Legends of the Vikings are well known. Not so well known are the stories of African explorers and traders which parallel those told of the Norsemen—and on a grander scale.

In 1311 Abubakari the Second, ruler of Mali, stood on an African shore, overlooking the surf, and stared westward. Behind him stretched the kingdom of Mali, as large as all of Europe and more powerful. (1) Before him lay a huge, mysterious sea.

Abubakari had been assured by learned professors from Timbuktu’s university and by Arab geographers that the world was indeed spherical and that new lands lay on the other side of the great green ocean. (2) At least one geographer, Abulfeda, at the turn of the thirteenth century, spoke of possible voyages around the earth. (3) Still, some scholars said that the sea bordered the end of the world. Abubakari, tiring of petty wars and trade with Europe, decided to find out.

The price was high. Earlier, he had assembled enough troops, carpenters, metalworkers, and supplies on the west coast to build four hundred ships, half solely for food and equipment, to cross an ocean. The ships were of all types and sizes; Abubakari took no chances.

The fleet sailed, and the year revolved slowly. Only one ship came back, that of a timid captain who had turned around just as the fleet was caught by a powerful westward-flowing current which had been expected. The captain had no news other than that he had seen the rest of the ships sail on west.

Obsessed with thoughts of the western ocean, Abubakari would try again. Around him now lay the second effort: a similar fleet paid for with the gold of his empire and the toil of thousands of subjects. Ready were his best sailors and navigators, captains and cooks. The ships this time would carry colonists and trade goods—just in case. And on the deck of one ship was placed a throne, covered by a royal parasol. (4) Abubakari would lead the second voyage himself. A drummer was stationed nearby so the words of the king could fly from ship to ship.

When all preparations were made, Abubakari handed over the government of Mali to his brother and departed. The ships were soon surrounded by a horizon of water. Abubakari and his fleet never returned to Africa.

The city of Timbuktu, as known to the English in 1830 Institute of Texan Cultures

Where Mali’s ruler landed is unknown today, but there is some evidence that he finally arrived in the New World, possibly on the western shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and settled with hundreds of followers.

Some evidence, that is. The departure of the fleet is perhaps conclusively certain, but where it went is not, although a few reviewers of the data already write in terms that assume the case is proven. (5)

Map from Medina's Arte de Navigar, 1545 Institute of Texan Cultures, 84-147

Perhaps full records of these Atlantic voyages still lie hidden in Arabic literature. If so, they may someday come to light. Many known works by earlier Arab geographers simply speak of the Atlantic as the green ocean that marks the end of the world. The Chinese, however, with one of the more complete historical records in existence, preserve stories of great ships which sailed west from Africa to a land of strange trade goods. They apparently had heard of such voyages in the course of their own trade with India and east Africa.

What two Chinese geographers, Chou Ch’u-fei and Chao Ju-kua, write sounds plausible. Chao, writing his Chu Fan Chi, the Record of Foreign Peoples, about 1226, and quoting from Chou, speaks of a land called Mu-lan-p’i:

Often dismissed as fiction, (9) this account can be easily interpreted as a fairly accurate description of a land across the Atlantic from the Old World. (10)

New World corn, c. 1606 Institute of Texan Cultures, 84-142

The natural products, however strange they sound, can be tentatively identified. (11) The grain of wheat could be an ear of early American corn, unfamiliar to the Chinese and worth mentioning whether they had seen it or merely had a description from an Arab or African traveler. The melon might be an exaggerated pumpkin; and the pomegranate, peach, and citron could be the soursop or sweetsop, the avocado or papaya, or the pineapple. Yet the primary question is where Mu-lan-p’i and T’o-pan-ti are or what the Chinese meant by the terms.

The name Ta-shih (however tempting to claim this is a Chinese transcription of Tarshish) was apparently applied by the Chinese to the Mohammedan world. (12) Present-day Morocco and part of the Iberian peninsula would be included. Neither Ta-shih nor T’o-pan-ti can apply to somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, because a trip across the width of that inland sea would not be described as a hundred-day voyage in open water to a far land of strange products. The Chinese knew the Mediterranean in the thirteenth century and also knew of the west coasts of Africa and Spain. The home ports of the great trading ships might have been on the Atlantic coasts of North America.

Nineteenth century engraving of a Chinese ship at Singapore Institute of Texan Cultures, 80-544

Whatever place the name Mu-lan-p’i referred to, ships that went there were commented on even earlier, in the fifth century, in China. (13) That the ships existed, and at such a size, is attested to by several writers. (14) Chou Ch’u-fei (K’u-fei) not only discussed ships of the Indian Ocean but also the larger ones on a western sea beyond Arab countries.

Chou notes that the ships sailing the Indian Ocean contain all that is necessary for crew and passengers for a long time. Once the voyages are undertaken, he says, the ships do not stop for anything, not even someone’s death. These are certainly not coasting vessels, for the shallows are the only dangers they fear. When underway, nothing can be seen from the ships except the ocean, until landmarks are sighted. (16)

Yet ships of the Western Sea, Chou relates, were the biggest of all. One could carry a thousand people and had marketplaces aboard. These huge ships were capable of a voyage of years if winds were unfavorable. (17)

Exaggeration, happily, appears to be more common in early Chinese records than pure fabrication.

