Liberia ^ 



century, suggesting that the rapacity of the Europeans, com- 

 bined with the slave trade, did much to brutalise and impoverish 

 the coastal tribes of Liberia during the two hundred years 

 between 1670 and 1870. They seem to have been well 

 furnished with cattle (in Northern, perhaps not in Southern 

 Liberia), with sheep, goats, and fowls,^ to have carried on a 

 good deal of agriculture, and not to have been such complete 

 savages as were the natives of the still little-known parts 

 of Portuguese Guinea or the people of the Ivory Coast, who 

 were wild cannibals. 



Having cast a glance at the principal commercial products 

 of these countries when they were first discovered by Europeans, 

 it may be interesting to note the trade goods which Europe 

 was able to offer to the Blacks from the fourteenth to the 

 seventeenth century. To begin with a negative statement, 

 there were no cotton goods, no calicoes in the holds of these 

 vessels such as there would be nowadays. Strange to say, 

 it was the natives of the Gambia and other rivers of Northern 

 Guinea, and of Cape Mount in Liberia, that impressed the 

 Europeans with the excellence of their cotton fabrics, and 

 actually sent some cotton goods to Portugal ! 



Two or three species of cotton grow in almost all parts 

 of Tropical Africa,^ and it was the Arabs who had brought 

 to Africa from India a knowledge of spinning cotton and 



' The domestic fowl, in fact, was so abundant amongst the tribes of Liberia 

 and the borderlands of Sierra Leone, that the Portuguese named one of the 

 streams of this country '' GalHnhas," " the River of Hens." 



* There are many different species of the genus Gossypiuni (cotton) yielding 

 a vegetable fleece which varies in length of staple, in colour, and in quality. One 

 species only (it is said) is actually indigenous to West Africa, Gossypium punctatum. 

 The cultivated forms seem to be of either Indian or American origin. Divers 

 species are indigenous to America, where the civilised natives of the tropical 

 regions spun and wove the cotton into fabrics long before the Europeans discovered 

 America. Columbus, in returning from Hispaniola in 1493, brought back with him 

 pods of cotton-wool as curiosities. 



72 



