ORIGIN OF WEST AFRICAN CROSSBOWS BALFOUR. 



643 



It seems to me unlikely that the crossbow was introduced into 

 West Africa overland from the northeasterly portion of the con- 

 tinent — though this has been suggested by some 1 — since this weapon, 

 though probably known in early days through European contact, 

 can not be regarded as characteristic of or as having been adopted 

 in that part of the world, which is therefore unlikely to have afforded 

 the source of inspiration through the medium of Arab traders and 

 explorers. The more probable and more generally accepted theory 

 is that West Africa owes the crossbow directly to western Europe, 

 and I hope to show that this theory is far more plausible even than 

 is generally supposed. 



The reputed French trading adventurers of the fourteenth cen- 

 tury, the Portuguese explorers from the middle fifteenth century 

 onward, and the Dutch, English, 

 and Danes, who followed closely 

 upon their heels and vied with 

 them for commercial supremacy, 

 may be regarded as the possible 

 introducers of the crossbow into 

 western Africa, in the region of 

 the Bight of Benin, the scene of 

 their keenest investigations and 

 most strenuous rivalries. The 

 famous bronzes, cast by the cera 

 perduta process by the natives 

 of Benin, afford evidence of the 

 use of the crossbow as a weapon 

 by invading Europeans in the 

 sixteenth or seventeenth cen- 

 tury. A bronze plaque in the 

 British Museum - carries a figure in relief of a European, probably 

 of the sixteenth century, carrying a crossbow (Fig 7, a) and three 

 different, kinds of bolts or quarrels (pointed, blunt headed, and 

 chisel ended), and the realistic manner in which these are portrayed 

 is evidence of an accurate appreciation of their utility and detailed 

 construction by natives already acquainted with the long bow. On 

 the other hand, none of the numerous figures of armed natives repre- 

 sented upon these bronzes are equipped with this weapon, and this 

 negative evidence may be regarded as indicating that the crossbow 

 was still purely exotic at the time, and had not yet been adopted 



1 Sir H. H. Johnston in his hook already referred to, as also in a letter which he 

 kindly wrote to me, expresses the opinion that the crossbow reached West Africa hy 

 two routes: (1) from Egypt, where it was introduced in Crusading times, and thence 

 transmitted by Moslem influence, (2) from Portugal by the West Coast sea route. 



" Figured by Read and Dalton in The Antiquities of Benin, London, 1899, pi. 14, fig. 1. 



Fig. 7. — European crossbow, represented in 

 relief upon a bronze plaque, from Benin, in 

 the British Museum. (a=upper view; 

 6=side view.) 



