Brief Treatise on the Rivers of Guinea

Part I (Translated text). This is a makeshift version of an edition of André Álvares de Almada's "Tratado breve dos Rios de Guiné do Cabo Verde (c.1595)" planned by Avelino Teixeira da Mota but incomplete when he died in 1982. André Álvares de Almada was born in the Cape Verde Islands, apparently c. 1550. The islands had been settled for almost a century. Almada's family was relatively well-to-do and therefore slave-owning. The islands are still today in general somewhat arid and offer few economic opportunities; hence a thin population of pioneering Portuguese settlers was soon outnumbered by African slaves and freedmen descendants, often of mixed extraction. The Almada family, like many others, made a living in part by trading to the mainland; and André's maternal grandmother appears to have been black. - P.E.H. Hair (1985)