Footnote 81: The oldest of her continental African possessions, dating from 1490. Footnote 82: The Chafarinas Islands are off the mouth of the Muluya river, near the Algerian frontier. Footnote 83: This Portuguese name becomes in Spanish Rio de Oro. Footnote 84: This also, like so many other places on the West coast of Africa, was named by the Portuguese; _Corisco_ meaning “sheet lightning,” a name applied to the place because it was first seen during a violent thunderstorm. Footnote 85: Bube is said to be a cant term meaning “male” (from the Bantu root, _-ume_, _-lume_) and the real name of this race is perhaps Ediya. This subject is fully treated in the author’s book, _George Grenfell and the Congo_, which gives a full account of Fernando Pô and the Bube indigenes. CHAPTER VI THE DUTCH IN AFRICA Although, as will be seen in a succeeding chapter, British seamen were the first adventurers of other nationalities to follow the Portuguese in the exploration of the African coasts, the Dutch, as settlers and colonists, are almost entitled to rank chronologically next to the Portuguese and Spanish. The Dutch made their first trading voyage to the Guinea Coast in 1595, 16 years after throwing off the yoke of Spain. On the plea of warring with the Spanish Empire, which then included Portugal, they displaced the latter power at various places along the West coast of Africa—at Arguin, at Goree (off Dakar, purchased from the natives 1621), Elmina (1637), and at Saõ Paulo de Loanda about the same time; while they three times threatened Moçambique on the East coast (1604, 1607, 1662), and possessed themselves of the island of Mauritius (1598), which had been a place of call for Portuguese ships. Mauritius, discovered in 1505 by the Portuguese sea-captain, Mascarenhas (after whom the “Mascarene” Islands—the Mauritius-Réunion-Rodriguez groups—have been named), was uninhabited at the time and possessed enormous quantities of a large and monstrous ground fruit-pigeon, the Dodo, which the Dutch sailors and their imported herds of swine exterminated in the course of about a hundred years. On the West coast of Africa, besides supplanting the Portuguese, the Dutch established themselves strongly on the Gold Coast by means of 16 new forts of their own[86], in most cases alongside British settlements, which were regarded by the Dutch with the keenest jealousy.