35. Melville J. Herskovits, Dahomey (New York, 1938), ii, 155. The worship of the crocodile was also noted in the 1690s, and the name Tokpodun first recorded in the 1860s: Phillips, ‘Journal’, 223; Burton, Mission, ii, 148.
36. For the Dangbe cult, see esp. Christian Merlo & Pierre Vidaud, ‘Dangbe et le peuplement houeda’, in François de Medeiros (ed.), Peuples du Golfe du Bénin (Paris, 1984), 269–304.
37. Described in Sinou & Agbo, Ouidah, 195–7.
38. E.g. Agbo, Histoire, 15–16, who says that Kpase ‘consecrated his town to the fetish Dangbe’.
39. Bosman, Description, 368a, 383.
40. The main Dangbe shrine was in fact located outside Savi, according to European accounts of the early 18th century 3/4 or 1/2 a league (1-1/2–2 miles/2–3 km) away: ‘Relation du royaume de Judas en Guinée’ (MS. of c. 1715, ANF, Dépôt des Fortifications des Colonies, Côtes d’Afrique 104), 60; Labat, Voyage, ii, 154. However, an earlier (1690s) source gives a much greater distance, about 2 [Dutch] miles (= 8 English miles/12 km), perhaps a different site: Bosman, Description, 370. Some versions of local tradition maintain that the earliest shrine of Dangbe was in a forest outside Ouidah to the north, near the modern Roman Catholic seminary, which might be the location indicated: Sinou & Agbo, Ouidah, 195.
41. Burton, Mission, ii, 141.
42. Merlo, ‘Hiérarchie fétichiste’, 4. Other local accounts claim that the primacy of the Hunon was established only during the colonial period: Fall et al., ‘Typologie’, 72, n. 31. But this is refuted by Burton’s earlier evidence.
43. An alternative etymology, however, posits a founder called Gle: I. Akibode, ‘De la traite à la colonisation’, in Sinou & Agbo, Ouidah, 31.
44. Hazoumé, ‘Aperçu historique’, 2nd part, no. 5 (19 Nov. 1925), 8–9. Tradition in Zoungbodji recalls the original Hueda name of the town as ‘Glesinme’: fieldwork, Zoungbodji, 11 Dec. 2001.
45. For examples, see Iroko, Les Hula, 56–8.
46. Agbo, Histoire, 15.
47. Gavoy, ‘Note historique’, 48–50.
48. This date is given on painted and appliqué cloths commemorating the event kept in the Kpatenon compound, as observed in fieldwork, 3 Dec. 2001.
49. These dates are painted on a wall in the Hounon compound, observed in fieldwork, 18 Jan. 1996.
50. In fact, 120 years (four reigns at 30 years each) backwards from the end of Hufon’s reign in 1727 would indicate a date for the beginning of Kpase’s reign of c. 1610, rather than c. 1580.
51. See esp. ANF, C6/25, Du Colombier, 10 Aug. 1714 (giving the name in the form ‘Bangala’).
52. For variant versions of the Hueda king list, see n. 20 above.
53. Alexis Adandé, ‘Buried heritage, surface heritage: the Portuguese fort of São João Baptista de Ajudá’, in Claude Daniel Ardouin & Emmanuel Arinze (eds), Museums and History in West Africa (Oxford, 2000), 127–31.
54. Kenneth G. Kelly, ‘Transformation and continuity in Savi, a West African trade town: an archaeological investigation of culture change on the coast of Bénin during the 17th and 18th centuries’ (PhD thesis, University of California at Los Angeles, 1995); idem, ‘Using historically informed archaeology: seventeenth and eighteenth century Hueda/European interaction on the coast of Bénin’, Journal of Archaeological Method & Theory, 4 (1997), 353–66.
55. This explanation first in Gavoy, ‘Note historique’, 48.
56. See esp. des Marchais, ‘Journal’, 40v; Labat, Voyage, ii, 10–11. Des Marchais describes this river as running by the Allada capital, evidently conflating the Toho with a watercourse that runs into it further east.
