by Hugh Thomas
The Portuguese were also good shipbuilders. The lateen-rigged caravel was their modification of the Moorish vessel that had long been sailing off Northwest Africa; it could sail closer to the wind than any others, though it was less useful in a following wind than a ship with square sails. Portuguese fishermen, too, had been busy off Moroccan coasts for generations. The country had a confident middle class, whose influence had increased at the end of the fourteenth century, when the old nobility had been destroyed in civil wars. The monarchs of the Aviz family, with their bastard blood, had favored merchants, by a series of fiscal concessions, and the curious royal capitalism which developed meant that Portuguese merchants abroad were really royal consuls. Portugal was far from isolated: there were so many merchants trading in Seville in the early fourteenth century that there was a street named “Calle de los Portugueses.” The whole country seemed a “wharf between two seas,” for it was in Lisbon or Oporto that Northern Europe could obtain Mediterranean produce such as dried cod, olive oil, salt, wine, and almonds. There were, too, English, Flemish, and Florentine merchants in Lisbon as well as Genoese ones: and as early as 1338, the Bardi of Florence had special privileges as corsairs—to seize captives at sea for ransoms from North Africa.
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From 1444 onwards, Zurara’s history mentions, in every chapter, kidnappings of more and more Africans by Portuguese captains in evermore-southern latitudes. “How they returned to the shore and of the Moors that they took” and “How they took ten Moors” are typical chapter headings in the work. Zurara describes the events as if the Portuguese thought that they were carrying out a great feat: winning new souls for God. Ca’da Mosto, the Venetian adventurer who traveled with the Portuguese, wrote, a little later: “The Portuguese caravels, sometimes four, sometimes more, used to come to the Gulf of Arguin, well armed and, landing by night, surprised some fishermen’s villages. . . .”9
The technique of these captures was inherited from attacks on Moors in Portugal or in Spain: there was little innovative about it. For this side of the African adventure had not been foreseen by those who began it. After all, it had been assumed that, to the south of the desert, there was a great Christian monarchy. Yet the early history of the Western discoveries on the African coast went hand in hand with that of a new Atlantic slave trade. This brought money to Prince Henry and other promoters of the expeditions. Sometimes the captures were easy but, sometimes, Zurara said, “our men had very great toil in the capture of those who were swimming, for they dived like cormorants, so that they could not get hold of them; and the capture of the second man caused them to lose all the others. For he was so valiant that two men, strong as they were, could not drag him into the boat until they took a boathook and caught him above one eye, and the pain of this made him abate his courage, and allow himself to be put inside the boat. . . .”10
These ventures continued to be private ones, for which the merchant had to obtain a license from the Crown—that is, from Prince Henry. Most of the new entrepreneurs were businessmen from Lisbon, though in 1446 the bishop of the Algarve fitted out a caravel for the slave trade (it sailed as one ship among nine). Always these vessels were accompanied by a notary sent by Prince Henry to ensure that he received his fifth of the booty.
The seizure of these desirable African slaves did not delay scientific discovery, for it made exploration financially worthwhile. Thus, in 1444, Dinis Dias, a new captain with imagination, discovered the Sénégal, the first great tropical river to be found by Europeans as yet, and by far the biggest which the Portuguese had encountered since leaving the Mediterranean. It was a waterway leading to (for it flowed directly from) the richest of the West African gold fields, whence the “silent trade in gold” was carried. With the impetuous currents which it caused at sea, the Portuguese supposed the Sénégal somehow to be a branch of the Nile, as did most others at that time, because of its alluvial behavior in summer. It had been on an island in the lower reaches of the river Sénégal that, five centuries before, the Tuareg Ibn Yacin conceived the popular austerity of the Almoravid movement, from which had derived their formidable conquests in Spain and Portugal during the early twelfth century.
