Liberia ^^ 



their own. Pigs also were introduced into these countries by 

 the Portuguese.^ 



Wine was carried in the Portuguese vessels as a beverage 

 absolutely necessary for their use ; but at first the Negroes do 

 not appear to have greatly appreciated it, preferring their own 

 native alcoholic drinks, the fermented sap of various palm trees 

 or a mead made from honey. Not much notice in these 

 earlier days of African trade seems to have been taken of 

 European alcohol until the seventeenth century, when the fatal 

 development of distillation created such strong waters as gin 

 and rum, which were to prove the curse of the coast regions 

 of West Africa, as they have been the curse of Northern 

 Europe. Perhaps one reason why less is recorded in the 

 chronicles of the African trade from the middle of the fifteenth 

 to the middle of the seventeenth century of violent fevers and 

 deadly epidemics amongst the European traders and explorers 

 was the relative sobriety of the latter, whose strong drink was 

 for the most part the natural, unbrandied wines of Spain and 

 Portugal. Moreover, in spite of the slave trade, their relations 

 with the natives seem to have been easier on the whole, and 

 less marked by murders on both sides than they were from 

 the middle of the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth 

 century. 



The sugar-cane had apparently reached North-west Africa, 



' In all Tropical Africa, with the exception of Sennar and the outskirts of 

 Northern Abyssinia, there is no indigenous wild swine of the genus Sus. The 

 nearest form to this genus would be Potamochoetus, the bush or river pigs of 

 Tropical Africa and Madagascar. Potamochoerus in its structure is so very nearly 

 related to the genus Sus that by some it is fused with that genus. The wild 

 Potamochoerus will interbreed with our domestic pigs. The handsome red river 

 hogs of West Africa {Potaniochcerus porcus) are very easily tamed and domesticated ; 

 but although they are sometimes found as pets in West African villages, there has 

 never been any determined attempt on the part of the Negro to domesticate 

 this animal. Consequently the domestic pigs which were introduced by the 

 Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were eagerly received, 



76 



