Liberia ^ 



The fate of the Portuguese kingdom after the battle of Kasr- 

 al-Kablr determined, as has been siid, much of th^ subsequent 

 history of Africa, Asia, and South America. But for this 

 crushing blow, it is quite possible that the Portuguese might 

 have stuck as resolutely to the coast of Liberia as they did to 

 that of Angola and the Congo, and there might have been no 

 Liberia to-day in the sense of a free Negro republic inde- 

 pendent of European control. But although they made an 

 indelible impression on the Grain Coast, although they named 

 most of its striking features and taught the Portuguese language 

 to the Vais and the Kruboys, and in their hundred years of 

 trade monopoly introduced to Liberia the orange tree, lime, 

 coconut palm, pineapple, papaw, chili pepper, and tobacco 

 plant, the European domestic ox (possibly), the hog, and 

 the Muscovy duck, they did not succeed in effecting a per- 

 manent hold. 



In the seventeenth century they were driven away from the 

 Gold Coast. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they 

 were forced to relinquish their hold over Benin and Dahome. 

 All that remains to them at the present day of their " Lordship 

 of Guinea " (which once stretched nearly uninterruptedly from 

 the Senegal to Old Calabar) is the small territory they have 

 at diff^erent times disputed with England and France, round 

 about the River Jeba and the Bisagos Archipelago ; this is 

 now known by the restricted name of Portuguese Guinea. 



days of early Portuguese discovery there were no horses on that coast, it is 

 supposed that the Portuguese explorers sighted a hornless female of the Kob 

 water-buck, and mistook it for a mare ! But they argued from a false analogy in 

 etymology Cavallo means horse in Portuguese ; but the word for mare is "egua," 

 "jumenta,' " poldra." 



The recent form of this name — Cavally — is an Anglo-American corruption 

 thoughtlessly adopted by the French, which should be at once discarded for the 

 correct form — Cavalla. This is used in all the older documents connected with 

 the Liberian Republic. 



52 



