There is almost nothing here now - a smear of dunes, the gray Atlantic, the wind. But for more than a century, ships from Amsterdam, London, and Saint-Louis dropped anchor off this empty shore to bargain over a single commodity: sticky amber tears of sap that bled from acacia trees deep in the desert. Portendick had no harbor, no fresh water, no permanent town worth the name. What it had was gum, and in the eighteenth century gum was worth fighting wars for.
The prize was gum arabic - hardened sap from the *Acacia senegal* trees that grew in belts across the Sahel. Tap the bark, wait, and the wound weeps a translucent resin that dries into glassy nuggets. Europe could not get enough of it. Dissolved in water, gum arabic thickened printers' ink, fixed the brilliant dyes of the textile trade, bound medicines and confections, and stiffened the silks of fashionable cities. The Trarza Moors who controlled the trade gathered the gum inland and carried it to the coast, where Dutch, then British and French merchants competed to buy it. The Dutch founded the trading point at Portendick in 1721, just after the French had seized the rival Portuguese island fort of Arguin to the north. The name itself is a worn-down echo of an older one: Porto d'Arco, a Portuguese label sanded smooth by centuries of foreign tongues.
Because there was no fort and no settled authority, Portendick became a loophole. France engineered a near-monopoly on the gum trade through its base at Saint-Louis, downriver on the Senegal, striking deals with the Emirate of Trarza. But monopolies leak. Whenever France and the Trarza fell into one of their frequent wars, British traders sailed north to buy gum at Portendick instead, slipping around the French stranglehold. In 1825 they organized the English Company of Portendick to formalize the taxes owed to the Emir - an attempt to make the freelancing respectable. France's answer came in 1835: a naval blockade that sealed the coast for a year and seized several British merchant vessels caught loading gum. The seizure spiraled into a genuine diplomatic crisis. In 1843 the Affaire de Portendick went to international arbitration, with the King of Prussia called in to adjudicate a quarrel between two great powers over a windswept beach and its tree resin.
What finally killed Portendick was not a navy but the climate. The acacia groves that fed the trade depended on rainfall, and the rain was retreating. As the desert crept south, the *Acacia senegal* belts withdrew with it, drifting closer to Saint-Louis and the Senegal River - exactly where the French already held the trade. Portendick's one advantage, its position near the gum country, evaporated. With no water, no anchorage, and no town to sustain a community, there was nothing to hold people in place. The site had also seen blood earlier, as a battleground in the Char Bouba war between Hassan warrior tribes and Zawaya religious clans who contested who would rule this corner of the Sahara. By 1916 a visitor found the great trading station reduced to a handful of huts. Today the empires are gone, the gum trade is a footnote, and the coast keeps only the wind that once filled the sails of merchants arguing over sap.
Portendick lies on the open Atlantic coast of western Mauritania at 18.58 degrees N, 16.12 degrees W, roughly 80 km north of Nouakchott. There is no settlement and no landmark - look for the unbroken line where pale dunes meet gray surf, with no harbor or river mouth to interrupt it. The nearest airport is Nouakchott-Oumtounsy International (GQNN); Nouadhibou (GQPP) lies far to the north. Best viewed at low cruising altitude in the clear, dusty light of the dry season, when the Saharan haze thins enough to pick out the desert's edge against the sea.