The north bank of the river was a territory of Azanaghi; and the south bank, at least near the mouth, was in the 1440s inhabited by two peoples, the Wolofs and the Serers, both with reasonably large populations. The Portuguese thereafter saw the Sénégal, identified by two palm trees on the southern bank, as the dividing line in West Africa, separating the Moors from the “fertile land of the blacks,” in Ca’da Mosto’s words. “It appears to me,” that Venetian went on, “a very marvelous thing that, beyond the river, all men are very black, tall and big, their bodies well formed; and the whole country green, full of trees, and fertile; while, on this side, the men are brownish, small, lean, ill-nourished, and small in stature.”11
The whole territory was a surprise to the Portuguese, who found there something of the promised land which they had been expecting: cultivated fields, and a tropical savanna, natives very different from those whom they knew in the Mediterranean, offering the travelers the flesh of elephants to eat and ivory to take home. Ca’da Mosto said that the king of the Wolofs was poor, a youth of about his own age, who supported himself largely by raiding neighbors and selling the captives to Moorish or even Azanaghi merchants.
Farther on, Dias came upon a green and beautiful headland covered with trees, running far out into the ocean; there, the desert came to an end, and the lusher tropics began. He named it Cabo Verde. That is where the equinox also begins, for here the days and nights always have equal length. When, a few miles to the south, Dias reached the island of Gorée (he called it Ilha da Palma), off what is now Dakar, he realized that thereafter the coast of Africa began to turn east.
By this time, the Africans were beginning to learn how to defend themselves against the Europeans, using their wooden longboats, made from tree trunks, with considerable intelligence. Being powered by paddles, they did not depend on the winds. One of Prince Henry’s protégés, Gonçalo de Sintra, “who had been his stirrup boy,” lost his life looking for slaves on one of these expeditions, as did one of the pioneers of earlier days, Nuno Tristão. A Danish nobleman, Vallarte, the first Northern European to sail to West Africa, who had joined Prince Henry’s Court, was captured and then killed, off Gorée, in 1448. Thus the promised land was shown to have many snares. Nor was every expedition a financial success: one armada of twenty-seven ships, which had been assembled from several Portuguese ports—Madeira and Lisbon, as well as Lagos—and was captained again by Lançarote de Freitas, spent a long time off the coast in 1445, and brought back only about sixty slaves.
The Portuguese soon began to buy rather than kidnap slaves. A captain named João Fernandes apparently initiated this change, on the explicit orders of Prince Henry. He offered to stay behind on the coast of the Bay of Arguin in 1445 in order to gather information, in temporary exchange for an old leader of the region. Fernandes did remain in Africa for a year, won over the local people, and learned of markets where both slaves and gold might be exchanged for quite modest European goods. A year later, he told Antão Gonçalves, who relieved him, that he had met Ahude Meymam, a Muslim merchant, who owned some black slaves whom he wished to sell. Gonçalves bought nine of these blacks, as well as some gold dust, in return for “some things which pleased the chief . . . (though they were small and of little value).” Arguin was the center of this transaction, the first of hundreds of thousands of such carried out by Europeans over the next four hundred years.12
These events on the West African coast introduced the Portuguese to that interesting phenomenon, the Muslim merchant who was also a holy man. Free, austere in style of life, and as a rule the only literate persons in the region, these merchants were endogamous, self-sufficient, and well informed. Although they were described as Moorish by the Portuguese, many of them were black. They usually lived as a state within the state (whatever state it was!),
practicing strict Islam, and trading pagans as slaves, rarely Muslims. Belief in Islam meant a useful communion with the other long-range operators. Nothing shows better the cosmopolitan nature of Islam than the discovery by the fourteenth-century traveler (or romancer) Ibn Battuta—in Sijilmasa, in southern Morocco—that his host was the brother of a man whom he had met a few years before in China.
The slaves whom these merchants had to offer the Portuguese were no doubt usually—as most slaves were, in that region as elsewhere, as they had been in antiquity and in medieval Spain—captives in war, or in raids. The Tuaregs had been used for so long to raid the black principalities to their south for slaves that, at first sight (even in the nineteenth century), freemen seemed to be “white,” or Berber, and slaves black. But there were always a few “white” slaves, some of whom would have lost their liberty as a result of punishment for crimes, or who had been sold by their parents into slavery. Had the Portuguese not bought the captives offered by the mullahs, these might have been sold to merchants operating the Sahara trade; and one or two of them just could have ended up in Spain or Portugal by that route, as a few slaves from Africa had already done.
