170 THROUGH ANGOLA 



in far Byzantium, and a culture brought thence 

 by people from the East, across so-called unknown 

 Africa. These ancient West African civilizations, 

 which may have found their original impulse in 

 Etruscan and Byzantine culture, influenced in 

 the coastal provinces by later Phoenician and 

 Carthaginian intercourse, and in the interior by 

 that of Persia and Nubia, were adversely affected 

 many centuries later by the coming of Islam from 

 the North, which brought with it. not a new and 

 higher culture, as has been generally taught, but 

 a destruction of much that was beautiful, and a 

 degradation of what had been great. 



The French claim for their Norman merchants 

 of Dieppe the discovery, in the fourteenth century, 

 of Scnegambia and the Gold Coast ; but it is to 

 the Portuguese navigators of the fifteenth century 

 that the discovery of most of the West African 

 coast and islands is due. 



It w r as that great Prince of Portugal, Henry 

 " the Navigator," who first, and from 1415 on- 

 wnrds until his death, inspired his sailors and sent 

 his ships to these unknown seas. It was the 

 Portuguese who rediscovered most of the West 

 African islands, and sailed more than any other 

 nation along the uncharted coast of Africa. 



Though Prince Henry had been granted power 

 by the Pope to annex those lands " from West 

 to East " which he discovered, his navigators were 

 content to place just a wooden cross, with the 

 Prince's crest, where the little 100-ton ships bore 

 them, and it was not till Don Joao came to the 

 throne of Portugal that lie made use of the Pope's 



