André Álvares de Almada

Circa 1594 Almada wrote The Short Treatise of the Rivers of Guinea of Cape Verde between the Senegal River and Baixos de Santa Ana and All the Black Nations on the Coast and its Clothing, Arms, Weapons and Wars, drawing on his personal experience trading in the region. The work focuses primarily on commercial information, and was an attempt to promote Iberian interests.^[2]

It was not published in his lifetime, but was edited and published in Portuguese in 1733, edited and re-published by Diogo Kopke in 1841.^[5] A summary, however, was created by Jesuit missionaries in Cape Verde in 1605 and soon spread and was translated. This profoundly impacted later authors up to the 19th century, who often borrowed Almada's ethnographic information for the entire area between Senegal and Sierra Leone without analyzing it or updating it.^[2][6]

• ALMADA, André Álvares de, ca 1555-1650, Tratado breue dos Reinos de guine do cabo verde ff.to pollo capitao Andre Alluares dallmada natural da cidade e ilha do Cabo Verde cursado e pratigo nas ditas partes, Regimento da Santa Inquisição, Manuscrito, Portuguese National Library, digital copy: cod-297 (in Portuguese)
• André d’Almada: um certo olhar "renascentista", by Raul Mendes Fernandes, September 2006 (in Portuguese)
• Notice sur André Alvarez d'Almada et sa description de la Guinée (Notices by Andrew Álvares de Almada) (1842), A. Bertrand, 1842, Digitizing sponsor: Google, Book from the collections of: University of Michigan