The attitude of the Africans to transactions of this kind with the Europeans can only be guessed. The sale by any ruler of a person of his own people would have been looked on as a severe punishment; when African kings or others sold prisoners of war, they looked on the persons concerned as aliens, about whose destiny they did not care, and whom they might hate. For there was no sense of kinship between different African peoples. Such prisoners, however obtained, were the lowest people in society and, even in Africa, would have been used to do heavy work, including in gold mines.
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By 1448, about a thousand slaves had been carried back by sea to Portugal or to the Portuguese islands (the Azores, Madeira). Most had been procured by privately financed expeditions, one or two by Genoese, such as Luca Cassano—the earliest example of a non-Portuguese in the Atlantic slave trade, who set himself up on the island of Terceira, in the Azores. To serve the traffic, a castle as well as a trading post was being built on the biggest island in the Bay of Arguin (it was finished in 1461). It was a dour place, lying between the limitless ocean (as it then seemed) and the sands of the Sahara, but it had good water and, for a century, it was the most important European gateway into the western Sahara. Arguin was both a revival of the Phoenician model of a fortified trading post, and the forerunner of a whole chain of similar establishments along the African coast. Its construction enabled the Portuguese, in a regular fashion, to lay their hands on at least some of the gold of Bambuk, on the river Falémé, which had in the past been carried across the Sahara to the North African coast. Elsewhere, the trade in slaves, as in gold and other things, was carried on, as it would be in many places off Africa for many centuries, from ship to shore.
The indigenous people of these territories, to the south of the Sénégal, the Wolofs and the Serers, were no doubt astonished at some manifestations of Portuguese enterprise: at the boats, for example, some thinking them at first to be fish, others birds, or perhaps just phantoms. But, in the end, the Portuguese wanted to trade—slaves, gold dust, or whatever else might be of interest—and these demands represented continuity rather than innovation. Had not the Arabs been accustomed to exchange Berber horses for slaves? The Portuguese did the same. In the 1450s, the Venetian Ca’da Mosto reported, in the first realistic account of West Africa by an explorer, how he received ten or fifteen slaves from Guinea in return for one horse: a price that may have seemed good to anyone who recalled a Salic Law that had laid down that a single male slave had the equivalent value of a stallion, a female one a mare. (But slaves were exchanged in the Oyo empire for Arab horses at an even better price.) No wonder Ca’da Mosto later wrote that he went to trade in “Guinea” because of the profit that could be made “among these new people, turning one soldo into seven or ten” (his family had ruined itself in Venice).
These exchanges naturally led to an increase in the number of horses in the region so that, by the end of the century, the king of the Wolofs, in his capital two hundred miles inland (he was overlord of five coastal peoples), would be able to mount a substantial force of cavalry, even though by then prices had fallen and the Portuguese had often to accept an exchange of six or seven slaves for a horse.
By the mid-1450s, other arrangements for this extension of the African trade had been settled satisfactorily, with European goods from numerous countries (woolen and linen cloth, silver, tapestries, and grain) being regularly bartered for slaves. Ca’da Mosto thought that, in this decade, one thousand slaves were exported annually to Europe from the African coast.
Ca’da Mosto spent a day or two with a Wolof king, the Damel Budomel of Cayor, on the Sénégal, who treated his subjects with arrogance, they being obliged to approach him naked, prostrate themselves, and throw dirt over their shoulders. This monarch always had with him about two hundred followers and appeared to have “good powers of reasoning and deep understanding of men.” In his realm, slavery was often a punishment for even moderate offenses.13
In a local market, men and women crowded round the Venetian, rubbing him with spit to see if the white of his skin “was dye or flesh.” Budomel asked Ca’da Mosto whether he knew “the means whereby he could satisfy many women, for which information he offered me a great reward.”
Later, the Venetian reached the mouth of the river Gambia. This second great navigable waterway of Africa discovered by Europeans allowed traders to penetrate the interior of the continent, for a ship drawing fifteen feet of water can sail over 150 miles inland. In most ways, it is more manageable than the Sénégal, its sister river to the north. The tidal reaches on the estuary were known for their salt, so desired in the interior; while the river flows a long time through a flat land with pasture for both wild and domestic animals. Near its source, also, there were the mountains at Bure, on the headwaters of the Niger, which really did produce gold. The metal could be obtained at the market town of Cantor on the Gambia.
