CHAPTER VII 



A DUTCH ACCOUNT OF LIBERIA IN THE 

 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 



THE Dutch had followed up the Portuguese on the West 

 Coast of Africa nearly concurrently with the English ; 

 that is to say, at the close of the sixteenth century, when 

 both these Northern maritime nations could give themselves the 

 excuse of the Spanish absorption of Portugal for wresting from 

 the Portuguese such of their possessions in Africa, Asia, and 

 America as could be torn from them. About 1600 the Dutch 

 captured from the French Arguin Island near Cape Blanco, and 

 the little Island of Ber near Dakar (Cape Verde), which they 

 called Goree, after an islet off the coast of Holland.^ 



Of course, the main objective in West Africa at that period 

 was the Gold Coast, the demand for slaves not having as yet 

 become so important as to oust gold from its first place as a 

 bait in African commerce. They therefore visited the coast of 

 Liberia on their journeys to and from the Gold Coast, though 

 occasionally a special voyage was made to the " Grain " Coast 

 for pepper and ivory. " Grain " was apparently as much a Dutch 

 as an English word (from the Latin granum)^ and was first applied 

 by the Dutch in succession to the Portuguese name Malagueta. 



1 These places were taken from Holland by the French in 1677-8. Portugal 

 was usually stripped of her colonies or forts in this order : first by the Dutch ; then 

 the French plundered the Dutch in the seventeenth century, and the British 

 snatched or bought from France and Holland in the eighteenth and nineteenth 

 centuries. 



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