Brief Treatise on the Rivers of Guinea

Brief Treatise on the Rivers of GuineaPart I (Translated text). This is a makeshift version of an edition of Andr lvares de Almada's "Tratado breve dos Rios de Guin do Cabo Verde (c. 1595)" planned by Avelino Teixeira da Mota but incomplete when he died in 1982. Andr lvares 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

Part I (Translated text). This is a makeshift version of an edition of AndrŽ çlvares de Almada's "Tratado breve dos Rios de GuinŽ do Cabo Verde (c.1595)" planned by Avelino Teixeira da Mota but incomplete when he died in 1982. AndrŽ çlvares 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 AndrŽ's maternal grandmother appears to have been black. - P.E.H. Hair (1985)