THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
man. But with this the Portuguese successes ended. 
T he native levies, satisfied for the moment with the 
victory, in order to celebrate their triumph and 
desirous to display in the town the heads taken, with-
drew from the position to which they should ·have 
cltmg at whatever cost, and it was at once, and almost 
without loss, seized by a second Dutch detachment. 
The Portuguese, hastily reassembling their native 
allies, twice made desperate attempts to retake this 
all -important position, but without success. I t is 
easy to make a blunder, not so easy to repair it. On 
each occasion they were repulsed with heavy loss, 
and finally they were driven back on a second 
position near the summit of the hill, a redoubt which 
they had prepared beforehand. But out of this, too, 
they were quickly forced, and very soon from the t op 
of the hill Dutch guns were playing on San Jorge. 
After two days' fighting-the Dutch being unable 
to carry and hold the town of E lmina owing to the 
heavy fire of the fort's guns - Colonel Coine 
summoned San Jorge to surrender, threatening with 
death the entire garrrison if t he summons should be 
disregarded. Time to consider the question was 
demanded by the Portuguese commandant ; in tlu·ee 
days he would be prepared to answer " Yea" or 
"Nay." But this by no means suited the D utch, 
who had left their ships carrying with them but a 
bare three days' rations. Here already was the third 
day. It mnst be now or never; either they must 
have the castle that day, or a retreat to the ships 
was inevitable. Accordingly Colonel Hans Coine 
ordered an immediate assault. But even as the men 
112 
PORTUGUESE AND DOTCH 
began to move forward on their desperate and 
uncertain task, above the frowning ramparts rose 
heavily in the stagnant air a white flag, and the roll of 
Portuguese drums beating the" ehamade" announced 
that the garrison was prepared to discuss terms of 
surrender. 
It was, after all, no great feat to capture this 
stronghold, for (leaving out of account the native 
levies on either side) there were no mol'\,! than thirty-
eight or forty Portuguese in the castle to withstand 
the thirteen hundred Dutch soldiers and sailors; 
and of this slender Portuguese garrison, the entire 
European rank and file were" banisht men," persons 
sent out of their country for crime. Not that it is an 
unknown thing for convicts to do loyal service,-oUl' 
own annals in Australia have shown that,-but the 
average Portuguese official ' of the time was little 
likely to have gained either the affection or the 
confidence of those under his command. We know 
from Andrew Battell and from others the material 
of which both officers and men were composed. Of 
this particular garrison Barbot says that it was 
"commonly composed of leud and debauch'd persons, 
as well officers as soldiers, both of them used to 
commit outrages and to plunder, or of such as were 
banish'd Portugal for heinous crimes and misde-
meanors. No wonder therefore that the histories of 
those times give an account of unparallel'd violence, 
and inhumanities committed there by those unsatiable 
Portuguese during the time that place was under 
their subjection, not only against the natives of the 
country and such European nations as resorted hither, 
113 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
but even among themselves." A successful, or even 
a prolonged, resistance, under such circumst ances was 
not within t he realms of possibility. Van Y pren 
had made no mistake in his est imate. 
T he Dutch were now virtually masters of the 
Gold Coast . Of important posts there was but Fort 
S. Anthony at Axim remaining in P ortuguese hands, 
and ere long that t oo followed the example of San 
Jorge. It is not easy to underst and why Holland 
did not seize F ort S. A nthony before Coine returned 
to Brazil. Van Y pren did indeed then demand that 
it should be surrendered, but he took no action after 
the Portuguese commandant's spirited rejection of 
his summons. P erhaps he thought that, like an 
over-ripe pear, it must soon drop of it s own weight, 
and t hat bloodshed might thereby be saved. I n any 
case, it was not until J anuary 1642 that the Dutch 
laid hands on Fort S. Anthony, some considerable 
time indeed after a treaty had been signed between 
Holland and the now restored King of Portugal, 
a tt'eRty whereby her conquests in ' Vest AfricR were 
secured t o the former. U nless there is some con-
fusion of dates, the Netherlanders were here acting 
in most high-handed fashion. 
