Seasonality and Habitability in Tropical West Africa, 1555–1705

This paper surveys the relationship between seasonality and habitability in English conceptions of the tropical climate of West Africa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although later considered a “white man’s grave,” Africa was central to English notions of habitable tropical environments during the sixteenth century. Travel writings such as Richard Eden’s Decades of the newe worlde (1555) and Leo Africanus’s/John Pory’s A Geographical Historie of Africa (1600) described how regular, dependable phenomena such as the succession of rainy and dry seasons and the revolution of days and nights made tropical West Africa habitable by tempering its heat and supplying it with water. Richard Madox (1582) and other travelers confirmed this view, describing the region’s climate as similar to that of temperate England. As the growing trade in commodities and slaves demanded a permanent English presence in West Africa, the dangers of the tropical disease environment loomed for factors, soldiers, and sailors on the coast. From the 1620s Richard Jobson (1623) and other observers reversed their earlier position, attributing high mortality to the change of seasons. By the 1660s English commentators considered Africa’s “sickly climate” in light of emerging European medical ideas linking disease to rapid changes in physical temperature. Observers now pointed to the oscillation between hot days and cold nights to explain the illnesses Europeans suffered on the African coast. By the publication of Willem Bosman’s A new and accurate description of the coast of Guinea (1705), writers described climate change in the form of increasingly erratic and irregular seasons. Over the course of the seventeenth century, then, the very seasons that had been considered the source of Africa’s temperateness were now seen as guarantors of its sickliness, making tropical Africa paradoxically both habitable and almost inescapably deadly.