evidence: At the arrival of the first Portuguese navigators to Gabon in 1472, portions of southern Gabon were loosely linked to the state of Loango, which in turn formed a province of the vast Kongo kingdom to the south. From the offshore islands of Sao Tome and Principe, where the Portuguese established sugar plantations, they developed trade with the mainland. From the late 1500s Dutch, French, Spanish, and English competitors also exchanged cloth, iron goods, firearms, and alcoholic beverages for hardwoods, ivory, and a few enslaved people. [...] In 1910 Gabon became one of the four colonies within the federation of French Equatorial Africa. The French delimited the frontier with the Germans in Cameroon in 1885 and with the Spanish in Río Muni, or Spanish Guinea (later Equatorial Guinea), in 1900. French occupation of the Gabon interior brought little opposition, but interference with trade and such exactions as head taxes, labour taxes for public projects, and forced labour provoked considerable resistance, as did the French policy from 1898 to 1914 of developing the economy through monopolistic concessionary companies, which devastated settlement, agricultural production, and trade.