ABSTRACT
The orthodox historians of the exploration of the Guinea coast during the fifteenth century have always attributed it entirely to the Portuguese. Drawing upon Portuguese chronicles and contemporary documents in the Torre do Tombo, the Portuguese record office, they have effected a masterly and detailed reconstruction of that official account, which ambassadors and propagandists of the government of Portugal often reiterated during the second half of the sixteenth century in reply to French and English critics. This was that the Portuguese, by their own unaided efforts, had discovered Guinea and had undertaken at great cost the exploration of its coast and the conquest of its peoples. But if the reader will take a map and study the relative positions of Europe and Africa, he will observe that the ports of Europe nearest to West Africa are not merely those of Portugal, but all those which lie between the Straits of Gibraltar and Cape Finisterre. The ports of Spain’s Atlantic seaboard, as well as those of Portugal, face the African Isles, Barbary, and the coast of Guinea. They also look out south-westwards across what the chroniclers of African exploration called the ‘ocean sea’. Observing this, the enquiring reader may well ask how it came about that seamen from the ports of Palos, Huelva, Sanlucar, Puerto de Santa Maria and Cadiz are not recorded as having played any substantial part in the discovery of Guinea and the development of its early trade. Why was it that the Andalusians of these Spanish Atlantic ports appear to have been idle at the time when the Portuguese were exploring the shores of Africa beyond Cape Bojador, and why did they refrain from exploration, save for a few bold expeditions to the Canary islands, until the first great voyage of Columbus? In the circumstances, the reader may be pardoned, should he question 186the honesty and impartiality of the Portuguese chroniclers, from whom he is obliged to draw most of his information about the discovery and conquest of Guinea, and should he wonder whether, after all, these writers have omitted events which might belittle the achievements of their own countrymen. In point of fact, his suspicions would not be unfounded, for there are records which prove that the Andalusians were active at this time in organising voyages to Guinea. These records have been collected, translated, and printed below in this section. They show that between 1453 and 1480 Andalusian seamen and traders sent many ships to the West African coast, and that the government of Castile claimed exclusive possession of Guinea. But they are too vague and too fragmentary to permit the deduction, not necessarily incorrect, that the Castilians contributed substantially to the work of exploring the coast of Guinea.
