Explorers & agents · compiled c. 1506–10
Valentim Fernandes
The Moravian printer in Lisbon whose compilation preserves the earliest detailed descriptions of the Grain Coast.
Biography
Fernandes never sailed to Africa. He collected and copied the accounts of those who had — pilots, factors and missionaries — into a manuscript now in Munich, which is the fullest surviving record of the Upper Guinea coast at the moment of contact.
It names peoples, describes markets, notes the pepper trade and the salt-making, and records political arrangements that no later source repeats.
Historical significance
The single most important early written window onto pre-contact Liberian coastal society — and a reminder that the written record begins in the fifteenth century, not the nineteenth.
Timeline
- c. 1506–10Compilation assembled in Lisbon
- 1940s–50sCritical editions published
- 1960sUsed by Hair and Rodney to reconstruct coastal society
Related entries
References
- Fernandes, Valentim (c. 1506–10). Description de la Côte Occidentale d'Afrique (ed. Monod, Teixeira da Mota & Mauny, 1951).
- Hair, P. E. H. (1967). 'Ethnolinguistic Continuity on the Guinea Coast.'
Suggested reading
- Hair (1967).