ABSTRACT
The Gambia River may not be the calmest and most easily navigated of the world’s great waterways, but to seamen entering the river after a few weeks of tossing in the choppy Atlantic, it may seem so. The Gambia flows into the ocean 115 miles below Cape Verde, the westernmost tip of the African continent. The river’s mouth is surprisingly broad-twelve miles across at its entrance into the Atlantic-and funnel-shaped as if designed to catch vessels coasting down around the cape from the north. Inside the mouth, the river is a sailor’s delight: its main channel is deep and its strong tidal flow helps vessels move upriver. In the days of sail, most ships could ride the winds and tides 120 miles eastward to a port on the river called NianiMaru. Smaller craft that could tack more easily between the narrowing banks were able to pass another eighty miles eastward to Barokunda Falls, a series of laterite ledges on which craft drawing a little more than three feet of water scraped bottom. Large canoes could pass Barokunda and travel another 140 miles southeasterly toward the edge of the Futa Jalon highlands. Thus, from as early as West Africans put vessels on the water, the Gambia served as a highway into the interior.
