So the Portuguese plunged farther down the coast, around the great
western bulge of Africa, until in 1471 they reached the area that became
known as the Gold Coast (roughly modern Ghana). There, they encoun-
tered the prosperous Akan people. The Akan welcomed the Portuguese,
whose trading goods they found attractive; and from 1471, eleven years after
the death of Prince Henry the Navigator and ten years before Columbus
sailed for America, the Akan began to supply the Portuguese with gold.
Gold the Akan had, but unlike the Wolof they had no slaves for sale; in
fact, what they wanted from the Portuguese as much as goods from Europe
were African slaves to work their gold mines. The Portuguese discovered
that if they could get slaves elsewhere in Africa, they could trade them to
the Akan for gold. They ultimately sold the Akan about 12,000 blacks from
other states. So they settled down in a convenient anchorage and built the
first of the European trading factories, São Jorge da Mina, later known as
Elmina. Columbus himself visited it before his trip to the New World. So
profitable was the trade, and so difficult was the return voyage to Portugal,
that the Portuguese soon built two more forts. These became the proto-
types for the later stations built by the Dutch, English, and Danish slave
traders.
Although they were noted for their brutal imperialism, the Portuguese
soon learned to respect the native rulers, to pay rent for the lands on which
they built their forts, and (usually) to honor the agreed terms of trade. This
policy was hardly altruistic; rather, it was a response to African military
power. As John Thornton has pointed out, some of the little city-states on the
West African coast “had a well-developed specialized maritime culture that
was fully capable of protecting its own waters.” The first Portuguese visitors
learned this the hard way. When they engaged in assault rather than trade, as
they initially did on the Grain Coast in 1444, the natives struck back: black
soldiers armed with bows and arrows and javelins and carried into battle in
dugout canoes wiped out the next Portuguese raiding expedition. Although
these canoes would not have seemed impressive to sailors riding high above
the water in a carrack, they were large enough to carry up to 100 armed men,
were agile enough to dodge among the slow-moving European sailing ships,
could cross sandbars and plow through breakers where none of the
Portuguese craft could follow, and were so low in the water as to be almost
84 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA