EUROPE IN WEST AFRICA 325 following century the principal French company in West Africa. A French West India Company also traded to the Slave and Ivory Coast, and the French company on the Senegal established the tradition, well maintained by Frenchmen in later years, of pressing further than other Europeans into the interior. They did not, however, accomplish anything which amounted to real communication with Nigritia. All that was known of the inland country were vague rumours of Arabs and white people riding upon mules and asses, and living in great state at Timbuctoo and the richer of its sister cities. The accounts of Leo Africanus and of Marmol were both, we must remember, published during the sixteenth century.

Imperfect as they are, they represent a certain amount of information about the interior which, though it was not gained from the coast, must have been presumably in the possession of all persons interested in the coast. Some knowledge of the internal country was, of course, felt to be very desirable, but writing at the end of the seventeenth century, a hundred years or more after the appearance of the latest of these publications, Barbot explicitly states that " none of the Europeans living along the coast have ever ventured far up the land, it being extraordinarily difficult and dangerous, if not altogether impossible, for Europeans to venture so far into such wild and savage countries." The Dutch very rapidly followed in the footsteps of the French. The first Dutch venture was conducted by a man of the name of Ericks in 1595. The natives, liking his goods, became more and more restive under Portuguese exactions, and another rising in the year 1600 practically confined Portuguese authority within the walls of their forts. The native chiefs entered into treaties with the Dutch, and in 1624 allowed them to build forts at Moree and Cape Coast. This transaction was made with the Dutch Government, but the forts afterwards passed into the possession of the Dutch West India Company. The Portuguese bitterly accused the Dutch of obtaining their