Note 62 — Chapter IV · THE PORTUGUESE IN AFRICA

Duarte Lopes, who records this fact in his description of the Congo region at the end of the 16th century, gives incidentally or directly other interesting scraps of information, such as, that the coco-nut palm was found by the Portuguese growing on the West coast of Africa. This palm, we know, originated in the Pacific Archipelagoes or on the Pacific coast of tropical America. It is possible to imagine that its nuts may have been carried over the sea to Southern India and thence to Madagascar and the coast of East Africa, but, inasmuch as the coco-nut palm cannot grow further south than Delagoa Bay owing to the cooling of the climate it is not very clear how it reached the tropical West African coast, unless it was introduced by Europeans. Lopes mentions the banana for the first time under the name “banana,” a name which seems to be derived from the Vai and other languages of the Sierra Leone-Liberia coast. Hitherto this fruit had only been known vaguely to Europe as the Indian fig or by its Arab name, which was latinized into Musa. The long banana or plantain was of ancient and widespread cultivation throughout tropical Africa, but the small banana with stubby fruit seems to have been a recent introduction from India which has penetrated into few parts of the interior.