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| The Padrão dos Descobrimentos and the Jardim Botânico Tropical in Belém, Lisbon (2022) |
The spirit of inquiry of the Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has imparted a distinct geographical flavour to the records of Portuguese activity in Africa in that era. Indeed, whatever short-comings those records possess must be attributed to the Portuguese preoccupation with the gathering of geographical data, to the exclusion of much else. As the Portuguese moved south along the west coast of Africa, their main concern was the preparation of navigational aids, necessitating a close attention to detail. Frequent soundings were made off the coast and in the rivers, and wind and weather conditions scrupulously noted. In 1634, the Conselho da Fazenda approved the payment of a pension to Miguel Albernas, who had been in their service as a cartographer on the Upper Guinea Coast.” The result of his work, like the work of so many others relating to Asia and Africa, must have been known only to the Portuguese authorities, since it was the policy to keep such information out of the hands of rivals.
Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Portuguese roteiros, or charts, in spite of their limited objectives, are extremely useful introductions to the geography and the history of the Upper Guinea Coast. More substantial information followed later as European commercial activities intensified and forced them to look more closely at the land from which they hoped to reap a profit. Sierra Leone was particularly favoured, since inquiries were conducted with a view to Portuguese colonization in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, English and French colonization projects generated similar interest. On the basis of such evidence, and with some recourse to more recent and more scientific studies, one can construct a tolerably accurate geography of the region between the Gambia and Cape Mount, which is the region described by the term ‘Upper Guinea Coast’ in this study...
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Together with the Senegambia, the Upper Guinea Coast was being exploited for slaves in the 1460s, even before the southern sections of the West African coast had been charted by the Portuguese. Four hundred years later, the Atlantic slave trade was still being prosecuted in the area. Over this span of centuries, the Upper Guinea Coast was involved in all the phases of the slave trade. It supplied Europe, the mines of Central and South America, and the plantations of the Caribbean and North America. In the late eighteenth century, it was Sierra Leone that was chosen as the site for the first settlement of freed slaves in West Africa; yet in spite of this memorial to freedom, and in spite of the British Navy, the slavers were still present in the neighbouring estuaries and rias until the second half of the nineteenth century. Thus, though the Upper Guinea Coast was not as notorious and unfortunate as Angola and the Bight, it is in many ways a classic region for the study of the Atlantic slave trade.
Fifty years after these shores had been seen by the Portuguese, the latter were shipping abroad, ‘when the trade of the country was well ordered’, more than 3,500 Africans every year. Captives taken were mainly destined for the nearby Cape Verde islands and the Iberian peninsula, with Madeira and the Canary Islands providing secondary markets. Sometimes captives from this section of the coast were procured by passing ships and became galley slaves—as, for example, in 1504, when the East Indies fleet of Alfonso de Albuquerque obtained seventy Negroes at Santiago.” This may also have applied to ships bound for the Americas. The Cape Verde islands were situated on the route of the sailing vessels proceeding from Portugal to Brazil, and it is not unlikely that small numbers of Africans from Upper Guinea were carried as slaves to Brazil at an early date.
It was the Spanish market which held out the greatest prospects. After the famous pleas of Las Casas, Charles V granted to a courtier the right to furnish 4,000 slaves to the Antilles, and the deal was eventually carried through by Genoese merchants, who made their purchases in Lisbon. A great portion of these slaves were obtained through Cape Verde enterprise. In 1512 a royal edict had declared that all Guinea slaves should go directly to Lisbon. The Cape Verdeans protested that in that event no ships from Madeira, the Azores, the Canaries, or Spain would visit the Cape Verde islands,” and they may have broken this strict provision. In any event, many of the slaves on the Lisbon market would have been acquired on the Upper Guinea Coast and in the Senegambia. Indirectly, therefore, Upper Guinea was in touch with the market in the Spanish Indies since the second decade of the sixteenth century. By the second half of that century, the Spanish Indies had become the principal destination of captives from this area...
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In 1755 the captain-major of Cacheu reported aggrievedly that an English ship from Barbados had gone straight up to Zeguichor on the river Casamance without a pilot—something which no Portuguese captain had ever done. This was truly symbolic, because it was in the sphere of navigation that Portugal had led the world in the fifteenth century. But the financial infrastructure of European mercantilism and nascent industrial capitalism was never developed within the Iberian peninsula, so that the profits of Iberian expansion ultimately flowed to banking, commercial, and manufacturing centres outside of Portugal and Spain. With pretensions to a monopoly of world trade completely shattered by the seventeenth century, Portugal became a depressed area of the Western European economy.
Of course capitalism, even in the days of chauvinist mercantilism, was already an international phenomenon; and all Western European states displayed a great degree of interdependence in buying, selling, and transporting goods intended for Africa. However, Portugal’s relationship was one of dependency rather than equality. Joao Barreto stresses Portugal’s weakness as an apologia for that country’s responsibility in the Atlantic slave trade. His argument is that Portugal’s moral blameworthiness should be proportionate to the small profits they reaped. He says:
It is curious to note that the economy of Portugal was the one which profited least from the slave trade. In the first place, the national mercantile fleet was very limited; the majority of the ships which, since the sixteenth century, were used to carry slaves from the African coast being foreign, and no gain accrued to Portugal. . . . In the second place, Portugal did not produce the articles which the slavers made use of in their transactions with the peoples of Africa: cotton cloths, trumpery, beads, mirrors, iron, etc.
Moral sophistry aside, he is substantially correct.
Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 1-2; 95-96; 242-243. A revision of his doctoral dissertation completed in 1966 at SOAS based upon work in the Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and British Archives, Rodney’s first book is a great work of historical research and writing. Reflecting on his reliance on European sources from his post in Dar es Salam, Rodney wrote that “stumbling over such barriers is an occupational hazard for those who seek to reconstruct the history not only of Africa’s peoples but also of all the voiceless millions who worked and died.” “My debt,” he wrote in the preface to his book, “is greatest to the irredentist masses of the British Caribbean, who provided inspiration and finances (via the University of the West Indies).” He ended his preface with a philosophy of history: “I have sought to ensure that the integrity of the evidence was respected at all times, for this has always been demanded from those who practise the writing of history. Beyond that, the interpreter is himself nothing but a spokesman for historical forces.”
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