trader called Petley Wyburne, who was not an agent of the Royal African Company but an ‘interloper’, that is, a trader operating independently of the company and in breach of its monopoly, and this was maintained until Wyburne was forcibly removed by agents of the Royal African Company in 1686.97 The company itself had meanwhile established a factory in the Hueda kingdom, at a second attempt, in July 1682; but this was located not at Ouidah, but at the capital Savi.98 In April and May 1684, however, this factory suffered two serious fires, which evidently effectively destroyed it, since later in 1684 the local chief factor reported that he was ‘busied about building a house’;99 and the new factory now built was evidently situated at Ouidah.100 The English factory was situated east of the French factory (at least, east of where the later French fort was established in 1704), between it and the indigenous settlement of Tové. It was fortified with earthworks, mounted with cannon, for defence against its French neighbour, in 1692, and a moat was added in 1694;101 it was later known as ‘William’s Fort, Whydah’, alluding to King William III (1689–1703), the English monarch in whose reign it was fortified.
From the Royal African Company William’s Fort passed into the possession of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, which replaced it in 1752, but it was abandoned in 1812, following the legal abolition of the British slave trade. It was reoccupied by a private British merchant, Thomas Hutton, operating from the Gold Coast to the west, from 1838, and was later occupied by a British vice-consulate (1851–2), by a British Methodist mission (1856–67), and again by a different British trading firm (F. & A. Swanzy, also of the Gold Coast) in the 1870s. It was sold off to a German firm (C. Goedelt, of Hamburg) in the 1880s, but was confiscated as enemy property by the French colonial authorities in the First World War and passed back into the hands of another British firm, John Walkden of Manchester, who remained in occupation until 1963 and with whose name it is still locally associated. Redevelopment had destroyed its appearance as a fortification by 1890, when the building occupied by Goedelt was described as ‘an ordinary house’; the moat was filled in in 1908.102 The only material remains of the earlier fort visible today are a few cannon scattered around its courtyard.103 In local usage, the area nevertheless remains ‘Le Fort anglais’.
The third and last of the European forts in Ouidah was the Portuguese. Some accounts date the foundation of the Portuguese fort to 1680;104 but although a Portuguese factory was indeed established in the Hueda kingdom around this time, it appears that this was at the capital Savi rather than at Ouidah, and in any case was ephemeral, or at least not continuously occupied.105 The Portuguese fort in Ouidah was in fact built in 1721;106 it was later known as ‘Fort São João Baptista de Ajudá [= Hueda]’. It was situated east again from the English factory, and adjoining Tové quarter on the south; a contemporary account of its establishment indicates that, unlike the earlier factories, it was constructed within an already built-up part of the town, which had to be demolished in order to clear the site, the construction employing over 500 persons for 30 days.107 Unlike the other two forts, the Portuguese was from the first a possession of the Portuguese crown, and under the immediate authority of the viceroy of Brazil at Salvador, Bahia; and later (after the Brazilian capital was removed to Rio de Janeiro in 1763) under the provincial governor of Bahia. It was abandoned after the legal abolition of the Portuguese slave trade north of the equator in 1815, but the Portuguese claim to it was maintained. It was reoccupied by the Portuguese government in 1844, this time administered from the local Portuguese headquarters on the island of São Tomé, off the West African coast. This renewed Portuguese presence was at first tenuous and intermittent, and possession of the fort was briefly usurped by Roman Catholic missionaries of the French Société des Missions Africaines in 1861–5. But it was definitively reoccupied by Portugal in 1865, and remained an anomalous Portuguese enclave within the French colony of Dahomey throughout the colonial period, its evacuation being forced by the newly independent Republic of Dahomey only in 1961. Alone of the three European forts the Portuguese retains its character as a fortification, though the present layout of the buildings appears to date from the reoccupation of 1865 rather than from the original period of occupation in the eighteenth century.108 It now houses the Historical Museum of Ouidah.
Local tradition speaks of the existence of Dutch and Danish forts also in Ouidah, and even indicates their supposed sites.109 Memory of a Dutch fort that had allegedly existed earlier is already attested in Ouidah in the 1860s, when it was said to have been on the site occupied since the 1820s by the Brazilian slave-trader Francisco Felix de Souza, which remains today the de Souza family compound.110 But the existence of such a Dutch fort is not corroborated by earlier contemporary evidence. The Dutch West India Company did contemplate establishing a factory in Ouidah, after their existing factory at Offra was destroyed in the war of 1692, when the Hueda authorities offered them the factory formerly occupied by the English interloper Wyburne.111 Although the Dutch factors were in the event evacuated, some of the company’s African employees apparently remained behind; in 1694 it was noted that there was a settlement of ‘Mina’ people (i.e. from Elmina, the Dutch headquarters on the Gold Coast), half a mile from the English factory at Ouidah, who assisted Dutch ships trading there.112 But it does not appear that this establishment was maintained. A Dutch fort is mentioned at Ouidah, alongside the French and English, in one source of the early eighteenth century; but this seems to be a simply a mistake.113 The West India Company did maintain a factory (which was not fortified) in the Hueda kingdom between 1703 and 1727, but this was situated at the capital Savi, rather than Ouidah.114 Although the company’s local chief factor in 1726 obtained permission to build a lodge ‘where the other nations have their forts’, i.e. in Ouidah, this was not in fact carried out;115 and after the destruction of Savi, including the European factories there, in the Dahomian conquest of 1727, the Dutch company no longer maintained any establishment in the area. Although it is of course possible that some later individual Dutch trader maintained a factory in Ouidah, this can only have been ephemeral, and the authenticity of the ‘traditional’ site is suspect.
The idea of a Danish fort in Ouidah seems to have arisen from a misreading of the same early eighteenth-century account that wrongly mentioned a Dutch fort there.116 Contemporary sources, again, do not corroborate this; the factor of a Danish ship that traded at Ouidah in 1784–5 lodged in the English fort.117 Recent tradition asserts that the Danish fort was on the site occupied in the late nineteenth century by the French firm of Cyprien Fabre, immediately east of the English fort, but this is probably a confusion; contemporary evidence suggests that the former occupant of this building was the British trader Hutton, who after relinquishing the English fort to the British vice-consulate in 1852 occupied premises east of the fort, which after his death (in 1856) passed into the possession of a Spanish merchant, and by the mid-1860s into the hands of the Dahomian crown.118
The European forts were distinctive within Ouidah by being built, in part, in two storeys, being consequently known locally as singbo (or singbome), ‘great houses’.119 Nevertheless, it should be stressed that the Ouidah forts were structures of much less military strength than the better-known examples on the Gold Coast. Unlike the latter, those at Ouidah were built in local materials – in mud rather than in brick or stone, which left them subject to rapid dilapidation if not regularly maintained, and with thatched rather than tiled roofs, which made them more vulnerable to fire. Their relative weakness is demonstrated by the fact that the Dahomians were able to capture and/or destroy forts in Ouidah on three occasions, the Portuguese in 1727, the French in 1728 and the Portuguese again in 1743; on the latter two occasions at least, the destruction of the forts was due to the buildings catching fire and causing the explosion of stores of gunpowder. Moreover, the Ouidah forts were located a considerable distance from the sea, and therefore their cannon could not, like those on the Gold Coast, command the landing-places for their own supplies; in consequence, as Europeans explicitly recognized, even if they could defeat direct attack they could be starved into surrender.120 In the early eighteenth century, both the English and the Dutch pressed for permission to build forts at the seaside, but the Hueda king, Hufon, refused, precisely because he was aware of the power that English and Dutch forts exercised
