Fernandes, descobridor do Monomotapa, trans. and ed. Caetano Montez (Lourenço Marques: Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique, 1940).
20. A. Teixeira da Mota, ‘A malograda viagem de Diogo Carreiro à Tombuctu em 1565’, Boletim Cultural da Guiné Portuguesa, XXV (1970), reprinted as Série separatas no. 57 (Lisbon: Agrupamento de Estudos de Cartografia Antiga, Lisbon, 1970).
21. Madeira Santos (note 18 above), loc. cit. In respect of imperial policy and official exploration, the perceptive comments of Vitorino Magalhães Godinho on crown initiatives and intentions on the one hand and local responses on the other, albeit in relation to economic matters, are pertinent. ‘The commercial system oscillated between monopolies–of the State or private, geographical or for certain products–and trade in private hands yet dependent on the permission of the State or a concessionaire. The real facts, however, must have followed anything but a rigid pattern: non-authorised contraband and trade may have been quite as important as the legal trade, given the insuperable difficulties of control and certain drawbacks of repression . . . the tangle of concessions, privileges, restrictions, prohibitions, and pardons for infringement made the task of justice a rather precarious one and afforded reasonable opportunities to many’ (cited from Teixeira da Mota, note 2 above, 5, the translation slightly revised). Where the letter of imperial policy tangled itself to a standstill, local entrepreneurs, defying officialdom, often worked in its spirit.
22. Almada (note 14 above), ch. 2, para. 9, and note.
23. Fernão Guerreiro, Relaçam anual das cousas que fizeram os Padres da Companhia de Jesus nas partes da India Oriental, e no Brasil, Angola, Cabo-Verde, Guiné …, 5 parts (Evora/Lisbon: Pedro Crasbeeck, 1603–1611), pt. 5, liv. 4, cap. 4, f. 234v; reprint, 3 vols. (Coimbra/Lisbon: Scriptores Rerum Lusitanarum, 1930–1942), Vol. 3: 252; Jesuit Documents on the Guinea of Cape Verde and the Cape Verde Islands, trans. and ed. P. E. H. Hair (Liverpool: Department of History, University of Liverpool, 1989), item 29, ch. 3, 3. ‘Run-aways’ and more positive renegades were a significant feature of European relations with non-European peoples in the early modern period, one deserving of more extended study. In India, for instance, Portuguese renegades (or merely entrepreneurial adventurers) made cannon for Indian rulers and built them temples which combined Hindu and Gothic features.
24. Peregrinação de André de Faro à Terra dos Gentios, ed. L. Silveira (Lisbon: Livraria Bertrand, 1945), f. 54; André de Faro’s Missionary Journey to Sierra Leone in 1663–64, trans, and ed. P. E. H. Hair, Occasional Paper 5 (Freetown: Institute of African Studies, University of Sierra Leone, 1982), 43–'a son of Portugal who, for more than twenty years, had been living at the foot of that Serra, in a place closely concealed and very remote, in order that no one should know about him’.
25. P. E. H. Hair, ‘The Falls of Félou: A Bibliographical Exploration’, HIA, XI (1984), 113–30, on pp. 118–19; Jean Boulègue, ‘Relation du port du fleuve Sénégal de João Barbosa, faite par João Baptista Lavanha (vers 1600)’, BIFAN, sér. B, XXIX (1967), 496–511.
26. Coelho (see note 15 above), chapter 2, paragraphs 11–15; Mateo de Anguiano, Misiones Capuchinas en Africa, ed. Buenaventura de Carrocera (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo, 1957), 2, 65.
27. The extraordinary bore on Rio Jeba was described by a member of the earliest Portuguese expedition to make contact with the district: Gomes (note 17 above), f.275v.