W hatever the facts of the case, however, t he 
P ortuguese, after an occupation of one hundred and 
sixt y years, were now finally ej ected from the Gold 
Coast. Traces of t hat occupat ion are st ill to be 
found in the language of the native tribes, and, in 
certain instances, in place-names. A mongst the 
words mentioned by Colonel E llis in his H ist01'Y if 
tlte Gold Coast as being st ill in use are " palaver," 
1 14 
PORTUGUESE AND DUTCH 
from the Portuguese " palabra"; "caboccer," from 
"cabeceiro )'; "picanniny," from "picania"; and 
"fetish," from "feitiyo." Colonel Ellis also says 
that although the Dutch remained on the Gold 
Coast for t wo hundred and t hirty-t wo years, there 
are no similar traces of their occupation, nor are 
even now in general use many words del·ived from 
our own language. From all accounts it would 
seem that the Portuguese mingled with the native 
population in much more int imate fash ion than did 
either Dutch or English. 
Of the place-names a good many slU"vive, thougll 
either translat ed into E nglish or corrupted. As 
instances may be mentioned Cape Three Points 
(Cabo de Tres P untas), Gold Coast (Costa del Oro), 
Ancobra (Rio Cobre), E lmina (La Mina), Cape Coast 
(Cabo Corso). 
v ~ <:' T"~A 
5~ 
CS 
u.,. . 
~7~ 
... /,\'1 
115 
CHAPTER IX 
OUR DUTCH RrvA LS 
THE Dutch at this time were practically the World's 
carriers, and not the least profit able part of t heir 
business was that connected with the West Coast 
of Africa and the ever-increasing t raffic t hence in 
slaves. 
Even had there been no other inducement t o 
take them there, the profits of the Slave Trade alone 
could scarcely fail to have brought other nations t o 
the Coast of Guinea. Hence we see at various dates 
and for various periods,-like wasps about the Dutch 
sugar- barrel,-besides the English and the French, 
the Swedes, the Brandenburgers (or Prussians), and 
the Danes, establishing trading posts and building 
forts along the Gold Coast, often in close proximit y 
to, and even in instances commanding, existing 
strongholds. The Brandenburgers, it is true, made 
no prolonged stay,-half a century saw them come 
and go,-and the Swedes were never very formidable 
ri vals; but Denmark held on to her old possessions 
on the Coast down even to a recent day (1872), when 
she sold them to Great Britain. Even now one finds 
trace of them in the term" Dane gun," a distinction 
116 
OUR DUTCH RIVALS 
applied to a peculiar- very peculiar, one may 
imagine-brand of firearm vended to the blacks. 
As to the Brandenburgers, it is not unsafe to 
conclude that they were ever ready for a "deal." 
On 28th March 1708 Sir Dalby Thomas, Chief 
Factor at Cape Coast, writes: "By a Portuguese 
ship which came from Lisbon I was informed that 
the King of Portugal had offered the King of 
Prussia £40,000 for his fort at Cape Tres Pontas 
and the two other settlements belonging to it. I 
think it a great deal of money to be g iven for 
any situation on this coast, and I am apt to believe, 
if it is ever bought by the Portuguese, the Dutch 
will take it from them; for they fear no conse-
quences can they but gain their point by all the 
deceitful ways possible. " 
Mention, also, of another Brandenburger fort 
is made in 1727 by William Smith, Surveyor of the 
Royal African Company. "Seven or eight leagues 
south-east ofAxim," says he, "is another large and 
beautiful Fort, built by the Brandenburgers, but now 
in the hands of the Dutch, and well known by the 
name of Conny's Castle. For when the Prussians, 
who had it last in possession, quitted the coast, they 
left the fort to the charge of one John Conny, a 
black Kaboshir, with strict orders not to deliver it 
to any nation but the Prussians. Soon after, the 
King of Prussia sold all his interest in the Coast 
of Guinea to the Dutch West India Company, 
including with this another fort belonging to him 
near Cape Three Points. When the Dutch came 
to demand the Fort, John Conny refused to deliver 
117 
THE LAND OF T HE GOLDEN TRADE 
it ; on which a war ensued fo r some years, which 
cos t t he D utch a great deal of blood and money. 
