Ouidah. Robin Law
75. Dapper, Naukeurige Beschrijvinge, 2/120.
76. ‘Relation du royaume de Judas’, 17; des Marchais, ‘Journal’, 60v; Labat, Voyage, ii, 20.
77. For discussion, see Law, ‘Between the sea and the lagoons’, 229–31.
78. Law, Slave Coast, 118–27.
79. E.g. Akinjogbin, Dahomey, 31.
80. King of Hueda to viceroy of Brazil, 26 Oct. 1720, in Pierre Verger, Flux et reflux de la traite des nègres entre le Golfe de Bénin et Bahia de Todos os Santos du XVIIe au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1968), 132.
81. Gavoy, ‘Note historique’, 49–51. However, one recorded version of the story of Kpate’s encounter with the first Europeans identifies them as French rather than Portuguese: Reynier, ‘Ouidah’, 51–2.
82. De Sandoval, Naturaleza, 51. In 1625 Dutch pirates took a Portuguese ship at ‘Fulao’: Beatrix Heintze (ed.), Fontes para a história de Angola de seculo XVII (Wiesbaden, 1985–8), ii, no. 53, Fernão de Souza, n.d. [c. 25 March 1625].
83. These figures are derived from Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 166 (Table 7.1). See. also the earlier estimates of Patrick Manning, ‘The slave trade in the Bight of Benin, 1640–1890’, in Henry A. Gemery & Jan S. Hogendorn (eds), The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1979), 107–41, who gives a slightly higher figure for the 1700s; and also contemporary estimates cited in Law, Slave Coast, 163–5 (which are somewhat higher again). The estimates of Eltis and Manning relate to the Bight of Benin as a whole, but in this period slave exports from the Bight were almost entirely through Ouidah. Exports from the Bight continued at a comparable (or slightly lower) level in the 1710s, but from 1714 a significant proportion of the trade was diverted through rival ports to the east and west of Ouidah.
84. Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 182.
85. The date is commonly given in local sources inexactly as 1670. Local ‘tradition’ (here as often, manifestly conflated with material from published contemporary sources) also attributes the founding of the Ouidah factory to Delbée: first in Gavoy, ‘Note historique’, 50. This is a confusion: Delbée had served in the expedition that established the original French factory at Offra in 1670, but did not accompany Carolof on the second expedition that transferred the factory to Ouidah in the following year.
86. This story first in Gavoy, ‘Note historique’, 50, 66.
87. ‘Relation du voyage d’Issyny fait en 1701 par le Chevalier Damon’, in Paul Roussier (ed.), L’Établissement d’Issigny 1687–1702 (Paris, 1935), 106 (where ‘Janire’ is clearly a miscopying of ‘Savire’, i.e. Savi).
88. Journal du corsaire Jean Doublet de Honfleur (ed. Charles Bréard, Paris, 1883), 253–6.
89. Gavoy, ‘Note historique’, 50–1. Gavoy himself assumed that the tradition related to the original establishment in 1671, with consequent distortion of his chronology of the Hueda kings. Agbo, Histoire, 40, supposed that ‘Amar’ was a distinct person from Ayohuan, and his immediate successor, and this is generally followed by subsequent writers. But since Ayohuan is described as son and successor to Agbangla, who is known from contemporary sources to have died in 1703 (and these also make clear that there was no other king intervening between Amar and Hufon, the last Hueda king, who succeeded in 1708), it is clear that the two are identical.
90. Description of the site in Sinou & Agbo, Ouidah, 127–9.
91. Barbot, On Guinea, ii, 635.
92. Law, Kingdom of Allada, 18–19.
93. Akin L. Mabogunje, Urbanization in Nigeria (London, 1968), 118, 205, 283; Abner Cohen, Custom and Politics in Urban Africa: A study of Hausa Migrants in Yoruba Towns (London, 1969). Hausa quarters in Yoruba towns are generally called sabo, but in Ghana they are called zongo: see Nehemiah Levtzion, Muslims and Chiefs in West Africa (Oxford, 1968), 23.
94. Denise Brégand, Commerce caravanier et relations sociales au Bénin: les Wangara du Borgou (Paris, 1998), 81–96.
95. Local tradition maintains that the location of the Zobé market predates the Dahomian conquest of Ouidah in the 1720s: Agbo, Histoire, 105–6.
96. Law, English in West Africa, i, nos 476–8: John Thorne, Glehue, 24 May 1681; William Cross, Offra, 18 Aug. 1681; Thorne, Offra, 19 Aug. 1681.
97. Ibid., no. 479: Thorne, Offra, 4 Dec. 1681. In 1686 Wyburne was arrested and taken prisoner to the Royal African Company’s headquarters at Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast, and from there shipped back to England: PRO, T70/11, Henry Nurse et al., Cape Coast, 19 March 1686; T70/12, Edwyn Steede & Stephen Gascoyne, Barbados, 27 April 1686. For the location of Wyburne’s factory, in ‘the Lower Town’, i.e. Glehue, as opposed to the royal capital Savi, see Law, English in West Africa, i, no.487: Timothy Armitage, Ouidah, 24 Oct. 1682. The English factory in Ouidah noted by Barbot in April 1682 was evidently Wyburne’s: Barbot, On Guinea, ii, 635.
98. Law, English in West Africa, i, no. 492: Thorne, Offra, 28 Jan. 1683; also enc. 2 in no. 487: Accounts of John Winder, Hueda, July–Oct. 1682. The location of this factory at Savi is implied in a reference to the removal of goods from it ‘to the Lower Town’, i.e. Ouidah: ibid., no. 487: Armitage, Ouidah, 24 Oct. 1682.
99. Law, Correspondence from Offra and Whydah, nos 16, 18: Carter, Hueda/Ouidah, 26 May & 11 Dec. 1684.
100. In 1685 the factor referred to having gone ‘up to the king’s town’, i.e. Savi: Law, English in West Africa, ii, no. 812: Carter, Ouidah, 19 Sept. 1685.
101. Robin Law (ed.), Further Correspondence of the Royal African Company of England Relating to the ‘Slave Coast’, 1681–1699 (Madison, 1992), no. 63: John Wortley, Ouidah, 5 Jan. 1692; Phillips, ‘Journal’, 215.
102. Édouard Foà, Le Dahomey (Paris, 1895), 417; Gavoy, ‘Note historique’, 30.
103. Description of site in Sinou & Agbo, Ouidah, 133.
104. Augusto Sarmento, Portugal no Dahomé (Lisbon, 1891), 52; Agbo, Histoire, 30.
105. Law, Slave Coast, 134–6.
106. A.F.C. Ryder, ‘The re-establishment of Portuguese factories on the Costa da Mina to the mid-eighteenth century’, JHSN, 1/3 (1958)’, 160–1; Verger, Flux et reflux, 132–9.
107. Verger, Flux et reflux, 136–9.
108. Description in Sinou & Agbo, Ouidah, 139–47.
109. Agbo, Histoire, 31–2; Sinou & Agbo, Ouidah, 148–9.
110. Borghero, Journal, 44 [20 April 1861]; also Burton, Mission, i, 67 (who probably had the information orally from Borghero). More recent tradition, however, has moved the site further west, to the area called Adamé.
111. Law, Further Correspondence, no. 63: Wortley, Ouidah, 5 Jan. 1692.
112. Phillips, ‘Journal’, 228.
113. Charles Davenant, Reflections upon the Condition and Management of the Trade to Africa (1709), reproduced in The Political and Commercial Works of Charles d’Avenant (London, 1771), v, 226. Also repeated in the English version (published 1732) of Jean Barbot’s work (see On Guinea, ii, 644), and from Barbot by Burton, Mission, i, 84.
114. ANF, C6/25, ‘Mémoire de l’estat du pays de Juda et de son négoce’, 1716; des Marchais, ‘Journal’, 29; Labat, Voyage, ii, 35.
115. Albert Van Dantzig (ed.), The Dutch and the Guinea Coast 1674–1742: A Collection of Documents from the General State Archive at The Hague (Accra, 1978), no. 250: Agreement with the King and Grandees of Hueda, 12 Nov. 1726.
116.