28. For an attempt to use early sources, mainly non-Portuguese, to assess whether the weather in part of Guinea has changed over the centuries, with some discussion of line-squalls, see J. Kenworthy and P. E. H. Hair, ‘Observations of the Weather at Sierra Leone by Sixteenth-Century Mariners’, Sierra Leone Studies at Birmingham 1985, ed. A. Jones and P. K. Mitchell (Birmingham: Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham, 1987), 51–65. This study could be considerably extended by using the early Portuguese sources.
29. Sauvageot (note 16 above), f.l28v.
30. Faro (note 23 above), f.89v.
31. A factor in this view may have been that three of the four major unpublished accounts of western Guinea were written by men born on the Cape Verde Islands to families settled there. It is arguable that the islanders were more capable of coping with the diseases of the mainland than newcomers from Europe, having acquired both some immunities and some local remedies, perhaps more especially if their maternal ancestors included Black Africans. For a proposal in the 1580s, that the inhabitants of the Cape Verde Islands, harried by foreign assaults, should transfer themselves to a mainland locality, Sierra Leone, alleged to be very healthy, see Almada (note 15 above), chap.19. Some metropolitan Portuguese were however well aware of the impediment caused by tropical diseases to European penetration into Africa and extensive settlement there, and Barros (who had served at Benin) wrote of ‘o anjo percuciente com uma espada de fogo de mortais febres’ (‘the angel who strikes by wielding a fiery sword of mortal fevers’) (cited from Teixeira da Mota, Some Aspects, note 2 above, 13).
32. See J. Boulègue, Les Luso-Africains de Sénégambie XVI e –XIX e siècles (Lisbon: Ministério da Educação, Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical/Paris: Université de Paris 1, Centre de Recherches Africaines, 1986); and for the other side of the coin, Lusitanized Africans, P. E. H. Hair, ‘Hamlet in an Afro-Portuguese Setting: New Perspectives on Sierra Leone in 1607’, HI A, V (1978), 21–42. See also António Carreira, ‘Aspectos da influência da cultura portuguesa na área compreen-dida entre o Rio Senegal e o norte da Serra Leoa’, Actas do Congresso lnternacional de Etnografia, Santo Tirso, 1963, vol. 4 (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1965).
33. Guerreiro (see note 22 above), pt. 2, liv. 4, cap. 9; P. E. H. Hair, ‘Material on Africa ... in the Publications of Samuel Purchas, 1613–1626’, HIA, XIII (1986), 117–59, on 125. See also ‘La description de la côte de Guinée du Père Baltasar Barreira (1606)’, eds. G. Thilmans and N. I. Moraes, BIFAN, sér. B, XXXIV (1972), 1–50; Hair, Jesuit Documents (note 22 above), item 13; and E. Ardener, ‘Documentary and Linguistic Evidence for the Rise of the Trading Polities between the Rio del Rey and Cameroons, 1500–1650’, in History and Social Anthropology, ed. I. M. Lewis (London: Tavistock Publications, 1968), 81–126.
34. For vocabularies collected in South-East Africa, see P. E. H. Hair, ‘Portuguese Contacts with the Bantu Languages of the Transkei, Natal and Southern Mozambique, 1497–1650’, African Studies, XXXIX (1980), 3–46.
35. A Jesuit missionary c.1615 expounded a few elementary grammatical rules of the Temne language of Sierra Leone: Manuel Álvares, ‘Etiópia Menor e Descrição Geográfica da Província da Serra Leoa’, unpublished manuscript of the Biblioteca da Sociedade de Geografia, Lisbon, f.54v; Ethiopia Minor and a Geographical Account of the Province of Sierra Leone, transcribed A. Teixeira da Mota and Luís Matos, trans. and ed. P. E. H. Hair (Liverpool: Department of History, University of Liverpool, 1991), f.54v. The Álvares manuscript was seen by the late Walter Rodney who made a number of references to significant material in it in his History of the Upper Guinea Coast (note 2 above).
36. For the attempts by the Portuguese to cope with speakers of African languages or rather, more often, the capacity of West Africans to cope with the Portuguese and other Europeans by acquiring some speech-knowledge of the respective European languages, see P. E. H. Hair, ‘The Use of African languages in Afro-European contacts in Guinea 1440–1560’, Sierra Leone Language Review, V (1966), 5–26.
