J. W. Blake, who died on 7 March 1987, was a significant and notable link in the chain of African historiography. In the 1930s he learned Portuguese, assembled Portuguese sources, and did meticulous research among the difficult and then largely unpenetrated archives of the English High Court of Admiralty. The result was a monograph on European Beginnings in West Africa, 1454-1578, published in 1937, followed by two volumes of documents relating to the same period, Europeans in West Africa, published in 1942. The outbreak of war in 1939 delayed the second publication and by preventing Blake from visiting French archives made it one nation short in its documents. The titles of these very solid works express exactly what they contain. The monograph was much admired by the distinguished Portuguese scholar, Avelino Teixeira da Mota, and by the small but growing band of Anglo-American historians who from the 1950s developed an interest in the history of Guinea. Indeed, the 1937 work was almost the earliest work to make a serious study of the first stages of European contact with Black Africa. But it was essentially a work about Europeans overseas, since Blake had been trained in a tradition of what was then called ‘imperial history.’ In modern parlance it was Eurocentric, and its references to the experiences and reactions of Africans were, by later standards, naive and uninformed.