57. However, a variant recorded in Zoungbodji itself claims that it was Kpase who accompanied Kpate to the shore and fled, and that Kpate then took the Europeans to meet Zingbo at Zoungbodji. These discrepancies evidently relate to disputes about seniority/primacy; the Zoungbodji version also claims that Zingbo was the first settler in the area, and gave land to both Kpase and Kpate. Fieldwork: Zoungbodji, 11 Dec. 2001.
58. Sinou & Agbo, Ouidah, 173.
59. For the fishing techniques employed in recent times by Hueda displaced by the Dahomian conquest of their kingdom in 1727, on Lake Ahémé to the west, see R. Grivot, ‘La pêche chez les Pedah du lac Ahémé’, BIFAN, Série B, 11/1–2 (1949), 106–28.
60. Burton, Mission, i, 33, says that ‘many’ preferred fish to meat; cf. 136–7, where he states that only the rich ate meat. For dried fish in the Abomey market, see ii, 243.
61. Phillips, ‘Journal’, 214, 221; Bosman, Description, 362a.
62. Fieldwork, Déhoué compound, 9 Jan. 1996.
63. ‘Relation du royaume de Judas’, 2, 75.
64. E.g. Duncan, Travels, i, 190–1. For salt production in modern times, including reference to Djedgbadji, see Josette Rivallain, ‘Le sel dans les villages côtiers et lagunaires du Bas Dahomey’, Annales de l’Université d’Abidjan, série I (Histoire), 8 (1980), 81–127; also A. Félix Iroko, ‘Le sel marin de la Côte des Esclaves durant la période précoloniale’, Africa (Rome), 46 (1981), 520–40.
65. E.g. Pierre Bouche, Sept ans en Afrique occidentale (Paris, 1885), 8, 320.
66. Barbot, On Guinea, ii, 621.
67. As suggested in Law & Strickrodt, ‘Introduction’, in Ports of the Slave Trade, 3.
68. Robin Law (ed.), The English in West Africa, 1685–88: The local correspondence of the Royal African Company of England, 1681–1699, Part 2 (London, 2001; hereafter English in West Africa, ii), no. 817: John Carter, Ouidah, 7 June 1686. On this occasion the level of the water had risen ‘4 or 5 feet higher than ever I saw them, and flooded the dry ground about a mile in breadth’.
69. Law, English in West Africa, i, no. 495: Petley Wyburne, Ouidah, 26 June 1683.
70. Robin Law (ed.), Correspondence from the Royal African Company’s Factories at Offra and Whydah on the Slave Coast of West Africa in the Public Record Office, London, 1678–93 (Edinburgh, 1990), no. 7: William Cross, Offra, 13 June 1681; Law, English in West Africa, i, no. 490: Timothy Armitage, Ouidah, 5 Dec. 1682.
71. PRO, FO2/886, Louis Fraser, Journal, Ouidah, 30 July 1851: ‘messengers go from here to Godomey by land, the rest of the route by canoe as far as Lagos’. But for an instance of travel by canoe from Ouidah to Godomey, see WMMS, William West, Cape Coast, 6 June 1859.
72. Dapper, Naukeurige Beschrijvinge, 2/118–19. The English fort at Ouidah in 1723 reported explicitly that the ‘Whydah cloths’ purchased by Europeans were not made locally, but in ‘Lucamee’: PRO, T70/7, Baldwyn, Mabyn & Barlow, Ouidah, 9 Aug. 1723.
73. For the impact of the European trade in stimulating the expansion of the lagoon traffic, see more generally Robin Law, ‘Between the sea and the lagoons: the interaction of maritime and inland navigation on the precolonial Slave Coast’, CEA, 29 (1989), 220–4.
74. Burton, Mission, i, 62. Burton assumed this tradition to refer to the period prior to the rise of Ouidah as a centre for the European trade in the seventeenth century, but this may have been a misunderstanding on his part, since an account by the Roman Catholic missionary Francesco Borghero, who was one of Burton’s principal informants, recorded stories of Hueda piracy along the lagoons in relation to a later period, after the Dahomian conquest in 1727, when the section of the Hueda people now in exile to the west recurrently raided Ouidah itself: ‘Relation sur l’établissement des missions dans