Navigation, as far as the trips described in these documents are concerned, was carried out by sailors before C.E. 1000 through observation of the sun and moon or by knowledge of prevailing winds and currents. Not until the twelfth century was the compass in use aboard Oriental ships. It was then usually just a magnetized needle—the “south-pointing, floating needle.” (18))

But the stories of these great ships rest on the authority of just a few writers, who, after all, may have been elaborating upon stories they heard after too many glasses of wine. One needs other kinds of evidence to decide whether these or other such voyages actually took place. There is little.

Blacks—from somewhere—did apparently precede the Spanish to the mainland New World. At least Spanish explorers spoke of them. The reports mention groups of African blacks isolated or living with native Indians, perhaps the fragments of former colonies or the survivors of shipwrecks. (19)

Peter Martyr, a historian and contemporary of Columbus, notes that Spanish explorers found “Negro slaves” in Darien, present Panama, who were fierce and cruel. (20)) “It is thought,” the chronicler observed, “that Negro pirates of Ethiopia established themselves after the wreck of their ships in these mountains.”

These Africans, for that is what Martyr means by his use of “Ethiopia,” were captives of local Indians (not slaves in a later sense, but captives in war) and had apparently come from a nearby colony. They were there before 1513 when Balboa found them. (21)

The explanation that they were former pirates is probably invented. That they were actually there probably was not. That they might have been African traders, perhaps shipwrecked years before, is at least possible. (22)

It is more likely that this group, and others noted in the Gulf area, might have been escaped Spanish slaves. The first were brought to the West Indies by the Spanish about 1501. (23) Not only the blacks who came with the Spanish as free men but also many slaves were certainly independent-minded people capable of taking care of themselves in a new world. Whether shipwrecked explorers and traders or later slaves, the Africans were not always the people pictured in the usual cliché: stone-age tribesmen taken from a jungle. Many blacks in the New World could write beautiful Arabic. (24) Some were shipbuilders; others were metalworkers, among a host of skills. (25)

The Spanish in their first explorations around the Gulf of Mexico noticed a sprinkling of black colonies. (26) The one in Texas was seen relatively late, and hence it cannot be dated early enough for a claim to be made that it was anything other than a group of escaped slaves from the Caribbean or Mexico. (27)

On the lower stretches of the Rio Grande, in a place within the present city of Brownsville, the first of the Spanish colonizers and explorers reported a group of blacks. (28)

Fanciful meeting of explorers and Native Americans Institute of Texan Cultures, 84-77

Captain Carlos Cantú, who had earlier led a group of Spanish colonists from Nuevo León in 1749, came across a colony of blacks on a river island in the braided lower Rio Grande. (29) Speculation on the origin of the people, noted as being independent and well armed, was wide ranging. They were called escapees from earlier slave ships or stranded mariners or were simply left unexplained, like the blacks seen in present-day Panama before Balboa. That they preceded the Spanish to the area is known, but whether they preceded the Spanish slave trade to the New World is not known. The Texas colony, apparently quite durable, was identifiable until the nineteenth century. However, few scholars today believe the colony was pre-Columbian.

In any case, the colony disappeared rather suddenly before the 1830’s, perhaps as the result of a disastrous flood. By the turn of the century, all that was left in the way of evidence were ghosts, some say, and mysterious fires seen late at night that leave no ashes to be blown by morning wind. (30)

But there is an earlier type of evidence concerning the western Gulf of Mexico. What exists is a mixed body of material and linguistic evidence, but limited in verifiability. In the civilization called Olmec, a number of stone heads exist as possible evidence of a visit or colonization scheme originating in Africa. The colossal heads have the faces of African blacks, and they dominate Olmec remains. Far too old to be connected with Abubakari’s voyages, they appear to be realistic portraits of blacks who could have come not as slaves or mercenaries, but as explorers or traders. No other motives are known, now, for such sculpture, and the great hewn blocks are certainly not fictional. (31)

The large Olmec heads and other figurines from later centuries seem to represent African racial types with startling accuracy. (32) But this is not proof that the sculptured faces are portraits of Africans who came to the western Gulf. They do present an ethnic facial structure that exactly resembles contemporary African faces from the Mandingo-Mali area. But they may only attest to coincidence.

No evidence such as huge rock heads comes from within Texas’s present boundaries. The often-cited “Pseudo-Negroid” human skulls mentioned by Earnest Albert Hooton are not applicable. (33) Some writers have taken his look at materials from the Pecos Pueblo in New Mexico to refer to Texas. (34) A number of skulls were examined in New Mexico which were close in measurements to “Negro groups” of Africa—but are by no means identifiably so. They were not statistically close to measurements of other Native American skulls in the area but were well within skull variations for any ethnic group.

Normal variations in skulls and other skeletal remains are enough to make questionable any “racial” conclusion based on only a few examples. Most authorities on Mesoamerican Indians consider that the question, definition, and determination of “race” cannot be applied. In particular, “attempts to establish differences based on . . . characteristics such as . . . form of the cranium [or anything else] yield no consistent classifications.” (35)

Other evidence than carved heads or skull measurements is necessary, therefore, before one can begin to test the statements about early African voyages. Contemporary efforts have used evidence from plants—agricultural and domesticated crops—that could have been brought to the New World or taken to the Old.