Conny, flushed with his victories, became a mortal 
enemy to the Dutch, having paved a little path 
from the outer gate to the inner apartment of his 
castle with the skulls of Dut chmen killed in his 
engagement with them. He had also a large D utch-
man's skull tipt with silver, which he used as a P unch 
bowl. However, in the year 1724 he was beaten out 
of his castle, and forced to fly up into the Fantin 
country from t he incensed Dutch." 
Since 1553 the English had at no time entirely 
ceased to send an occasional ship trading to the Gold 
Coast,- there were ever plenty of bold spirits, in well-
armed craft, willing to run t he risk of capt ure by 
t he Portuguese,-and now, encouraged by Dutch 
successes, they began to come in increasing numbers. 
The Royal African Company of 1631 had latterly, 
with caution, established t rading posts and forts 
along the coast, and after the fall of the Portuguese, 
private adventurers of various nationalities began 
to put in an appearance, undeterred by the monopoly 
of trade claimed by the Dutch ~T est India Com-
pany. Such a monopoly had also with as little 
efficacy been grant ed by Charles to t he English 
Company of 1631. Occasionally, indeed, when it 
came to the ears of the Directors of that Company 
that a vessel was fitting out in England for "iI\T est 
Mrica, in order to assert its right to that monopoly, 
application for her detention would be made; but-
t his merely led to greater care being taken to con-
ceal t he port of destination of craft" fitting foreign," 
118 
OUR DUTCH RIVALS 
and in no way deterred adventurers from taking their 
share in West African trade. 
By the Dutch, not merely the English, but inter-
lopers of their own or any other nation, were regarded 
as equally undesirable. And though the Nether-
landers had at the beg inning treated the natives with 
considerable kindness and forbearance-that is, as 
long as they themselves were striving to obtain a 
footing at the expense of Portugal-they now 
hegan to attempt forcibly to prevent the negroes 
from trading with any but themselves. ' Vhen 
the English came, says Barbot, the Dutch changed 
their former "civility towards the Blacks into 
severity." Having effectually broken down the 
Portuguese monopoly, t heir policy was now to 
establish, and hold, a monopoly of theil' own, as 
vigorous as anything the Portuguese had attempted, 
and to effect their purpose Barbot hints that they 
did not shrink from condemning to death, or from 
occasionally executing, Europeans caught trading 
on the coast, and that to natives they dealt out 
measure as severe as that to which they treated 
Europeans. Bosman himself makes no mention of 
the death -penalty, but he says that the negroes 
drove" a great Trade with the Europeans for Gold, 
which they chiefly vend to the English and Zealand 
Interlopers, notwithstanding t he severe penalty they 
incur thereby, for if we catch them their so bought 
goods are not only forfeited, but a heavy fine is 
laid upon 'em. . . . The plain reason why the 
Natives run this Risque of Trading with the Inter-
lopers is that their goods are sometimes better 
119 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
than ours, and always to be had one third part 
cheaper. " Captain John P hillips, an Englishman, 
who in 1693 went trading to the Guinea Coast in 
command of the Hannibal, a powerful four hundred 
and fifty ton ship, of 36 guns, says that" the Dutch 
Castles have frequently by Stratagem seized some 
of these Interlopers, and used them with the utmost 
Rigour; yet it does no whit deter them, they pro-
viding themselves with nimble ships, which outsail 
the Company's, and go well manned and armed, and 
generally fight it out to the last man rather than 
yield." Phillips mentions' that he had seen as many 
as four or five at a time lying off Mina Castle, 
trading, caring nothing for the Company's prohibi-
tion, though the men knew well that capture 
meant for them imprisonment in the dungeon at 
E I Mina. Captains and the senior officers of captured 
ships P hillips t hinks were generally condemned to 
death. 
