Inhambane Bay

Inhambane Bay connected the southern Mozambican interior with Indian Ocean traders. By the sixteenth century ships called there for ivory, sometimes remaining for months while enough tusks were assembled. A Dutch reconnaissance in 1727 found signs of this intermittent maritime presence: a Portuguese settlement with empty huts, a church and fruit trees, but no resident Portuguese traders at that moment. Dutch interest helped prompt the establishment of a permanent Portuguese trading post in 1729. The bay's commerce depended on African suppliers and on Muslim and South Asian merchants as well as European vessels. Cloth and beads moved inland in exchange for ivory and enslaved people. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, growing export demand altered alliances and competition among coastal authorities and interior communities. Portuguese claims to the harbour therefore operated within trading networks whose participants retained substantial power of their own.