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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2014
Writing in the 1590s about Sierra Leone, André Alvares de Almada, a Cape Verde Islands trader who had probably at one time visited Sierra Leone, commended its peoples for being “unfriendly to the English and French,” not least by fighting John Hawkins—the latter remark obviously a reference to Hawkins' well-known visit in 1567/68. But when did the French visit Sierra Leone? Elsewhere I have cited the evidence for three French voyages to the Sierra Leone estuary in the later 1560s, probably in 1565, 1566, and 1567. I now analyze archive material published in two French works that appeared long ago but are probably little known to Africanists, since both concentrate on voyages to the Americas. The first source calendars items in the registres de tabellionage (notarial registers) of the Normandy port of Honfleur relating to intercontinental voyages, the items being mainly financial agreements made before or after voyages. Dates, names of ships, and destinations are supplied for the period from 1574 to 1621: what proportion of all intercontinental voyages from Honfleur during that period is represented in the registers is uncertain. But in the eleven years between 1574 and 1584, there are recorded 24 voyages to both Guinea and America, the ships proceeding across the Atlantic from Africa. The American destination is usually described as “Indes de Pérou,” meaning the Caribbean. The African destination of 15 named vessels making 19 voyages is “Serlione” or “coste de Serlion,” in 15 instances given singly, otherwise with the addition of “et Guinée,” “et Guinée et coste de Bonnes-Gens,” or “et cap de Vert et coste de Mina.” The remaining voyages were to “Guinée,” to “cap de Vert [Cape Verde, i.e. Senegal],” to “cap des Bonnes-Gens” [Ivory Coast], or to more than one of these.
1. de Almada, André Alvares, Brief Treatise on the Rivers of Guinea (c. 1594), English translation (Liverpool, 1984), ch. 18, pars. 11–12.Google Scholar
2. Hair, P.E.H., “Some French Sources on Upper Guinea, 1540-1575,” Bulletin de l'Institut Français d'Afrique Noire, 31B (1969), 1030–34Google Scholar; also see da Mota, A. Teixeira and Hair, P.E.H., East of Mina: Afro-European Relations on the Gold Coast in the 1550s and 1560s (Madison, 1988), 51n69.Google Scholar
3. Charles, and Bréard, Paul, Documents relatifs à la Marine Normande et à ses armements aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris, 1889), 148–61.Google Scholar After 1584 there are no recorded voyages to Guinea until 1606, and then only four between 1606 and 1621, of which only two mention Sierra Leone. It is not clear whether this represents a falloff in voyages or merely a falloff in recording.
4. Barrey, Ph., “Le Havre transatlantique de 1571 à 1610” in Hayem, J., ed., Mémoires et documents pour servir à l'histoire du commerce et de l'industrie en France (5 vols.: Paris, 1917), 5: 47–209Google Scholar, with lists, 163-209. In this article the spelling of toponyms appears to have been modernized. I am indebted to D. B. Quinn for drawing my attention to Barrey's study.
5. Ibid., 5: 87; Quinn, D. B., Explorers and Colonies: America, 1500-1625 (London, 1990), 287.Google Scholar The true destination was disclosed only to the ship's captain after leaving port, in this case presumably because of fear of Spanish counteraction. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the Le Havre register entries, at least in the form they are calendared, indicate only where on setting out the ships claimed to be intending to go, and not on returning where they had actually been. If the return cargoes had been documented we could be more certain about how many ships had traded in Guinea. It is conceivable that a few of the ships did not intend to trade in Guinea, but called there only to obtain water and wood before sailing on to the Americas.
6. Barrey, , “Le Havre,” 154.Google Scholar
7. Brâsio, Antonio, ed. Monumenta Missionaria Africana, 2/3 (Lisbon, 1964), 106.Google Scholar
8. Cabrera, Manuel Lobo, “Viajes Canarios a Guinea” in Vice-Almirante A. Teixeira da Mota in Memoriam (2 vols.: Lisbon, 1989), 2:138–39Google Scholar; for the Portuguese background see da Mota, A. Teixeira, “Viagens espanholas das Canarias à Guiné no século XVI, segundo documentas dos arquivos Portugueses” in III Coloquio de Historia Canario-Americana (1978) (Las Palmas, 1980), 219–50.Google Scholar
9. Hair, P.E.H., ed., To Defend Your Empire and the Faith: Advice on a Global Strategy Offered c. 1590 to Philip, King of Spain and Portugal, by Manoel de Andrada Castel Blanco (Liverpool, 1990), 96n4.Google Scholar Neither the author of this tract nor Almada (see note 1 above) mentioned Spanish ships trading illegally in Guinea. This may have been because by 1590 Spanish ships had ceased to do this, at least with any regularity, or it may have been because, although the writers were both Portuguese, they were writing after the union of the crowns of Portugal and Spain and neither wished to upset the monarch by tacking on complaints about the hostile French and English complaints about brotherly Spaniards. A further point is that although both writers were informed about Sierra Leone, their first-hand information dated from some decades before they wrote, hence their comment on French and English ships at Sierra Leone may have referred to the 1570s and earlier, rather than to the 1580s.
10. Hair, P.E.H., “Protestants as Pirates, Slavers, and Proto-Missionaries: Sierra Leone, 1568 and 1582,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 21 (1970), 203–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11. I am not suggesting that slaves were the only commodity of Afro-European trade at Sierra Leone. As well as slaves, Portuguese vessels bought cola, wax, and a little ivory and gold (as documented, for instance, in a Portuguese source of the 1560s complaining about English attacks on a large number of Portuguese vessels; see Hair, P.E.H., “Sierra Leone in the Portuguese Books of Complaint, 1567-1568,” Sierra Leone Studies, 26 [1970], 2–10Google Scholar). But non-Portuguese European traders were not interested in cola and wax. Regular visits therefore indicate trade mainly in the most available commodity, slaves. The minority of Honfleur ships that also visited other localities may, however, have traded at Sierra Leone only in minor commodities. Andrada asserted that renegade Portuguese at Sierra Leone traded with “the pirates” in gold, ivory, ambergris, pepper, and other commodities (Hair, , To Defend Your Empire, 112Google Scholar).
12. Donelha, André, An Account of Sierra Leone and the Rivers of Guinea of Cape Verde (1625), ed. da Mota, A. Teixeira and Hair, P.E.H. (Lisbon, 1977), 109Google Scholar; Almada, Brief Treatise, ch. 16, par. 11.
