Bosman New and CostlyA New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea by William BosmanReview by: Ivor WilksThe Journal of African History, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1968), pp. 164-166Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/179928 .

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gratulated at least for his implicit acknowledgement that the story of Danish enterprise on the Guinea Coast is an inseparable part of the history of the region as a whole: that the Danish and other European mercantile communities were as integral to the local political scene as the Akyem or the Ashanti. There is, however, no excuse for the intellectual failing shown in the way in which Norregard treats his 'natives'-as barbaric communities existing in a Hobbesian state of nature, incapable of pursuing by rational means ends beneficial to society. While Boston University Press is to be commended for its initiative in making widely available a work hitherto little known outside Denmark, and Mr Sigurd Mammen for his readable translation, it has to be made clear that this is scissors-and-paste history of the worst type, and that Danish Settlements in West Africa exemplifies few of the scholarly virtues that are now becoming manifest in the field of African historical studies.

Dr McCall's preface to this work contains a useful outline of the growth of Danish mercantilism, and some salutary remarks addressed to the historian. The extensive bibliography of both published and unpublished sources will prove of value, though unfortunately it is not without defects. Romer's Nachrichten von der Kiiste Guinea, for example, is a translation of a Danish original of 1760, and Bosman's Voyage de Guinee of a Dutch original of I704. Reindorf's History was published in 1895, not I889. Bowditch should read Bowdich.

Northwestern University IVOR WILKS

BOSMAN NEW AND COSTLY

A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea. By WILLIAM BOSMAN. A new edition with an introduction by JOHN RALPH WILLIS and notes by J. D. FAGE and R. E. BRADBURY. London: Frank Cass and Co. Ltd, I967. Pp. xxi+ 577, 2 maps. ?9. 9s.

Willem Bosman left the Gold Coast for Europe on 27 June I702, having spent fourteen years there in the service of the Dutch West India Company. In this time he rose to be Upper Factor at Elmina. He was repatriated, apparently in disgrace, when Willem de la Palma assumed the director-generalship. The nature of his offence is not clear, but was probably connected with the mis- management of the Ashanti mission of I70I-2. In I704 Bosman published in Utrecht his Nauwkeurige Beschryving van de Guinese Goud- Tand- en Slave-kust. This comprised twenty letters from Bosman to an uncle in Holland, written between early-I7o0 and mid-I702 and concerned mainly with the Gold Coast, together with an account of Benin written by David van Nyendael in 170I (though mis-dated in the English edition to 1702) and a description of the Tooth (Ivory) and Grain Coasts by J. Snoek, dated I702. The I967 edition of this work is a reprint of the Sir Alfred Jones edition of 1907, itself a facsimile of the first English translation published by James Knapton in London in I705. An intro- ductory essay has been contributed by the editor, John Ralph Willis, and notes in elucidation of the text by Professor J. D. Fage, Dr R. E. Bradbury, and others.

Bosman, who apparently left Europe for West Africa when only sixteen years of age, was not a person of exceptional intellectual powers: his Description of the Coast of Guinea has little in common with the tradition of the great European

gratulated at least for his implicit acknowledgement that the story of Danish enterprise on the Guinea Coast is an inseparable part of the history of the region as a whole: that the Danish and other European mercantile communities were as integral to the local political scene as the Akyem or the Ashanti. There is, however, no excuse for the intellectual failing shown in the way in which Norregard treats his 'natives'-as barbaric communities existing in a Hobbesian state of nature, incapable of pursuing by rational means ends beneficial to society. While Boston University Press is to be commended for its initiative in making widely available a work hitherto little known outside Denmark, and Mr Sigurd Mammen for his readable translation, it has to be made clear that this is scissors-and-paste history of the worst type, and that Danish Settlements in West Africa exemplifies few of the scholarly virtues that are now becoming manifest in the field of African historical studies.

Dr McCall's preface to this work contains a useful outline of the growth of Danish mercantilism, and some salutary remarks addressed to the historian. The extensive bibliography of both published and unpublished sources will prove of value, though unfortunately it is not without defects. Romer's Nachrichten von der Kiiste Guinea, for example, is a translation of a Danish original of 1760, and Bosman's Voyage de Guinee of a Dutch original of I704. Reindorf's History was published in 1895, not I889. Bowditch should read Bowdich.

Northwestern University IVOR WILKS

BOSMAN NEW AND COSTLY

A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea. By WILLIAM BOSMAN. A new edition with an introduction by JOHN RALPH WILLIS and notes by J. D. FAGE and R. E. BRADBURY. London: Frank Cass and Co. Ltd, I967. Pp. xxi+ 577, 2 maps. ?9. 9s.

