considerable cargo of ready-dressed stones and materials for monuments, and that from the quantity of discoveries these expeditions made, the sixteenth century Portuguese homeward bound must have been flying as light as the Cardiff bound collier of to-day.
Still it is remarkable that with all the wealth of detail that we have of these Portuguese discoveries in the fifteenth century there is no mention of the French being on the coast before Pedro do Cintra reaches Sierra Leone and calls it by this name because of the thunder on the mountains roaring like a lion, and so on; but he says nothing of French factories ashore. Azambuja gives quantities of detail regarding the building of San Gorge da Mina, but never says a word about there being already at this place a French fort; yet Sieur Villault, Escuyer, Sieur de Bellfond,[1] speaks of it with detail and certainty. Also M. Robbe says that one of the ships sent out by the association of merchants in 1382 was called the Virgin, that she got as far as Kommenda, and thence to the place where Mina stands, and that next year they built at this place a strong house, in which they kept ten or twelve of their men to secure it; and they were so fortunate in this settlement that in 1387 the colony was considerably enlarged, and did a good trade until 1413, when, owing to the wars in France, the store of these adventurers being exhausted, they were obliged to quit not only Mina, but their other settlements, as Sestro Paris, Cape Mount, Sierra Leone, and Cape Verde.
Villault, who went to West Africa to stir up the French to renew the Guinea trade, openly laments the folly of the
- ↑ A Relation of the Coasts of Africa called Guinea collected by Sieur Villault, Escuyer, Sieur de Bellfond, in the years 1666–1667. London John Starkey, 1670.
