Africa and the American Flag

by Andrew H. Foote

Vessels running out from the African coast fall here and there into these lines traced on the chart, or sometimes cross them. No one can tell what they contain from the graceful hull, well-proportioned masts, neatly trimmed yards, and gallant bearing of the vessel. This deceitful beauty may conceal wrong, violence, and crime—the theft of living men, the foulness and corruption of the steaming slave-deck, and the charnel-house of wretchedness and despair.

It is difficult in looking over the ship’s side to conceive the transparency of the sea. The reflection of the blue sky in these tropic regions colors it like an opaque sapphire, till some fish startles one by suddenly appearing far beneath, seeming to carry daylight down with him into the depths below. One is then reminded that the vessel is suspended over a transparent abyss. There for ages has sunk the dark-skinned sufferer from “the horrors of the middle passage,” carrying that ghastly daylight down with him, to rest until “the sea shall give up its dead,” and the slaver and his merchant come from their places to be confronted with their victim.

The relation of the western nations to these shores present themselves under three phases, which claim more or less attention in order to a full understanding of the subject. These are,

I. Period of Discovery, Piracy and Slaving.

II. Period of Colonizing.

III. Period of Naval Cruising.

CHAPTER II.

DISCOVERIES BY FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE ALONG THE COAST—CAPE OF GOOD HOPE—RESULTS.

The French of Normandy contested with the Portuguese the honor of first venturing into the Gulf of Guinea. It was, however, nearly a hundred years from the time when the latter first embarked in these discoveries, until, in 1487, they reached the Cape of Good Hope. For about eight centuries the Mohammedan in the interior had been shaping out an influence for himself by proselyting and commerce. The Portuguese discoverer met this influence on the African shores. The Venetians held a sort of partnership with the Mohammedans in the trade of the East: Portugal had then taken scarcely any share in the brilliant and exciting politics of the Levant; her vocation was to the seas of the West, but in that direction she was advancing to an overwhelming triumph over her Eastern competitor.

On the 3d of May, 1487, a boat left one of two small high-sterned vessels, of less tonnage than an ordinary river sloop of the present day, and landed a few weather-beaten men on a low island of rocks, on which they proceeded to erect a cross. The sand which rustled across their footsteps, the sigh of the west wind among the waxberry bushes, and the croakings of the penguins as they waddled off,—these were the voices which hailed the opening of a new era for the world; for Bartholomew Diaz had then passed the southern point of Africa, and was listening to the surf of the Antarctic Sea.