The island changed hands frequently during the
colonial era. The first European to visit the island was the Portuguese explorer
Nuno Tristão, in 1443.[3] In 1445, Prince
Henry the Navigator set up a trading post on the island, which acquired
gum arabic and
enslaved people for Portugal. By 1455, 800 enslaved people were shipped from Arguin to Portugal every year.[4]
In 1633, during its
Dutch-Portuguese War, the Netherlands seized control of Arguin. It remained under Dutch rule until 1678, with a brief interruption by English rule in 1665. France took over the island in September 1678, but it was then abandoned until 1685.[5] Arguin's aridity and its lack of a good anchorage made long-term European settlement difficult.[1]
In 1685, Captain Cornelius Reers of the frigate Rother Löwe [
de] occupied the old Portuguese fort on the island. He successfully concluded a treaty with the native king in which
Brandenburg was accepted as a protecting power. The treaty was ratified in 1687 and was renewed in 1698.[6] Arguin remained a colony of Brandenburg until 1721 when the French successfully assaulted the fort and then took control of the island. The Dutch took the fort and island from the French the following year only to lose it again in 1724 to the French. This period of French rule lasted four years; in 1728, it reverted to the control of indigenous peoples.[5] The island was included in the territory of the French colony of
Mauritania, and it remained under Mauritanian rule when that country became independent in 1960.[2]
In July 1816, the French frigate Méduse, bound for
Senegal, was wrecked off Arguin and 350 people died.[1]
^Slave Routes - Europe PortugalArchived November 10, 2013, at the
Wayback Machine. New raw archival-sourced data regarding Arguin slave trade in the early sixteenth century have been released in Ivana Elbl, "Sand and Dreams: Daily Slave Purchases at the Portuguese Coastal Outpost of Arguim (Mauritania) (1519-1520) ~ Full Raw Serialized Data plus Archival Analysis Annotations,” Portuguese Studies Review 30 (1) (2022): 325-354. The data very simply supersedes other obsolete listings and / or previous unfounded speculations ("estimates"), for the period in question. Available on academia.edu.
https://trentu.academia.edu/ivanaElbl Consulted 29 May 2023.
1 1975 is the year of East Timor's Declaration of Independence and subsequent
invasion by Indonesia. In 2002, East Timor's independence was fully recognized.