The Cape Verde Islands

What were the Cape Verde Islands like in 1715?

The game’s Cape Verde is not one harbour but a group of islands, now the country of Cabo Verde. When sailors working for Portugal found them, between about 1456 and 1460, nobody lived there. Settlers arrived on Santiago, the largest island, in 1462 and built a town called Ribeira Grande. It is often described as the first European town in the tropics, and in 1533 it became the seat of a bishop for the islands and the African coast.

By the game’s years the islands were poor and dry. Rain was unreliable, and drought and hunger came back again and again; a terrible famine came later, in the 1770s. Ribeira Grande was still the home of the governor and bishop, but trade was drifting to Praia, a better harbour along the coast. Praia officially became the capital in 1770, and Ribeira Grande has been called Cidade Velha, “old town”, ever since.

Why did ships stop at the Cape Verde Islands?

The islands sat on the main sailing route from Europe to West Africa, Brazil and the East Indies, so ships stopped to fill their water casks and buy fresh food. The English captain William Dampier called at Santiago in February 1699. He traded salt for chickens and maize, paid money for cattle, and watered his ship from a stream in the valley below the town. He found a town of rough stone houses, forts guarding the landing, and one of the worst anchorages he had known.

Dampier noted that Portuguese ships on their way to Brazil called to buy island cotton cloth, and he met an English ship carrying island donkeys to Barbados.

How did English ships get salt at Maio?

Salt was the islands’ most famous gift to passing ships. On Maio, a low island east of Santiago, a natural salt pond lay behind a bank of sand. Dampier, who spent six days there in 1699, described how the sea flowed in only at the highest tides, and the sun dried it into salt from about November to May.

The salt itself cost nothing, but the work did. Islanders raked it into heaps and carried it to the beach on their donkeys, and the English paid them in food, a little money and old hats and shirts. The local governor, a Black man appointed from Santiago, expected a small present from each captain. About 230 people lived on Maio, and Dampier wrote that the salt season was their harvest. In some years, he said, a hundred English ships came, some of them carrying salt for the cod fishery of Newfoundland. The town of Porto Inglês, “English Harbour”, is named after this trade.

What part did Cape Verde play in the slave trade?

From the start, the islands were built on slavery. In 1466 Portugal’s king allowed the settlers of Santiago to trade on the nearby African coast, and they bought enslaved people from the lands of today’s southern Senegal, Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone. In the 1500s and early 1600s Ribeira Grande was one of the main places where enslaved Africans were held and sold on across the Atlantic to the Americas. A count from 1582 found about 13,700 enslaved people on Santiago and Fogo, compared with about 2,000 free people.

Enslaved Africans worked the islands’ cotton, indigo and sugar fields. Skilled weavers from the mainland were kept on the islands to weave panos, long strips of striped cotton cloth in African patterns. Panos were prized on the coast and served as a kind of money there, including for buying captives, so the labour of enslaved weavers paid for the enslavement of others.

By the game’s years this role had faded, because European ships now sailed straight to the African coast. A book of the 1720s, published under the name of the English captain George Roberts, said that Santiago had formerly been the great market for slaves. Most islanders were by then of African or mixed descent, and from their mixed society came Kriolu, one of the first Creole languages of the Atlantic, still spoken today.

What happened to Ribeira Grande in 1712?

In 1585 Francis Drake attacked Santiago during England’s war with Spain, whose king also ruled Portugal from 1580 to 1640. Afterwards the Portuguese built the stone fort of São Filipe on the hill above Ribeira Grande, finished in 1593.

In 1712, during the War of the Spanish Succession, when Portugal was on Britain’s side against France, a French squadron under Jacques Cassard attacked. Cassard was a corsair, a licensed raider sailing for Louis XIV, not a pirate. His men sacked the town and left the cathedral in ruins. Ribeira Grande never recovered, and its leading families moved away to Praia. Today its ruined cathedral, fort, early church and stone pillory make up the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Cidade Velha, listed in 2009.

Which pirates came to the Cape Verde Islands?

In 1699 Dampier heard that pirates had recently raided the islands and had held Maio’s governor prisoner for a year or two.

The best-told story comes from the 1724 book A General History of the Pyrates, which is partly embellished. Early in 1719 the Welsh pirate Howell Davis flew English colours at São Nicolau, where the Portuguese took him for a privateer and welcomed his crew for five weeks. At Maio he plundered the ships loading salt and turned one into a 26-gun ship, the King James. At Santiago, when the governor suspected him, Davis stormed the fort by night and pulled down its guns, then sailed away when the whole island was roused against him.

Bartholomew Roberts joined Davis only later, in West Africa. In late 1720 Roberts tried to reach the islands, missed them and was blown back across the Atlantic, with many of his crew dying of thirst. He called there in April 1721 on his way to Africa and swapped his leaking ship for another.

Edward Low came in 1722, after raiding the Azores. His crews took several prizes, among them the sloop of Captain George Roberts, which they stripped of its sails and food before letting him go. A book about his adventures, published in 1726 under his name and long credited to Daniel Defoe, describes the islands in detail.