Page:West African Studies.djvu/279

 The fascination of West Africa's historical record is very great, bristling as it does with the deeds of brave men, bad and good, black and white. What my German friends would call the Blüth-period of this history is decidedly that period which was inaugurated by the great Prince Henry the Navigator; and no man who has ever read, as every man should read, Mr. Major's book on Prince Henry, can fail to want to know more still, and what happened down in those re-discovered Bights of Benin and Biafra after this Blüth-period closed. This can be done, mainly thanks to a Dutchman named Bosman, who was agent for the great Dutch house of the Gold Coast for many years circa 1698, and who wrote home to his uncle a series of letters of a most exemplary nature reeking with information on native matters and local politics, and suffused with a tender fear of shocking his aunt, which did not, however, seem in his opinion to justify him in suppressing important ethnological facts.

Regarding the ethnological information we have of the Gold Coast natives, the most important works are those by the late Sir A. B. Ellis. His books are almost models of what books should be that are written by people studying native customs in their native land. We have also the results of scientific observers in the works of Buckhardt and Bastian, besides a mass of scattered information in the works of travellers, Bosman, Barbot, Labat, Mathews, Bowditch, Cruickshank, Winwood Reade, H. M. Stanley, Burton, Captain Canot, Captain Binger, and others, and quite recently a valuable contribution to our knowledge in Mr. Sarbar's Fanti Customary Laws. I think that every student of the African form of