Gulf of Guinea

In another instance, Binger reports that an African intermediary placed various lengths of straw on the ground to indicate the distances between localities in the Kong region.

In his exploration of the area between the Niger River and the Gulf of Guinea in the early 1890s, Navy Lieutenant Jean-Baptiste Marchand routinely collected route information from local inhabitants about places he could not visit.

This locally sourced route information, as he described it, appears as dashed lines on his landmark map of the region.

The routes of Marchand and other European explorers appear as solid lines.

So literally every recipe in Spiced has a connect to a real person, someone I've met somewhere and I've learned something from them and I think that to me was immensely important.

After her huge success with the Visual Encyclopedia of Indian Food, an A to Z, Spiced is a groundbreaking deep dive into a whole world of spices, from Norway to the Greek islands, Yunnan province to the Gulf of Guinea.

With essays from friends and esteemed colleagues and a foreword from Harold McGee, this is a modern classic.

I began by asking her how she got such a luminary in food science to add his weight to such a project.

In his sermon, Padgett said, quoting, As the state of those in hell is described by a worm that torments them and never dieth, so those that live in this torrid zone in guinea have often and ordinarily a worm of strange and incredible length that breedeth in their flesh as those that travel thither have both seen and felt and in their flesh have brought home from thence unto their own countries and have had the same drawn out from under their skin after their return end quote As the association with Africa grew, the name guinea worm began to emerge as a common term for the disease.

By the 18th century, English-speaking Europeans documented high rates of this parasite along the Gulf of Guinea, especially in present-day Ghana and Nigeria.

However, this was not the sole reason for the name.

When enslaved Africans were transported to the New World, many carried the disease.

These factors ultimately led British doctors to associate the disease with the Guinea region.

A widely circulated myth claims an unnamed Swiss traveler first named the parasite after visiting Africa's west coast in 1611.

However, the name Guinea Worm likely became established due to repeated reports of enslaved people from the Gulf of Guinea experiencing its symptoms in Europe and the Caribbean, rather than from a single declaration.

Regardless of its origins, the name persisted and remained widely used until 1726, when British physician Richard Towne formally explained its meaning and origins in writing.

Why are we going there?

So the unique part about these two countries, which reside on the equator in the Gulf of Guinea... are the amazing wildlife that they have to offer in Gabon.

And in São Tomé, São Tomé was a former Portuguese colony where they planted a lot of cacao and coffee.

So it is... known as the Chocolate Islands.

Especially near Nigeria.

Yeah, particularly the ones splaying out into the Gulf of Guinea right near Nigeria.

These huge cracks and fissures in the Earth's crust created these sort of shielded gullies and deep open basins on the ancient seafloor.

Like natural traps.