Cape Verd

Cape Verd is the westernmost projection of the African mainland, a peninsula inhabited by Lebu communities before the arrival of Portuguese navigators in the fifteenth century. Nearby Gorée Island offered shelter and became a centre of coastal trade. Dutch merchants fortified the island in the seventeenth century, but it changed hands amid European rivalries. In 1677 a French fleet captured Gorée, whose position gave its occupiers access to trade along the Senegambian coast.