Willem Bosman left the Gold Coast for Europe on 27 June I702, having spent fourteen years there in the service of the Dutch West India Company. In this time he rose to be Upper Factor at Elmina. He was repatriated, apparently in disgrace, when Willem de la Palma assumed the director-generalship. The nature of his offence is not clear, but was probably connected with the mis- management of the Ashanti mission of I70I-2. In I704 Bosman published in Utrecht his Nauwkeurige Beschryving van de Guinese Goud- Tand- en Slave-kust. This comprised twenty letters from Bosman to an uncle in Holland, written between early-I7o0 and mid-I702 and concerned mainly with the Gold Coast, together with an account of Benin written by David van Nyendael in 170I (though mis-dated in the English edition to 1702) and a description of the Tooth (Ivory) and Grain Coasts by J. Snoek, dated I702. The I967 edition of this work is a reprint of the Sir Alfred Jones edition of 1907, itself a facsimile of the first English translation published by James Knapton in London in I705. An intro- ductory essay has been contributed by the editor, John Ralph Willis, and notes in elucidation of the text by Professor J. D. Fage, Dr R. E. Bradbury, and others.

Bosman, who apparently left Europe for West Africa when only sixteen years of age, was not a person of exceptional intellectual powers: his Description of the Coast of Guinea has little in common with the tradition of the great European

164 164 REVIEWS REVIEWS

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topographers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nor (although a son of his was reported living in Ahanta in I715) did he manifest that degree of involvement in local affairs that makes so fascinating the writings on the Gold Coast of his younger contemporary, the Dane Ludwig R0mer. The virtue of Bosman lies rather in his sound common sense and in the range of his descriptive powers: fauna and flora, social, political and legal systems, climate and disease, all are treated with equal facility even though with little logical rigour and depth of analysis. (But Bosman's comment, that the system of inheritance is 'so perplexed and obscure, that hitherto no European has been able to obtain a clear description of it, as I am sure they never will' (Letter XII), will be sympatheti- cally received by the student of coastal society faced with the intricacies of double descent and complementary filiation.)

Misgivings about the reliability of Bosman's Description have been expressed in an earlier issue of this journal (II, 2, I96I) by Professor A. W. Lawrence, who argued that Bosman was quite prepared to suppress or misrepresent incidents reflecting discreditably upon Dutch activities on the coast. Certainly on many topics of especial interest to the historian the evidential value of the Description needs to be determined by reference to independent sources. Bosman's report on the Ashanti kingdom, for example, is among the earliest we possess, but his detailed account of the Ashanti-Dankyira wars of I699-170I in Letter VI, which is on gold production and marketing, reads like an interpolation. The question of its reliability is therefore of particular concern. (In fact the record books of Elmina show that Bosman, shortly before his departure for Europe, saw the first part of a diary written by Van Nyendael in Ashanti, and dispatched by him to Elmina on 5 May I702. Van Nyendael had left Elmina on 9 October I70I, as Dutch emissary to the Ashanti king Osei Tutu, and we may be reasonably sure that Bosman's information was culled from this diary. Unfortunately the diary itself has not yet been found, and Van Nyendael, arriving back at Elmina on I2 October I702, died there eight days later without having reported further on his mission.)

The Description of the Coast of Guinea, then, has to be used critically. It must, however, always remain one of the most important sources of information about the Lower Guinea Coast in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and this new edition is greatly to be welcomed. The notes on the text are most useful and appear by and large impeccable, though that on the identification of Acanny (p. 522) is an oversimplification of a very complex matter: the term Akan (Akanists, Accanys, etc.) seems to have been used to describe generically the Twi-speaking gold traders-the southern component, as it were, of the vast network of West African merchants with a primary involvement in the distribu- tion of that commodity. Moll's map of Guinea, which appeared in the English edition of I705, though not in the Dutch of 1704, is reproduced in this new edition. To it is added a map of the Gold Coast, which is dated I629, and which, though anonymous, I believe to have been the work of Hans Propheet, who visited Elmina in that year. Unfortunately this most important map has been redrawn for this edition, and several incorrect or dubious identifications of toponyms have been incorporated.

It is regrettable that in this new edition nothing is said about the quality of the English translation of the Description, other than the editor's brief comment that all translations are, ' for the most part, considered faithful renditions of the original Dutch' (p. xix). This reviewer cannot claim systematically to have compared the

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Dutch and English texts, but has noted various places where the translation is

certainly infelicitous and sometimes quite inaccurate. The English text of Letter I, for example, refers to an incident when the 'Commander in Chief of the Negroes' in Egwira, being besieged by the Dutch, offered to negotiate with them but then blew up with gunpowder both himself and his Dutch adversaries. The Dutch

original, however, attributes this valorous conduct to the commander-in-chief of a Dutch fort in Egwira, who had found himself'besieged by the Blacks and unable to endure it any longer'.

