to the upper Gambia River. There they met up with merchants from downriver who were supplying the Atlantic and American markets, which preferred male slaves, and quickly sold them away in exchange for European imports. Some of these Atlantic goods could then be used to purchase gold in the Bambuk goldfields, thus beginning new circuits of arbitrage trading.29
FIGURE 1.2 Map of the Upper Guinea Coast and the Cape Verde Islands. The National Archives of the UK, Nicolas Sanson, L’Afrique en plusieurs cartes nouvelles (Paris, 1656).
Specialized merchants such as the Jahaanke were known to Europeans as being particularly adept at initiating, negotiating, and closing deals. And deals were complicated. They involved making a series of offers and refusals, some real and others feigned, on the composition of specific trade goods in each assortment to be exchanged and on the relative values of the assortments as expressed in an agreed currency of account. Francisco de Lemos Coelho, a Portuguese merchant based in the Cape Verde Islands who lived for twenty-three years in the mid-seventeenth century on the Upper Guinea Coast, recorded what he had seen of Jahaanke merchants conducting their business. Jahaanke-led caravans of merchants and their loads of goods and provisions were among the largest in the hinterlands of the Upper Guinea Coast. They regularly set out from their homelands in November as the dry season opened roads. By the time they reached the entrepôt of Barrakunda up the Gambia River in July, their caravans had swelled to several thousand people, including large numbers of captives, over two thousand donkeys, and quantities of ivory, cotton textiles, and gold. Some of the merchants continued on down to the coast, where they purchased salt with a portion of their cotton cloth. Others remained on the spot to do business with Europeans who came upriver to purchase captives, ivory, gold, and cotton cloth. It appears that the privileged and highly respected and powerful Muslim clerics who led them possessed the authority to negotiate market prices and deal directly with European agents. Several caravan leaders would meet with agents to agree on a fair equivalency in the commodities they carried for a fixed, often fictional, length of cloth, for example, and on how a purchase price was to be paid in practice, such as in units of writing paper (reams or quires), in beads, or in a combination of the two. Once these equivalents were established, the rest of the individual merchant sellers converged on the scene and, according to this witness, engaged in nonstop intense trading for up to twenty-four hours. As with Álvares de Almada in the previous century, Coelho remarked admiringly that he saw no evidence of cheating or theft.30
Other merchant groups handled their commercial exchanges through whatever different procedures they found acceptable, but again, prices would be expressed in a currency of account while the actual payments would be made in other goods and currencies of exchange. Coelho witnessed smaller caravans of a hundred men or fewer arriving at Barrakunda from nearby areas and gave a description of how these merchants operated. What they hoped for was to sell their captives and ivory tusks and to be paid as much as possible in salt, but in this case they did not have a hand in deciding and setting prices. Trading was allowed to commence only after local officials in charge of the venue determined what the relative prices of goods and values of currency units would be in their domains. The example given by Coelho was for the largest and best-quality ivory tusk, which was priced at a notional ten cotton cloths. That price was to be paid partly in salt, whose value had been set per single dry unit of measure, in this case, a bowl of a certain standard size. Prices for other possible “payment goods” were then set in relation to the units of cloth and salt. What is most interesting is what Coelho had to say about the trade at Barrakunda in gold. Valuation of the precious metal in relation to other currencies and goods was such that European merchants who bought it discovered that it was not as profitable as buying other commodities and selling them later for gold-equivalent paper or favors of the powerful in European economies. In speaking of Atlantic commerce, Coelho claimed that European merchants could realize much greater eventual profits in this part of the Guinea Coast by dealing in ivory or captives rather than gold.31 Whether or not he was deliberately trying to avoid royal interference in a profitable transaction by downplaying gold as a trade item there, it was indeed the case that Africa’s gold exports in Atlantic trade came not so much from Upper Guinea as they did from the Gold Coast.
Bar iron was the essential commodity currency for Europeans trading on the Upper Guinea Coast. We see indications of concentration on this highly useful metal from the start with the establishment of Portuguese settlements on the Cape Verde Islands in the 1460s and then, increasingly in the 1500s, among the communities that lançados (men of Portuguese descent operating independently along the coast) were establishing on the mainland. Attempts by the Portuguese crown to regulate the commerce of these settler-traders and their Luso-African descendants were chronically unsuccessful as they evaded royal decrees and continued to work privately and independently, in direct competition with the official trade of Portuguese monarchs. Among the decrees issued in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to control these outlaws were regulations that specifically prohibited the sale of iron on the Guinea Coast, a convincing indication of its strategic importance. Local Portuguese interests, lançados and Cape Verde Islanders, were reportedly using it especially in transactions for the purchase of captives and ivory.32 Where this iron was from, whether it was locally produced bar iron acquired in arbitrage trade or European bar iron either transshipped from Lisbon through the islands or acquired illicitly from other European traders in the vicinity, or a combination of all of the above, is not clear.
In the second half of the sixteenth century, small numbers of French and English merchants began to intrude on the Upper Guinea Coast. But they did so only in fits and starts since they were initially ill-equipped and hesitant to challenge Portugal’s long-standing claims to trade with Africa. What trading they did was centered mainly on the Senegal River, along the Petite Côte, the coast between the Gambia River and south to the vicinity of Sherbro Island, and much farther south and east on the Gold Coast. These merchants were in search of captives, intermediate goods for European markets such as hides and ivory, and, above all, gold. Armed clashes with vessels manned by local lançados and Portuguese alike kept any serious expansion of the foreigners’ trade there in check.
It is therefore of interest to consider the vituperative remarks of Álvares de Almada, who described commerce on the Upper Guinea Coast in the late sixteenth century as being in ruin because of the French and the English. His account exaggerates the influence of these newcomers prior to the seventeenth century so as to portray his compatriots as victims in dire need of royal favors. In the past, he complains, many vessels from the Cape Verde Islands had sailed to the mainland to purchase captives, cloth, wax, and ivory in abundance. However, rising competition with agents of French and English merchants had supposedly forced them to abandon the trade. They had bid up prices for African commodities and captives, he claimed, and the former peace and security they had enjoyed with their coastal trading partners no longer existed. In describing so dramatically the decline of Portuguese trade on the Upper Guinea Coast at this time, it is likely that Almada was deliberately using them to bolster his case for a stronger official Portuguese presence there as well as protecting the hidden activities of his fellow islander and lançado merchants.33
It was the seventeenth century that saw an increasing presence of Dutch, English, and French merchants on the Upper Guinea Coast—predecessors of the RAC—and with them came a flood of European-made bar iron and other overseas commodities. Since much of the larger-scale iron smelting in West Africa was done in regions of the interior, blacksmiths near the coast would have had very limited and uncertain supplies of the metal besides what little they got from recycling. Thus these new Atlantic sources of iron must have significantly enabled the work of these smiths. The Englishman Richard Jobson’s account of his travels on the Gambia River in 1620–21 provides a valuable description of local blacksmiths, their workshops and products, and how much these new supplies of European bar iron were already becoming such a boon to them. He commented that among all of the artisanal occupations he had observed, the most important one was blacksmithing. He described how blacksmiths specialized in working bars of iron metal into finished goods such as swords, javelin blades, arrows, and especially agricultural tools. They themselves were not smelters and so depended on others for their