At Axim, the Dutch Factor of t hat place came 
aboard P hillips' ship enquiring for home news. He 
was invited t o remain, "which he did, and proved 
a boon Companion, t aking his glass off very smartly, 
and singing and dancing several Jiggs by himself." 
But this lively Dutchman was speedily sobered and 
his mirth quenched at sight of a large canoe, flying 
a flag, hf"ading towards the ship from the direction 
of E I Mina. In spite of Phillips' friendly offer to 
fi re on this Jarge canoe, the Dutch Agent refused to 
remain on board, t umbJed hastily over the side farthes~ 
from the approaching canoe, and, getting into a small 
canoe that lay trading with the ship, "and squatting 
120 
OUR DU'J1CH RIVALS 
himself down flat upon his Belly, made the Men 
row away to the west as fast as they could; and 
having taken a large Compass, landed about a quarter 
of a mile from the Castle." The cause of this sudden 
stampede, as Phillips learned later, was that the 
Dutch Factor's uneasy conscience caused him to 
imagine that any large canoe flying a flag must 
necessarily have on board the Company's Inspector, 
an official of almost unlimited power, whose visits 
were greatly dreaded by Factors inclined to indulge 
in clandestine trade on their own account. If detected 
in any malpractice, "the gentlest Usage he meets 
"~th is to be well fined, and forced to carry a Musket 
in the Castle as a common Centinel, another being 
put into his Government." He was, in fact, only a 
little lower than an Interloper in the scale of crime. 
However, in this instance no dreaded Inspector made 
inopportune arrival, and the Factor, having " banished 
his Fear, resolved to have the other Jug with them. 
Accordingly, they had him aboard, where he con-
tinued till late at Night, and was carried ashOl"e well-
ballasted with Wine and Punch." They were not a 
very moral set of youths, those vVest Coast Factors, 
whether Dutch or English, one fears. But neither 
were the times very moral, and no doubt their 
temptations were great-books and rational recrea-
tion almost non -existent, restraints few or none. 
A life more enervating, more trying, it would ,be 
hard to imagine. In a climate of the worst descrip-
tion, the lassitude consequent on which driving them 
constantly to the spur of brandy, living almost neces-
sarily without exercise either physical 01· mental, can 
121 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
one wonder that men went to the bad and died 
before their time? Phillips mentions that at Suk-
kandi he found Mr. Johnson, the English Agent, 
in bed, raving mad, "through Resentment of an 
Affront put upon him by one Vanbukeline," an 
official of Mina Castle. The" Affi'ont "-result of 
a pitiful quarrel over a not ill-looking native woman 
-was not very creditable to either party, and no 
doubt Mr Johnson flew to the bowl for consolation. 
H is second in command, "a young L ad, and had 
been a Blue-coat Hospital Boy," had apparently no 
pleasant billet. Johnson was afterwards cut in 
pieces by the blacks, at the instigation of Vanbukeline. 
Specially to enforce that prohibition of English 
trade on which they were intent, armed Dutch 
vessels were kept continually cruising along the 
coast, seizing here a weakly-armed English ship, 
pouncing there on natives and forfeiting their goods. 
' Vith so many stubbom.men of inflammable tempera-
ment on either side, in such a state of affairs it could 
not fail that friction should speedily become acute, 
and when in 1662 "The Company of Royal Adven-
turers of England Trading into Africa" received its 
charter and took the West Coast trade in hand (the 
Company of 1631 having expired, overwhelmed in the 
throes of Civil War), it can readily be seen how little 
was needed to cause a renewal of t hose hostilities 
between England and the Netherlands which had 
been closed so short a period before. That little was 
not long delayed. 