A few cultivated plant species—the bottle gourd, jack bean, and one variety of cotton—almost certainly were transported or spread naturally from the Old World, usually meaning Africa. (36) Probably only the gourd could have simply drifted across an ocean by itself. Cottonseed, valued as a source of oil and food long before the fiber-bearing varieties were artificially selected by humans, could not survive an ocean drift. (37)

Yet the dates for the arrival of these plants in the New World are, according to present estimates, too early to be connected with any known human voyages. The bottle gourd reached northeastern Mexico as early as 7000 B.C.E. and cotton by 1000 B.C.E. (38)

Other food plants are often said to provide proof of early Atlantic crossings. Yams (Dioscorea) may have been in the West Indies before Columbus and, if so, were brought from Africa; (39) the taro (Colocasia) is also apparently an African plant brought to the New World. (40) Going the other way, the manihot root and maize are found in Africa and have been attributed to Portuguese importation after 1500. But the Portuguese themselves made no such claims, and the crops were too extensive in Africa by the early 1500’s to have been started only a few years before. (41)

Another popular source of evidence is languages—rather, the similarities between them. Evidence of linguistic similarity is one of the least satisfactory forms of evidence in the minds of almost everyone except its defenders. To Leo Wiener, (42) the evidence is clear that native African languages left an indelible mark in the native American languages of the New World long before Spanish or other European voyages. In addition, Wiener sees other Mandingo cultural influences in Mexican civilization. In a thousand pages, he compares Mexican Indian civilization with Mandingo and concludes that the two are not just similar but “identical, in concept, in form, in ritualistic observances.” (43)

On largely linguistic evidence, (44) Wiener dates the arrival of Mandingo merchants in the New World to the first quarter of the fifteenth century. This kind of contact, if it happened and if it happened early enough, could have resulted in the creation of the black god of traveling merchants seen in the few surviving Mexican Indian codices.(45) Or the color could be ceremonial or accidental.

Wiener’s claims are very wide. He cites similarities between African and New World Indian cultures concerning the shield design of Aztec warriors (reflecting a crescent design in Africa), (46) sacrificial practices, (47) the costuming of the gods, (48) the structure of worship, (49) calendar similarities, (50) and artistic motifs. According to Wiener, Arabic-African talismanic designs, called gadwal, occur also in the Americas in a wide band from Mexico to Tennessee. The recurrent motif is a square, often with looped ends, at times enclosing a cross and embellished with symbols. (51) Whether such detail represents proof or influence or chance is at present in the mind of the beholder. After such an array of what Wiener believes is evidence, there is no doubt in his mind, at least: “The matter of chance is mathematically excluded. If chance can play such pranks, then all historical, archaeological, and philological conclusions are null and void.”

Written evidence is rarer still. North African evidence (not necessarily black African) of early arrivals in the Americas is claimed by Barry Fell, who theorizes pre-Columbian North African exploration and active settlement in North America. Fell reads the Great Basin curvilinear Indian pictographs, long an enigma to American archaeologists, as early Arabic. (52) He has interpreted many shield-like rock paintings as copies of Mediterranean coins. He has, however, received little support for his claims from American archaeologists. (53)

As far as local evidence goes, the Texas area itself seems to remain a crossroads. One of the most curious stories concerns legends from the Mexican Indians themselves—possibly the most reliable source—attesting to ancestors coming down the Texas coast. But, because of the destruction of Native American records largely during the Spanish conquest, the legends are filtered through Spanish voices.

Map of the Gulf of Mexico with an illustration placed conveniently offshore. Institute of Texan Cultures, 84-99

According to Bernardino de Sahagún, the ancestors of the Mexican Indians came by sea from the east and north. They traveled, he understood the Indian informants to say, from the direction of Florida, around the curve of the Gulf of Mexico to the Pánuco area (about as far west as they could sail). (54) They came looking for a paradise, a new home. And they came in seven ships.

Various people have used this voyage, with little other evidence, as proof that the natives of Mexico were influenced by the northeast Africans—the Egyptians. (55) Similarities in ritual, concepts of existence after death, artistic motifs, forms of the deities, athletic costume, all have been cited in support of Egyptian influence (and racial mixture) with Olmecs, Mayans, and Aztecs. (56) There are indications that Rameses III (1195-1164 B.C.E.) did send out ships on expeditions, even into the ocean of inverted water. (57) And in his tomb an expedition of seven departing ships is painted. (58) His explorers may have sailed the Texas coast, but none apparently returned to Egypt.

The Mayan Popul Vuh states that such ancestral arrivals—unfortunately without specifying where they came from—were a mixed bunch, black and white, who came far from the east and down the present Texas coast. But there are few details. The Spanish destroyed Mexican Indian literature with such zeal that the full story, true or false, is probably lost for all time.

What is left admits varied interpretations. And it may be that one occasionally sees only that for which one searches.