This book was originally designed to be part of a series of publications (since discontinued) entitled Portuguese Encounters with the World in the Age of the Discoveries, and was to be the companion volume to the one on east Africa that was published by Ashgate in 2002. The general editor of the series laid down the format to which all the volumes were to conform. The object of the series was to provide a selection of original sources in English translation that would illustrate the interaction of the Portuguese with the peoples of Africa, Asia and America in the period from 1400 to 1700. The emphasis would be on the way Europeans and non-Europeans reacted to these first contacts, and how their mentalities and cultures were changed by the experience. This volume follows closely the original conception of the Portuguese Encounters series.

Anyone approaching the history of the Portuguese in northern and western Africa soon becomes dependent on the great collections of documents edited by Pierre de Cenival, António Brásio and Louis Jadin, which have never been translated into English. English readers have had to rely on the publications of the Hakluyt Society and the scholarly volumes edited by Paul Hair and Avelino Teixeira da Mota. These are the main sources from which the documents in this collection have been drawn, supplemented with extracts from von Ehingen, Pigafetta, Cadornega, Carletti, the Anonymous Pilot who wrote about São Tomé and the manuscript of Valentim Fernandes.