The Dutch in effect claimed that the entire 
Guinea Coast was theirs by right of conquest over 
1 22 
OUR DUTCH RIYALS 
Portugal,-a claim which indeed was actually made 
in 1663 by Valckenburgh, their Director General 
of the W" est Coast of Africa, when protesting against 
the action of the English at various places. That 
claim, however, the English were little likely to 
acknowledge in face of the fact that since the early 
days of the Company of 1618 they had uninter-
ruptedly held Cormantine, a fort not far removed 
from Mouree, where stood the earliest established 
Dutch armed post. Arising from this claim, and 
fostered by high-handed acts committed by the more 
turbulent spirits of both nations, the condition of 
affairs on the coast speedily resolved itself into a 
kind of chronic petty warfare. T he Colonial State 
Papers of that period teem with complaints of Dutch 
aggression. The Netherlanders, we read in letters 
written at Cormantine and other places on the Coast 
in the year 1663, followed our ships " from port 
to port, and hindered the English coming near the 
&hore to trade. " They" give daily great presents 
to the King of Fulton to exclude their Honours" 
[the Royal Company of Adventurers] "fi'om the 
trade, and to the King of Fantyn to make war on 
the English castle of Cormantyn, saying if they 
could get that place never Englishman more should 
have trading upon that coast. Had not Captain 
Stokes arrived it's much to be feared the Flemish 
flag had been on Cormantyn as it is now on the 
Castle on Cape Corso." "The Dutch told the K ing 
of Ardra that they had conquered the PortugaIs, the 
potentest nation that ever was in those countries, 
and tumed out the Dane and Swede, and in a short 
12 3 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
time should do the same to the English." Mr. Brett, 
Factor at Commenda, relates how a ship of the 
Royal African Company" came to the place the 21st 
and the Dutch man of war told them they must not 
go ashore; in two days more the Amstm·dam came 
from Castle de Myne and sent two men on board 
to see if they belonged to the Royal Company, 
pretending if they had been interlopers that they 
had power to take them. Next day the Dutch 
manned . out three long-boats and continued firing 
at all canoes that would have traded with the 
English, and those canoes that were made fast to 
the English ship the Dutch cut from the ship's 
side, which one of the seamen endeavouring to 
prevent, a Dutchman cut him on the leg. So the 
English ship weighed anchor, the long-boats' men 
'giving us such base language as was not to be 
endured. '" I Probably this English vessel was very 
weakly armed, and no match for the Amsterdam, 
but one cannot help wondering how Towrson in 
his Minion or the Tyger would have "endured" 
such treatment. He certainly would have" weighed 
anchor," but it would have been for the purpose 
of laying his ship alongside the Dutchman in no 
friendly mood. Men with the temperament of him 
who with his little squadron defied the powerful 
Spanish fleet do not readily offer the other cheek 
to the smiter, or under any circumstances permit 
themselves to be cowed by the bluster of a bully, 
however formidable in appearance that bully may be. 
But truly, "the Dutch were very insolent on this 
1 Gol. P ap. vol. xvii. No. 60. 
124 
OUR DUTCH RIVALS 
coast, endeavouring by all methods to undermine and 
ruin the English commerce there." 
We read further in those old records that the 
ship Me'rc/tant's Del:ight was seized and her crew 
imprisoned. At Cape Corso and at Commenda, where 
Dutch trading posts did not exist, English traders 
were interfered with, and at the former place the 
Dutch war vessel Golden Lyon fired on the boats 
of an English ship and drove them out to sea. 
