The Gambia - Early Colonial Contact
When they arrived on the African coasts, the Europeans found a situation different from anything they encountered in the Americas or in Asia. The West African disease environment was nearly as dangerous for them as their European diseases were for the American Indians. From any point of view, tropical West Africa had a terrible disease environment for human beings of any origin. Infection rates with yaws, Guinea worm, trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), onchocerciasis (river blindness), and schistosomiasis (liver ?ukes) were extremely high.
The first Europeans to reach the river were the Portuguese in 1455. Captains Luiz de Cadamosto and Antoniotti Usodimare traveled a few kilometres upstream before being repulsed by the angry local inhabitants. In 1456 the same group returned and this time managed to travel 20 miles up-river and came across what was later re-named James Island. It is said they had named the island St. Andrews Island after a sailor who had passed away and was buried there. The name was later changed by European colonialists.
In the early 15th century, Prince Henry of Portugal began instructing navigators to sail along the west coast of Africa, trying to circumvent the Arab and Muslim domination of the trans-Saharan gold trade, which by that time was at the centerpiece of Portugal's public finances. Although the Portuguese didn't establish a settlement, they continued to monopolise trade along the West African coast throughout the 16th century. In their trading posts, salt, ostrich feathers, iron, pots and pans, firearms and gunpowder were exchanged for ivory, ebony, beeswax, gold and slaves.
From the first, the lure of gold concentrated Portuguese attention on two points on the West African coast. They could reach the gold ?elds of Buré and Bambuhu most easily from trading stations on the Gambia River. The Portuguese seized the uninhabited Cape Verde Islands offshore as a secure entrepot for that trade. The lower Gambia was already important in West African trade as a source of sea salt, and an existing trade route carried it into the interior.
The first British traders in the Gambia came in 1587. They began to explore the river in 1618. The English had factories in Gambia ever since the year 1618, when a chartered company was formed to explore the interior and reach the Niger region by the main stream, which at that time was supposed to be a branch of the Senegal, if not of the Niger itself. The first European settlement in Gambia was made by Baltic Germans, who built a fort on St. Andrew's Island in 1651. The British eventually got control of the island 1661. It was renamed James Island after the Duke of York, later King James II, a name it retained. The Germans were ousted by the British, who were themselves ever under threat from French ships, pirates and the mainland African kings.
Fort James lost its strategic appeal with the construction of new forts at Barra and Bathurst (now Banjul) at the mouth of the Gambia River, which were better placed to control the movement of ships, though Fort James continued to serve as a slave collection point until the trade was abolished. Trading companies were set up and they tried to control the trade of the river. The companies, such as the Companies of Merchant trading in West Africa, The Royal Adventurers and the Royal African Company traded and controlled the area.
The first British expeditions, conducted by Richard Thompson (1718) and Richard Jobson (1720-21) all ended in disaster. Then followed a century of inaction till the year 1723, when another attempt made under Bartholomew Stibbs to penetrate inland merely resulted in the discovery that the Gambia had no connection either with the Senegal or the Niger. Meanwhile the French had been consolidating their power in the Senegal basin, whence they have gradually extended their dominion round the British Gambian settlements in such a way as to completely prevent all further access to the interior from that direction.
In 1765, the forts and settlements were vested in the British Crown and for eighteen years what is now The Gambia, formed part of the British Colony of Senegambia, with headquarters in St. Louis at the mouth of the river Senegal. However in 1783, the greater part of the Senegambia region was handed to France. The 1783 Treaty of Versailles gave Great Britain possession of The Gambia, but the French retained a tiny enclave at Albreda on the north bank of the river, which was ceded to the United Kingdom in 1857. The Gambia section ceased to be a British colony and was again placed under the charge of the African Company.
The French authorities, on various occasions, and under various false pretences, insulted and despoiled the English traders belonging to the neighboring British settlements. These proceedings had been systematically carried on by the French ever since the peace, having commenced so early as the year 1819, when they took possession of Albredar, a station within the mouth of the river Gambia, notwithstanding that that river was reserved exclusively to Great Britain by the peace; that the British Government remonstrated against this outrage at the time, and had done so at intervals without effect.
By 1840 the want of naval protection had been the main cause of these evils, the French having never less than two or three ships of war constantly stationed in the neighborhood, while the English settlements were frequently left for six or eight months together without a single British ship of war coming within sight of them. At the time the proceedings took place at the Cazamanza in 1840, there was no British ship of war within 500 miles of those settlements, although nearly twenty English ships of war were employed on that coast.
Every advantage which the most liberal commercial policy could suggest was afforded in Gambia to the French nation. The British port of St. Mary was open to them, but in their port of St. Louis it was not permitted for a British vessel to approach. At Goree the severity was such that goods could not be transhipped from one foreign vessel into another if they happened to be destined for the British possessions in the Gambia.
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