SELECTION OF GOODS FOR THE ISLANDS FERNANDO PO, ST. THOMAS’S, PRINCE’S, AND ANNOBON.
There were about 150 ships per annum calling and trading at San Tomé in the seventeenth century. The goods in “French ships particularly consist in Holland cloth or linen as well as of Rouen and Brittany, thread of all colours, serges, silk stockings, fustians, Dutch knives, iron, salt, olive oil, copper in sheets or plates, brass kettles, pitch, tar, cordage, sugar forms (from 20 to 30 lbs. apiece), brandy, all kinds of strong liquors and spirits, Canary wines, olives, carpets, fine flour, butter, cheese, thin shoes, hats, shirts, and all sorts of silks out of fashion in Europe, hooks, &c., of each sort a little in proportion.”
In connection with this now but little considered island of San Tomé, so called from having been discovered in the year 1472, under the direction of Henry the Navigator, on the feast day of the Apostle Thomas, there is an interesting bit of history, which has had considerable bearing on the culture of the Lower Congo regions.
The Portuguese, observing the fertility of the soil of this island, decided to establish a colony there for the convenience of trading in the Guinea regions; but the climate was so unwholesome that an abundance of men died before it was well settled and cultivated. “Violent fevers and cholicks that drove them away soon after they were set a-shore.”
“The first design of settling there was in the year 1486 but perceiving how many perished in the attempt, and that they could better agree with that of the continent on the coast of Guinea, it was resolved by King Jaõ II. of Portugal that all the Jews within his dominions, which were vastly numerous, should be obliged to receive baptism, or upon refusal be transported to the coast of Guinea, where the Portuguese had already several considerable settlements and a good trade, considering the time since its first discovery.
“A few years after such of those Jews as had escaped the malignant air, were forced away to this Isle of San Tomé; these married to black women, fetched from Angola in great numbers, with near 3,000 men of the same country.
“From these Jews married to black women in process of time proceeded mostly that brood of mulattos at this day inhabiting the island. Most of them boast of being descended from the Portuguese; and their constitution is by nature much fitter to bear with the malignity of the air.” (For a full account of this matter see the History of Portugal by Faria y Sousa, p. 304.)
San Tomé is now very flourishing, on account of its soil being suited to cocoa and coffee, and there are to-day there plenty of full-blooded Portuguese; but the old strain of Jewish mulattos still exists and is represented by individuals throughout all the coast regions of West Africa. Moreover, these mulattos secured in the seventeenth century a monopoly for Portugal of the slave trade in the Lower Congo, and I largely ascribe the prevalence of customs identical with those mentioned in the Old Testament that you find among the Fjort tribes to their influence, although you always find such customs represented in all the native cultures in West Africa (presumably because the West African culture is what the Germans would call the urstuff), but I fancy in no culture are they so developed as among the Fjorts.[94]