CHAPTER XI
FRENCH DISCOVERY OF WEST AFRICA
Concerning the controversy that is between the French and the Portuguese as to which of them first visited West Africa, with special reference to the fort at Elmina.
We will now turn our attention to the other pioneers of our present West African trade, and commence with the French, for we cannot disassociate our own endeavours in this region from those of France, Portugal, Holland, and the Brandenburgers; nor are we the earliest discoverers here. When we English heard the West African Coast was a region worth trading with, those great brick-makers for the architects of England’s majesty, the traders, went for it and traded, and have made that trading pay as no other nation has been able to do. However, from the first we got called hard names—pirates, ruffians, interlopers, and such like—in fact, every bad name the other nations could spare from the war of abuse they chronically waged against each other.
The French claim to have traded with West Africa prior to the discoveries made there by the emissaries of Prince Henry the Navigator.[39] When on my last voyage out I was in French territory, I own the discovery of this claim of my French friends came down on me as a shock, because on my previous voyage out I had been in Portuguese possessions, and had spent many a pleasant hour listening to the recital of the deeds of Diego Caõ and Lopez do Gonsalves, and others of that noble brand of man, the fifteenth-century Portugee. I heard then nothing of French discoverers, and also had it well knocked out of my mind that the English had discovered anything of importance in West Africa save the Niger outfalls, and I had a furious war to keep this honour for my fellow countrymen. Then when I got into French territory not one word did I hear of Diego Caõ or Lopez; and so as a distraction from the consideration of the private characters of people still living, I started discoursing on what I considered a safer and more interesting subject, and began to recount how I had had the honour of being personally mixed up in the monument to Diego Caõ at the mouth of the Congo, and what fine fellows—I got no farther than that, when, to my horror, I heard my heroes called microbes, followed by torrents of navigators’ names, all French, and all unknown to me. Being out for information I never grumble when I get it, let it be what it may. So I asked my French friends to write down clearly on paper the names of those navigators, and promised as soon as I left the forests of the Equator, and reached the book forests of Europe, I would try and find out more about them. I have; and I own that I owe profound apologies to those truly great Frenchmen for not having made their acquaintance sooner; nevertheless I still fail to see why my honoured Portuguese, Diego and Lopez, should have been called microbes, and I have no regrets about my fights for the honour of the Niger for my own countrymen, nor for my constant attempts to take the conceit out of my French and Portuguese friends, as a set-off for “the conceit about England” they were always trying to take out of me, by holding forth on what those Carthaginians had done on the West Coast before France or Portugal were so much as dreamt of.
The Portuguese discoveries you can easily read of in Major’s great book on Prince Henry; and as this book is fully accepted as correct by the highest Portuguese authorities, it is safer to do so than to attempt to hunt your Portuguese hero for yourself, because of the quantity of names each of them possesses, and the airy indifference as to what part of that name their national chroniclers use in speaking of them. I have tried it, and have several times been in danger of going to my grave with the idea that I was investigating the exploits of two separate gentlemen, whereas I was only dealing with two parts of one gentleman’s name; nevertheless, it is a thing worth learning Portuguese for. And, in addition to Major’s book, we have now, thanks to the Hakluyt Society, that superb thing, the Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, by Gomez Eanes de Zurara—a work completed in 1453. This work is one on which we are largely dependent for the details of the early Portuguese discoveries, because Gomez Eanes spent the later part of his life in tidying up the Torre do Tombo—namely, the national archives, of which he was keeper—and his idea of tidying up included the lady-like method of destroying old papers. It makes one cold now to think of the things De Zurara may have destroyed; but he evidently regarded himself, as does the nineteenth century spring-cleaner, as a human benefactor; and, strange to say, his contemporaries quite took his view; indeed, this job was done at the request of the Cortes, and with the Royal sanction. There is also an outstanding accusation of forgery against Zurara, but that is a minor offence, and is one we need only take into consideration when contemplating the question as to whether a man capable of destroying early manuscripts and forgery might not be also capable of leaving out of his Chronicle, in honour of the Navigator, any mention of there being Frenchmen on the Coast, when he sent out his emissaries to discover what might lay hidden from the eye of man down in the Southern Seas. I do not, however, think De Zurara left out this thing intentionally, but that he had no knowledge of it if it did exist, for no man could have written as he wrote, unless he had a heart too great for such a meanness. Certain it is Prince Henry never knew, for these are the five reasons given by Zurara, in the grave, noble splendour of his manner, why the Prince undertook the discoveries with which his name will be for ever associated. I give the passage almost in full because of its beauty. “And you should note well that the noble spirit of this Prince (Henry the Navigator) by a sort of natural constraint was ever urging him both to begin and carry out very great deeds; for which reason after the taking of Ceuta, he always kept ships well armed against the Infidel, both for war and because he also had a wish to know the land that lay beyond the Isles of Canary and that Cape called Bojador, for that up to his time neither by writings nor by the memory of man was known with any certainty the nature of the land beyond that Cape. Some said indeed Saint Brandan had passed that way, and there was another tale of two galleys rounding the Cape which never returned ... and because the said Lord Infant wished to know the truth of this—since it seemed to him if he, or some other Lord, did not endeavour to gain that knowledge, no mariners or merchants would ever dare to attempt it, (for the reason that none of them ever trouble themselves to sail to a place where there is not a sure and certain hope of profit,) and seeing also that no other prince took any pains in this matter, he sent out his own ships against those parts, to have manifest certainty of them all, and to this he was stirred up by his zeal for the service of God, and of King Dom Duarto, his Lord and brother, who then reigned; and this was the first reason of his action.”
“The second reason was that if there chanced to be in those lands a population of Christians or some havens into which it would be possible to sail without peril, many kinds of merchandise might be brought to this nation which would find a ready market, and reasonably so because no other people of these parts traded with them, nor yet people of any other that were known; and also the products of this nation might be taken there, which traffic would bring great profit to our countrymen.”
“The third reason was that as it was said that the power of the Moors in that land of Africa was very much greater than was commonly supposed, and that there were no Christians among them nor any other race of men, and because every wise man is obliged by natural prudence to wish for a knowledge of the power of his enemy; therefore the said Lord Infant exerted himself to cause them to be fully discovered to make it known determinedly how far the power of those Infidels extended.”