Encounters: European Merchants and West Africa

Repeated from main page

Female Narrator:
This gallery contains objects from a variety of places visited by European explorers and merchants between 1450 and 1600. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to begin direct trade with West African kingdoms, while the Spanish discovered America. Many travelers wrote about their experiences, like Englishman Master James Welsh, who visited the Kingdom of Benin in West Africa in 1588.

Male Voice:
'The commodities that we carried in this voyage were cloth both linnen and woollen, yron works of sundery sorts, Manillios or bracelets of copper, glasse beades, and corrall. The commodities that we brought home were pepper and elephants teeth, oyle of palme, cloth made of cotton wooll very curiously woven and cloth made of the bark of palme trees… Also many pretie mats and baskets that they make, and sponnes of Elephants teeth very curiously wrought with different proportions of foules and beasts made upon them.'

Female Narrator:
Carved ivory objects from West Africa were popular with European collectors. But commodities and decorative items weren't the only goods being traded. Portuguese explorer Duarte Pacheco Pereira wrote about his visit to the Kingdom of Benin in the 1490s:

Male Voice:
'The Kingdom of Beny ... is usually at war with its neighbours and takes many captives, whom we buy at twelve or fifteen brass bracelets each, or for copper bracelets which they prize more.'

Female Narrator:
Pereira's account describes the origins of what would become the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Millions of Africans would later be shipped to the Americas and Europe to work as slave labour.