French nobleman Sieur de Bellefond Nicolas Villault was the first person to publish a claim that sailors from Dieppe in the 1200s established a post at Grand Cess (called “Little Dieppe” by the French). There is no evidence to support Villault’s claim. They consists of assertions made centuries after by people who did not observe or participate in the “discovery.”
Based on direct experience at Grand Cess, Villault said Cess. “They work excellent well in Iron” because “they mended our shears for us, with which we cut out our barrs of Iron, and gave them such a temper as made them incomparably better than they were at first.”
Barbot, 1732, pp. 9-11; Adam Jones, Zur Quellenproblemmatik der Geschichte Westafrika, 1450-1900 (Stuttgard: Franz Steiner, 1990), pp. 55-58; Villault, 1670, p. 95; Sieur de Bellefond Nicolas Villault, A Relation of the Coasts of Africk called Guinee (London: John Starkey, 1670), p. 130; P. E. Hair, Adam Jones and Robin Law, eds., Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa 1678-1712 (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1992), p. xii, Letter 113, pp. 7-9, Letter 19, pp. 242, 254 n. 31; Masonen, 2000, pp. 38-51.
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