37. The Jesuit publications tended to concentrate on pious material, while a very detailed, if somewhat florid, account of western Guinea and especially the Sierra Leone district, written c.1615, remained unpublished until 1991: see Álvares (note 35 above).
38. As is well known, the Dutchman, Jan Huygen van Linschoten, acquired information about Portuguese activities in Asia and Africa while serving aboard Portuguese ships and in the Azores, information he subsequently published in Dutch: see especially Jan Huyghen, Beschryvinghe van de gantsche Custe van Guinea … (Amsterdam, 1596); Jan Huygen van Linschoten, Intinerario, deerde deel, ed. C. P. Burger and F. W. T. Hunger (‘s Gravenhage: Linschoten-Vereeniging, 1934). Other Dutch accounts of Guinea patently drew information from Portuguese informants, e.g. P[ieter]. D[e]. M[arees]., Beschryvinge … vant Gout Koninckrijck van Gunea (Amsterdam: Cornellís Claesz., 1602); Dierick Ruiters, Toortse der Zee-vaert (Vlissinghen: Marten Abrahamsz, 1623). For instances of early transmission of Portuguese information to foreign printed sources (to the Spanish cosmographer, Martín Fernández de Enciso, and to a sailor who wrote in French but who had served the Portuguese in Guinea and may have been Portuguese in origin, Jean Alfonce), see P. E. H. Hair, ‘Some Minor Sources for Guinea, 1519–1559: Enciso and Alfonce/Fonteneau’, HIA, III (1976), 19–46. But the information transmitted was fairly slight. Very confused information on Guinea, some perhaps imaginary, some from printed sources such as Cadamosto, but some perhaps from Portuguese oral sources, percolated into the writings of the French cosmographer, André Thevet, particularly his Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique (Paris: Maurice de la Porte, 1557) and La Cosmographie Universelle (Paris: Pierre ÍHuillier, 1575); for Thevet's claim that he drew information (on other parts of the world) from Portuguese pilots, see P. E. H. Hair, ‘A Note on Thevet's Unpublished Maps of Overseas Islands’, Terrae Incognitae, XIV (1982), 105–16. For one Portuguese who communicated to the English some Iberian knowledge (on America), see D. B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of America 1481–1620 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1974), ‘A Portuguese pilot in the English service’, 246–63. The illegal transmission of information from Portuguese official maps to foreign sources has not been intensively studied in the case of the Guinea maps, but for the general theme there is much to be learned from Quinn (note 9 above), ‘Artists and illustrators in the early mapping of North America’, 47–69.
39. Le navigazioni Atlantiche del Veneziano Alvise da Mosto, ed. T. G. Leporace. II Nuovo Ramusio 5 (Venice: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, Libreria dello Stato, 1966); Crone (note 16 above–but this translation of Cadamosto needs to be used with caution and checked).
40. An important account of Guinea compiled in Lisbon by a foreign printer c.1510 did contain extracts from Cadamosto's account, but remained unpublished and unknown until the nineteenth century, having disappeared into an archive in Germany, apparently at an early date: Valentim Fernandes, Description de la Côte Occidentale d’Afrique (Sénégal au Cap de Monte, Archipels), ed. T. Monod, A. Teixeira da Mota and R. Mauny, Memórias 11 (Bissau: Centro de Estudos da Guiné Portuguesa, 1951) (Portuguese text and French translation). For the minor account mentioned in the text, see note 16 above. A third printed account in Italian, also derived from a Portuguese informant, relates mainly to the Congo but contains very little original and up-dated information on the Cape Verde Islands and on Sao Tome: Filippo Pigafetta, Relatione del Reame di Congo … (Rome: B. Grassis, 1591); Description du Royaume de Congo …, trans. and ed. Willy Bal, 2nd ed. (Louvain: Beatrice Mauwelaerus, 1965).
