there was a place called Tagazza, signifying a chest of gold; there large quantities of rock salt were dug from the earth every year and carried on camels by the Arabs and the Azanaghi, who were tawny Moors,[1] in separate companies to Timbuk, and from thence to the Empire of Melli, which belonged to the negroes; having arrived there they disposed of their salt in the course of eight days, at the rate of two and three hundred mitigals the load (a mitigal=a ducat), according to the quantity thereof, after which they returned home with the gold they had been paid in. The se merchants reckoned it forty days' journey on horseback from Tagazza to "Timbuk" as Mostro, while from Timbuk to Melli it is thirty days' journey. Ca da Mostro then inquired to what use the salt taken to Melli was put; and they said that the merchants used a certain quantity of it themselves, for on account of their country lying near the Line, where the days and nights are of equal length, at certain seasons of the year the heats were excessive, and putrefied the blood unless salt was taken; their method of taking it was to dissolve a piece in a porringer of water daily and drink it. When the remainder of the salt reached Melli, carried thither on camels, each camel load was broken up into pieces of a suitable size for one man to carry. A large number of what Ca da Mostro calls footmen―whom we nowadays call porters―were assembled at Melli to be ready to carry the salt from thence further away still into the heart of Africa.
I have dwelt on this salt's wanderings because we
- ↑ The writers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries commonly divide up the natives of Africa into—1, Moors; 2, Tawny Moors; 3, Black Moors, a term that lingers to this day in our word Blackeymoor; 4, Negroes.