The following year, 1456, Ca’da Mosto returned, and on that occasion sailed up the Gambia sixty miles, his intention being to reach the land of the Songhai. He reached a town ruled by one of the vassals of that empire, a certain Battimaussa, where the river was still a mile in breadth, and where its lively commercial atmosphere and trading recalled to the Venetian “the Rhone near Lyons.” He did a good deal of trading, including for slaves, and also accompanied a leader of the Nomi on a hunt for elephants near the mouth of the river. He observed horses in use, even if there were “very few” of them.
Returning to the open sea, Ca’da Mosto again turned south, and saw further rivers. He did not turn back till he reached one he called the Rio Grande, now known as the Jeba; from there he could see the Bissagos Islands, a major source of slaves for Europeans for many generations.
This intelligent traveler requested permission from Sonni Ali, the ruthless emperor of the Songhai, to send a mission to Timbuktu, but nothing came of the idea. What interest had that “master-tyrant, libertine and scoundrel,” as he was described by Es-Sadi, the historian of the western Sudan, in trading with white Europeans? His main trading partners were the Arabs in the Maghreb, with whom he could exchange more beneficially his eunuchs and other slaves in much greater numbers than he could sell to the Portuguese in their pretty boats.14
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At that time, south of the river Gambia, and south too of the Wolof kingdoms, the coastal polities of Africa were small, often only about one to two thousand square miles, rarely consisting of more than one entity, though perhaps with several semidependent autonomous settlements. That was especially so in the territory between the rivers Gambia and Sierra Leone, where the towns of small ethnic groups such as the Baga, the Pepel, the Diola, and the Balante were really overgrown villages, kraals, of about forty houses. There were some towns where Portuguese could without embarrassment talk of the leader as the king.
The most usual form of government seems, however, to have been what Ca’da Mosto called a despotism of the richest and most powerful caste.
In the far interior, there were, and had been for many generations, much more formidable states: above all, the empire of the Songhai, who, on the ruins of the swiftly vanishing Mali, with her ten thousand horsemen, had by now established an empire that dominated most of the western Sudan. This was one of the most sumptuous political enterprises ever to be established by black people. The capital at Gao, on the Middle Niger, was a vast unwalled city with rich markets where slaves, obtained by razzias from neighboring peoples, as well as horses, scarlet Venetian cloth, spurs, saddles, bridles, and gold, were all sold—and had been long before the Portuguese had begun to trade on the coast. Like the Mali, and indeed the Ghanaian, empire which had preceded that, the Songhai controlled trade between West and North Africa. As far as slaves were concerned, they obtained them from the land of the “pagans”—that is, the non-Muslims. There was a boast that, within a single day, a prince could bring back a thousand by raiding the south. The Songhai used them on royal farms when they were not selling them to the Arabs of the Maghreb.
The establishment by the Portuguese of a small trading post, feitoria, at Arguin, and the export thence of a few thousand slaves, seemed neither significant nor outrageous. Always the Portuguese would enter into negotiation with the rulers, either small-scale or grand, and these became as it were allies with the newcomers, jointly concerned to make profits from trade.
These peoples of the region south of the Sahara with whom the Portuguese were in touch were far from unsophisticated: they wove and used cotton and linen, they fished from well-built light canoes (an essential element in economic life), pottery had been practiced for centuries, they had recognizable chiefs and, of course, they traded. Cotton goods had long been an object of commerce in inland Senegambia: “Every house had its cotton bush,” an observer of 1068 had written, in regard to Mali, and “cloths of fine cotton” were exchanged, often for salt, the most sought-after product of the coast, in the view of the empires of the savannas of the interior, where there was none of it.15 Millet, fish, butter, and meat were also traded, as were dyes from indigo. On the upper river Sénégal, gum from acacia trees was well established in the markets. The fact that the banana, which seems to derive from Asia, had reached West Africa before the Europeans suggests an international interconnection of great range.