It is a matter of some surprise that this edition, originally announced at 75s., should now appear at nine guineas. One had hoped that even a new translation of Bosman's Description of the Coast of Guinea might have been possible at that

price.

Northwestern University IVOR WILKS

THE TESTIMONY OF THE SLAVES

Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade. Edited by PHILIP D. CURTIN. Madison, Milwaukee and London: University of Wisconsin Press, I967. Pp. x+363; maps. 75s.

Equiano's Travels. His Autobiography: the interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African. Edited and abridged by PAUL

EDWARDS. London: Heinemann, I967. Pp. xviii+ 96; illustrations. 2Is.

One of the by-products of the Atlantic slave-trade was a tiny number of literary works by some of the trade's victims. Extracts from seven such works form the backbone of Africa Remembered, which includes, in addition, a long account of

Ijebu society written up by the nineteenth-century French ethnographer D'Avezac from close questioning of an Ijebu slave informant, and two pieces, by the first African priest of the Church of England and an Astrakhan traveller respectively, on aspects of African life during the period of the slave-trade. As well as the editor's general introduction, each of the three parts of the book has a brief

foreword, whilst the individual accounts are meticulously introduced and edited

by contributors who include the general editor, G. I. Jones, Margaret Priestley, Ivor Wilks, H. F. C. Smith, D. M. Last, Gambo Gubio, P. C. Lloyd and J. F. Ade Ajayi.

The pieces here assembled come either from rare eighteenth- and nineteenth-

century published sources, or are published from the original manuscript. They are for the most part extremely readable, whilst their historical value lies in their

descriptions of African society and African life as seen from the inside, and in their testimony to African reactions to enslavement, and sometimes, to European ways. In addition, these accounts add something to our knowledge of African

history, though it must be borne in mind that editorial intervention and mis-

understanding at the time of original publication, the frailty of memory and sometimes a seemingly imperfect understanding of some of the phenomena described all impart distortion.

Paul Edwards's purpose is somewhat different from Professor Curtin's. Aimed at a more general readership, he has reproduced a more extended part of Equiano's Travels than it was relevant for G. I. Jones to include in Africa Remembered.

Dutch and English texts, but has noted various places where the translation is

certainly infelicitous and sometimes quite inaccurate. The English text of Letter I, for example, refers to an incident when the 'Commander in Chief of the Negroes' in Egwira, being besieged by the Dutch, offered to negotiate with them but then blew up with gunpowder both himself and his Dutch adversaries. The Dutch

original, however, attributes this valorous conduct to the commander-in-chief of a Dutch fort in Egwira, who had found himself'besieged by the Blacks and unable to endure it any longer'.

It is a matter of some surprise that this edition, originally announced at 75s., should now appear at nine guineas. One had hoped that even a new translation of Bosman's Description of the Coast of Guinea might have been possible at that

price.

Northwestern University IVOR WILKS

THE TESTIMONY OF THE SLAVES

Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade. Edited by PHILIP D. CURTIN. Madison, Milwaukee and London: University of Wisconsin Press, I967. Pp. x+363; maps. 75s.

Equiano's Travels. His Autobiography: the interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African. Edited and abridged by PAUL

EDWARDS. London: Heinemann, I967. Pp. xviii+ 96; illustrations. 2Is.

One of the by-products of the Atlantic slave-trade was a tiny number of literary works by some of the trade's victims. Extracts from seven such works form the backbone of Africa Remembered, which includes, in addition, a long account of

Ijebu society written up by the nineteenth-century French ethnographer D'Avezac from close questioning of an Ijebu slave informant, and two pieces, by the first African priest of the Church of England and an Astrakhan traveller respectively, on aspects of African life during the period of the slave-trade. As well as the editor's general introduction, each of the three parts of the book has a brief

foreword, whilst the individual accounts are meticulously introduced and edited

by contributors who include the general editor, G. I. Jones, Margaret Priestley, Ivor Wilks, H. F. C. Smith, D. M. Last, Gambo Gubio, P. C. Lloyd and J. F. Ade Ajayi.

The pieces here assembled come either from rare eighteenth- and nineteenth-

century published sources, or are published from the original manuscript. They are for the most part extremely readable, whilst their historical value lies in their

descriptions of African society and African life as seen from the inside, and in their testimony to African reactions to enslavement, and sometimes, to European ways. In addition, these accounts add something to our knowledge of African

history, though it must be borne in mind that editorial intervention and mis-

understanding at the time of original publication, the frailty of memory and sometimes a seemingly imperfect understanding of some of the phenomena described all impart distortion.

Paul Edwards's purpose is somewhat different from Professor Curtin's. Aimed at a more general readership, he has reproduced a more extended part of Equiano's Travels than it was relevant for G. I. Jones to include in Africa Remembered.

166 166 REVIEWS REVIEWS

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 10:52:19 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions