NOTES AND DOCUMENTS EARLY KNOWLEDGE OF THE OGOWE RIVER AND THE AMERICAN EXPLORATION OF 1854 K. David Patierson The Ogowe River, one of Africa's major warerways, drains the rainforest of Gabon and was an important route for African traders. However, its...
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NOTES AND DOCUMENTS EARLY KNOWLEDGE OF THE OGOWE RIVER AND THE AMERICAN EXPLORATION OF 1854 K. David Patierson The Ogowe River, one of Africa's major warerways, drains the rainforest of Gabon and was an important route for African traders. However, its existence was unknown to Europeans until well into cthe nineteenth cen- tury, European mariners and geographers were aware that a number of rivers reached the sea in the vicinity of Cape Lopez but, as was the case with the Niger, did not realize that these streams were the mouths of a single great river. Early maps usually showed three of the major Ogowe mouths as short unconnected screams — the Nazareth {or Olibatea nocth of Cape Lopez, the Mexias just south of the cape, and the Fernan Vaz about thirty miles farther south.' The Ogowe became a major commercial artery in the 1760s and 1770s when Europeans began buying Gabonese slaves in significant quantities. Small-scale trade had long existed in the region; sea salt and European goods w
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