41. Instances from the named writers are too many to cite. But for another instance, the burial rites of king of Benin in the early sixteenth century, see Sauvageot (note 16 above), f.126.
42. References to some of these animals also reached Europe in contemporary printed accounts of Asia.
43. See for instance the chapter on animals in André Donelha, Descrição da Serra Leoa e dos Rios de Guiné do Cabo Verde (1625)/ An account of Sierra Leone and the Rivers of Guinea of Cape Verde (1625), ed. A. Teixeira da Mota and P. E. H. Hair, Memórias 19 (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos de Cartografia Antiga, Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1977).
44. Although it is not inconceivable that an occasional chimpanzee was brought into and exhibited in the Middle East, it is unlikely that the animal was known in Europe before the Portuguese Discovery of western Africa. The name in all modern European languages derives from chi-mpenze, the name in a Bantu language, probably a language of the Congo, but the Portuguese of western Guinea termed the animal the dari. See Donelha (note 33 above), notes 99–100; for the despatch of monkeys, civet-cats and parrots from Mina to the Queen of Portugal in the 1550s, see Teixeira da Mota and Hair (note 3 above), 60–61, 65–66; and for a rumour of c.1510 about ‘wild men of the forest’ in Benin, possibly chimpanzees, see Pacheco Pereira (note 10 above), 135. The Portuguese encountered orangutan in Indonesia, but there is no evidence that they ever became aware of gorillas in Guinea.
45. For a description of driver ants in action, see Faro (note 23 above), f.60v; and for the king of the ant-hill, see e.g. Álvares (note 28 above), f.52.
46. For an instance of the reliance on local foodstuffs of a Portuguese garrison in Africa, in this case in South-East Africa, see P. E. H. Hair,’ “Milho”, “meixoeira” and other foodstuffs of the Sofala garrison, 1505–1525’, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, XVII (1977), 353–63.
47. For yams on São Tomé c.1500, see Fernandes (note 33 above), and c.1520, in more detail, see Sauvageot (note 16 above), f.128. It is clear that those who supplied these descriptions had personal experience of eating yam.
48. On these points see the chapter on trees and other plants in Donelha (note 33 above).
49. Brasil-wood–which gave its name to Brazil and initiated the Brazilian colonial economy– and cam-wood are related species, both producing a red dye. On Guinea textile production, and the Portuguese influence, see António Carreira, Panaria Cabo-Verdiano-Guineense (Lisbon: Museu de Etnologia do Ultramar, Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1968).
50. For other instances of the Portuguese acting as middlemen, by transporting commodities for African consumption from African traders at one point on the coast to African traders at another, see Teixeira da Mota, Some Aspects (note 2 above), 15.
51. For fruit and vegetables known at Mina in the 1550s, including some introduced from Europe, see Teixeira da Mota and Hair (note 3 above), 80–81.
52. For instance, by Faro (note 23 above), f.83.
53. The banana originated in South-East Asia and probably reached East Africa c.1000 A.D, but its progress to West Africa is obscure. It was noted on São Tomé by c.1500: Fernandes (note 33 above), f.206. While not known in Europe it was known to Europeans who ventured to the Middle East: an early reference to it in Guinea noted that it could be seen at Alexandria: Sauvageot (note 16 above), f.l28v. Here it is worth pointing out that the Portuguese were responsible, largely in unknown circumstances, for introducing many crops to Guinea, most from America, a few from Europe or Asia, the most startling introduction being that of cassava (manioc), since this eventually became a major staple foodstuff. Citrus fruits were probably also introduced by the Portuguese, along the coast if not in the deep interior. The American plants often arrived first in the islands, the Cape Verdes or São Tomé. A recent study by Stanley B. Alpern (which will, I hope, be published shortly) has demonstrated more adequately than heretofore the considerable extent of the Portuguese contribution to the list of edible plants grown by present-day West Africans.