Liberia ^ 



Islamised and generally stirred up to adventure by the Arab 

 invasion of Mauritania. They surged backwards and forwards 

 across the Western Sahara during the tenth, eleventh, and 

 twelfth centuries, rushing in a few years from the banks of the 

 Niger to Spain, or back again from Morocco to the Niger. 

 Thus in about four hundred years after the Arab invasion of 

 Egypt some of the most notable features of the Northern Sudan, 

 from Senegal to Abyssinia, had reached the Arabs and Berbers 

 of North Africa, and had been communicated by them to the 

 Sicilians, the Normans, and Genoese. By the middle of the 

 thirteenth century the Genoese and the Catalans had derived 

 a very correct impression of the main geographical features of 

 the Niger Basin, and even of the North-West African coast.^ 

 More than this, the rapidly growing Moslem civilisation of 

 Jenne and of Timbuktu, had got into touch southwards and 

 north-westwards with the gold-bearing regions of Ashanti or 

 of Bambuk. From such place-names as Jenne or Ghana arose 

 a vague geographical designation — Ghine, Ghinoa, Ghinoia, 

 which was mentioned by Arab and Italian geographers two 

 hundred years before it was actually applied by the Portuguese 

 to West Africa. In fact, the Portuguese had the word Guinea 

 (Guine, Guinala) in their minds when they set out to discover 

 these regions. They did not invent the word Guinea as an 

 original term. 



The Genoese, either coming independently or as the 

 captains or pilots of Spanish and Portuguese vessels, discovered 

 the Canary Islands, as we have already seen, and two of their 



* In 1402 the priests or missionaries attending De Bethencourt's expe- 

 dition to the Canary Islands revived and recorded the accounts of a wonderful 

 journey made about 1230 by a Spanish mendicant friar of the Franciscan 

 Order to Morocco, and from Morocco overland to the Senegal, the " River 

 of Gold," the Kingdom of Melli, and perhaps to the Mandingo hinterland of 

 Liberia. 



34 



