Record 20 (1732)

This record provides information on Allada ‘Withdaw’ clothes being exported to Barbados.

Their women are most employ'd in making Whidaw cloths, mats, baskets, canchy, pitto and in planting and fowing their corn, yams, potatos etc. The Whidaw cloth is about two yards long, and about a quarter of a yard broad, three such being commonly joyn'd together. It is of divers colours, but generally blue and white. For a pound of leaf tobacco, be it never so rotten and bad we could buy one of these cloths; which would yield a crown in Barbadoes; also one for eight knives, value prime cost eighteen pence. To make these cloths, especially the blue streaks, they unravel most of the sayes and perpetuanoes we sell them.

Source: See John Thornton, Africans in Africa, pp.52-53 quoting John Phillips 'A journal of the voyage in the Hannibal of Lonodn, ann. 1693, 1694', in A Collection of Voyages and travels (London, 1732)