The colonial military history of British and French West Africa has received copious attention from historians and soldiers. The role of the region in the two world wars has also been discussed in one way or the other. However, in the discussion of West Africa's colonial military history and the role of the colonies in the two world wars, hardly any reference is made to the air factor. While discussions of colonial military history concentrate on infantry and naval exploits, those on the role of the colonies in the world wars concentrate on their importance as sources of raw materials and manpower for British and French war efforts in other theatres of the wars. The wrong impressions thus given are that the air factor was alien to West Africa's colonial defence and that the region was largely outside the strategic manoeuvres of the two world wars. This is understandable in that the Maxim gun and the gunboat had largely been responsible for the conquest and policing of West Africa. Moreover, while infantry and naval warfare had been the mode of combat in all societies from time immemorial the air as a factor of warfare is largely a phenomenon of the twentieth century. Lastly, strategists in British West Africa ignored the air factor for a very long time because of its capital intensity.

Although this paper builds on earlier research, let me frankly confess that this is still a preliminary report as it is not based on comprehensive research in the original sources upon which my work on the seventeenth centuryis based. Given the huge amount of sources available for the eighteenth century, to write a truly thorough paper on the Arabian seas in the eighteenth century would take many years – nay, a life-time so voluminous is it. Holden Furber, perhaps the greatest historian of the eighteenth-century Indian Ocean, started to work on this topic in 1936, published a volume on the 1780–1790 period in 1948 and then announced he would write further volumes tracing the story back into the seventeenth century. But Holden Furber spent the rest of his life hunting down further archival material, with new material constantly forcing him to delay further publications for another forty years. Even then he was only able to write a preliminary survey of the eighteenth century, ending with the causing note that, of course, he had not studied the Dutch material as well as he would have liked to.

Academic historians – or at least one sub-species of them - display growing interest in underwater archaeology, but nearly all of these profess little but disdain for treasure salvors who dive for precious metals and jewels hidden in submerged shipwrecks. Even so, the academics sometimes rub elbows with the undersea hunters and I myself became involved with them in 1982 and again in 1995–1996. I might add that they contacted me - not the other way around. This article is designed to document my experience, and while it is not intended in any way to be an exposé, I think it might be useful to my profession and to my Brazilian friends to learn something of how the salvors operate.

The 1944–1945 Yearbook of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam includes a commemorative article written byjohan Huizinga in honour of the French historian Gabriel Hanotaux, who was a foreign member of the Academy from 1913 to 1944. Hanotaux was born on November 19, 1853, and died on April 11, 1944, a few months after his ninetieth birthday. In his commemoration of Hanotaux, Huizinga briefly sketched the life, work and achievements of Hanotaux who was, at that time, a wellknown French historian and politician. Huizinga was very impressed, as becomes apparent from his words: ‘Truly, it is almost unbelievable what this representative of all that is noble and pure in the French has created.’ He concluded his commemoration with a brief consideration of what he called his ‘temporary personal relationship with Hanotaux’.

The German scholar Georg Marcgraf was the first trained astronomer in the New World and co-author of the earliest published natural history of Brazil, Historia naturalis Brasiliae (Leiden and Amsterdam 1648) (Fig. 1). Arriving in the Americas in 1638, Marcgraf took his place among a remarkable group of scholars and painters assembled at the Brazilian court of the German count Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen (1604–1679), the governor-general of Dutch Brazil from 1637–1644.1 Dutch Brazil was established by the Dutch West India Company (WIC), which was created in 1621 to engage in trade, conquest, and colonisation in the Americas and Africa. Except for Marcgraf, the most important members of the Count's entourage were Dutch and included the painters Albert Eckhout (c. 1610 - c. 1666) and Frans Post (1612–1680) and the physician Willem Piso (1611–1678). The rich group of scientific and visual materials they created are comparable in both scope and importance with the works created by Sydney Parkinson, William Hodges, and others during the Pacific voyages of Captain Cook in the eighteenth century.2 The Count's support of natural history, astronomy, and scientific and ethnographic illustration during his governorship was highly unusual, setting him apart from other colonial administrators and military leaders in the seventeenth century. Indeed, he is responsible for establishing both the first observatory and the first botanical garden in the New World, sparing no expense in creating a princely empire for himself in the Brazilian wilderness.