Another river and its sources, the Congo, became the great riddle that occupied geographic societies and made them send expeditions to Central Africa. Their discoveries entertained European readers, fed the greed for power and wealth of many nations, and made explorers famous.

(remarkable also because of the positive value Gierow gives to his observation of what other travellers often saw as a sign of savagery):

Undeterred, the German association then sent out a third expedition led by Pogge whose first trip had made him a famous and respected explorer.

One of the chief problems with many of the existing scholarly interpretations of sixteenth century 'Portuguese' Africa is that they fail to understand Europe's trade with Africa in terms of commodity chains.8 Direct European involvement on the coast of Africa south of the Sahara came to take place because of markets; some of these market relationships were already very old when this started to happen, i.e. caravan routes, and some new ones came into being as a result of increased contact and trade along new routes. By the sixteenth century, the various commodity chains embracing African trade connected Africa primarily with north, northwestern and central Europe, not Lisbon, which was mostly a way station on the route northward. This was true not only for the trade items produ

l-state systems.9 The logic of markets, far more than political jurisdictions, established the routes along which flowed the various European and African trade commodities as well as the technology, informational exchanges and financial tools that allowed the trade to flo

Portuguese attack. The weakness of its territorial claims and the implausibility of enforcing maritime rule over such a vast coastline were among the conditions that drove various Portuguese groups - representing the crown, colonies and religious orders - to attempt to gain a more secure territorial base in Africa by the end of the sixteenth century. These groups realized just such a project in Angola by the end of the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth century, all European groups competing for African trade sought to harness merchant shipping to African territorial claims and relied on state support to achieve these ends, although the success of these ventures remained limited.

Another, dated circa 1502, is a contraband copy of a top-secret Portuguese document, rendering Africa and the eastern seaboard of the Americas substantially as we know them today

The first of the rooms nominally devoted to the mother country shows several maps. One from Florence in the early 1490s posits a land bridge connecting southern Africa to China but shows no sign of the Americas or the Pacific

The Portuguese explorers introduced it around the world. To this day it flourishes as far afield as Hawaii, yet back home it is largely forgotten.