Dorado, it was real, but another twenty years would pass before a lone
Florentine merchant was thought to have reached it, and nearly a century
would pass before “Leo Africanus” described the city in his Descrittione
dell’Africa.Even then Timbuktu remained mythical. It was off limits to
Westerners, like Mecca or Tibet. The Portuguese stuck to the coast.
This, the northernmost coast, would be called by later sailors
Senegambia—the name was a combination of the Senegal and Gambia
rivers. There, on the sahel,the Portuguese first met black African societies.
Just as Columbus found the inhabitants of the Caribbean different from
what he expected of “Cathay,” black Africans were different from what the
Portuguese had expected of Timbuktu. The Wolof people were settled vil-
lagers with little to sell the Portuguese except slaves. Slaves were already of
value to the Portuguese, although the Portuguese sugar plantations, which
later would be the great consumers of slaves, were then only in their
infancy; so while the Portuguese entered into trading relationships with the
Wolof, they kept moving south.
From Senegambia, they passed along what later sailors knew as the
Grain Coast. It was given that name because ships were able to buy food-
stuffs there and because the area produced the Malaguetta pepper which is
the source of a spice known as “seeds of paradise.” One English captain
commented that although the climate was oppressive, its agriculture was so
bountiful that “by this fruitfulness the Sunne seemeth partly to recompence
such griefes and molestations as they otherwise receive by the fervent heate
thereof.” The Grain Coast was made up of the Atlantic fringe of modern
Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Ivory Coast.
Later sailors regarded it as a particularly dangerous area because the
Portuguese had often kidnapped the inhabitants when they found no gold
and no slaves for sale. So bad were relations that in the eighteenth century
trade was usually conducted on shipboard, as the sailors feared to go
ashore and the natives did not want them to land. This too was a parallel to
the American experience: along the New England coast, European fisher-
men had created such hostility that when Giovanni da Verrazzano visited
in the sixteenth century, his men were not allowed ashore. What mischief
the English, Dutch, and French must have done in North America, the
Portuguese certainly did in Africa.
82 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA