Africa's Gold Coast Through Portuguese Sources, 1469-1680

Abstract

This book provides the most substantial and important source of material on the Portuguese empire and on Portugal's gold and slave trades with the Gold Coast of West Africa. The Portuguese produced the earliest records for regions in West Africa, none for important than the Gold Coast and its fortified base at São Jorge da Mina. Originally written in Portuguese, Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish, these various documents from the fifteenth to the late seventeenth century include letters, inquisitional files, ship-logs, navigational guides, religious and ethnographic accounts which appear in English translation, many for the first time. These sources add to the handful of existing yet spare translations, but especially illuminate the two-century relations between the Portuguese empire and the Gold Coast in the Atlantic World as well as the world of trans-Savanna and trans-Saharan trade. The volume offer comparative materials for other European interlocutors—Spanish, French, English, and Dutch—garrisoned on the coast or offshore in their vessels. Over that concentrated period, and especially where no other European-supplied records exist, these uncomprehending Portuguese outsiders recorded their observations or received information about local Akan ideas, personalities, polities, and cultural forms animating Gold Coast societies and their relations with Portugal. Bookended by a glossary and an introduction in front and a bibliography and appendix in the rear, palaeographic transcriptions and additional translated materials appear on an accompany website.