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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2014
In 1974 the very first issue of HA included an analysis of a small section of John Barbot's Description of the coasts of North and South Guinea. Since this represented the first fruits of a project to edit Barbot's writings on Guinea, it is appropriate that, now the completed edition is published, a review of the history of the editing, the methods and problems of the editors, and the problems that the consumer will face in using the edition, should also appear in HA.
Why Barbot? When, twenty years ago, I decided that Barbot's account of Guinea should be edited, I already knew that it was partly unoriginal, and that in an ideal world priority would be given to editing the other, earlier, recognized compendium on Guinea, the relevant section of Dapper's account of all Africa. For although Dapper is also partly unoriginal, it has probably a wider range of new material than Barbot, not least the very detailed Kquoja account. Why then Barbot rather than Dapper? The answer is simple. I recognized the lack of critical editing of Guinea sources and felt I had to take the plunge somewhere. But whereas Dapper wrote in Dutch, a language of which I have only dictionary command, the earlier manuscript version of Barbot was in French, a language I could cope with. Dapper will have his turn. Adam Jones, one of the co-editors of “Barbot on Guinea,” having Dutch, has already published studies of Dapper's sources. Moreover, in the edition of Barbot we have taken the unusual step of including in the annotation fairly frequent references to the lines of transmission of information, for instance, not only noting the material Barbot borrowed from Dapper but also, where the material was not original to Dapper, the sources of his borrowing—thus doing part of the work of a critical edition of Dapper. In fact we have generally tried to make the edition of Barbot a starting point for the critical study of many other pre-1700 Guinea sources.
Those consulting our work may care to correct one error detected too late to put right in the text. It concerns an engraving of Cape Coast Castle by Henry Greenhill. The reference given on p. lxxvi, n55, is correct, the different reference in the list of illustrations on p. cxv is incorrect. The engraving is separately preserved in the British Library and not, as stated, united with the set of Barbot engravings.
1. Hair, P.E.H., “Barbot, Dapper, Davity: a Critique of Sources on Sierra Leone and Cape Mount,” HA 1 (1974): 25–54.Google Scholar
2. Barbot on Guinea: the writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa 1678-1712, ed. Hair, P.E.H., Jones, Adam, and Law, Robin (2 vols.: London: Hakluyt Society, London, 1992).Google Scholar The edition includes a large number of Barbot's excellent drawings of coastal scenes, European forts, and African natural history and ethnography. Excluded from the edition are Barbot's fairly extensive vocabularies of four West African languages. These have been analyzed in a separate detailed study: Hair, P.E.H., ed., Barbot's West African Vocabularies of c. 1680, Centre of African Studies, University of Liverpool, 1992, 44 pp.Google Scholar (available only from the Centre or from myself, c/o Department of History).
3. See Jones, Adam, “Decompiling Dapper: a Preliminary Search for Evidence,” HA 17 (1990): 171–209.Google Scholar
4. In 1987, however, Marion Johnson produced a most useful index to the 1979 publication of Barbot's 1678-79 journal (an index we then wished we had had available earlier), sadly published only after her death: Johnson, Marion, “An Index to Barbot's 1678-1679 Journal,” HA 15 (1988): 303–19.Google Scholar
5. An initial probing of the material on Calabar was kindly carried out in the 1970s by John Latham.
6. See Law, Robin, “Jean Barbot as a Source for the Slave Coast of West Africa,” HA 9 (1982): 155–73.Google Scholar
7. Whatever the final judgment on the value of Barbot as a source, the 1732 printed work has probably been cited more frequently by twentieth-century writers on precolonial Guinea and on the Atlantic slave trade than any other printed source. It therefore seemed to us important to offer later researchers and historians a detailed critical assessment of Barbot.
8. When admitting to borrowing (in Letter 3), Barbot made the following claims: “I draw on only what seems to be most important and most plausible, and I have judged the truth of those points I have borrowed, by their conformity with what I myself know for fact.” Barbot may indeed have included only what he considered most plausible, but the subsequent claim, that all borrowings had some “conformity” with personal knowledge, lacks the strength of a claim that all borrowings confirmed personal knowledge.