Further, the Dutch surprised and took the English 
castle at Cape Coast, and attempted to repeat this 
success at Cormantine. Protests by the English 
Ambassador at The Hague led to no improvement, 
but rather, it may be, made matters worse. In 1664 
a statement of their grievances and of the wl"ongs 
inflicted on them was laid before Parliament by the 
English merchants. Attention was drawn to the 
long list of ships illegally captured by the Dutch on 
the Gold Coast, and immediate redxess was asked 
for a total damage which was said to amount to 
several hundred thousand pounds. Mr. Samuel 
Pepys, however, in his Dia1"y under date 29th 
May 1664 throws doubt on this estimate, appears, 
indeed, to reduce the total to vanishing point. He 
states that in conversation on the subject with Sir 
W. Coventry the latter "seemed to argue mightily 
upon the little reason that there is for 'all this," 
and stated his belief that the loss incurred "did 
not amount to above £200 or £300." If, however, 
the Dutch took any vessel at all, Ol" committed 
any act of aggression of whatever nature, (and it 
cannot be disputed that they did both), it is difficult 
12$ 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
to see how Sir W. Coventry arrived a.t his t otal, 
unless indeed he struck a balance between the 
damage done to us by the Dutch and the injury 
already inflicted on them by Captain Holmes. And 
even then one would imagine that the seizure by t he 
Dutch of 'Cape Coast Castle alone would weigh 
heavily against the doings of Holmes and the others. 
The acts of Holmes were acts of war committed 
during time of peace-peace at least in Europe; but 
so undoubtedly was the seizure of Cape Coast Castle, 
so also was the attempted seizure of Cormantine an 
act of war. Possibly Sir '''''. Coventry was of that 
class of Briton which unfortunately is never absent 
from us, the class which delights in attempting to 
show that in any controversy with a foreign nation 
its own country must necessarily be in the wrong; 
or in any question as between white man and black, 
that its own countryman must be the bully and 
the aggressor. It is a strangely common form of 
perverted patriotism, wholly unadmirable, and only 
to be accounted for by the fact that its holders are 
persons intensely self-centred, imbued from infancy 
with the conviction that the narrow views held by 
them are the only possible or reasonable views on any 
and every subject; persons who, sitting at home, 
microscopically study a section, instead of in their 
view embracing a whole; or who, if by chance they 
travel, travel with eyes closed to all things except to 
those which they wish to see. 
As regards acts committed in '''''est Africa; 
neither England nor Holland was free from blame; 
jf the Dutch had been aggressive and guilty of overt 
126 
OUR DUTCH RIVALS 
acts of war, so undoubtedly had been the Englisb. 
,'V hen in 1663 the newly-formed English African 
Company bega-n operations, they found on the Gold 
Coast a state of affairs which was intolerable, and to 
cope with which remonstrances were of no avail. 
Now, it chanced that the Governor of the new 
Company was no less a man than James Duke of 
York, brother of Charles II., and at that time High 
Admiral of England. His Majesty himself was also 
a shareholder. In the State" Papers of June 1661 
appear warrants to pay to Thomas Holder sums of 
£90 and £250 "for the King's additional venture 
in the business of Guinea." Influenced no doubt 
by the Duke, as well as by personal considerations, 
the King-probably nothing loth-consented to the 
making of reprisals against the Dutch on the Guinea 
Coast, and accordingly Captain Robert Holmes (after-
wards Admiral Sir Robert Holmes) was directed to 
take there a small squadron, with instructions-as 
he showed at his examination in March 1665-to 
avoid hostilities as far as possible, but to protect 
the property of the Royal African Company "by 
force if needful and if he were able." Holmes 
was already not unknown on the Coast; he was, 
indeed, anathema to the Dutch, who went so far as to 
set a price on his head . Under date 19th October 
1661 there appears in the State Papers a memorandum 
from the Dutch Ambassadors to Charles, reminding 
His Majesty that in his letter of 14th A ugust he 
absolutely disclaims the proceedings of Captain 
Holmes, commander of some of His Majesty's ships 
upon the coast of Africa, which he promises to inform 
127 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN T RADE 
himself of particularly. "The Stat es General being 
informed that said Holmes is in E ngland, bave com-
manded said Ambassadors to pray His Majesty to 
cause him to give account of what he has enterprised 
against the States' Subjects, hindering that freedom 
of trade of t he coasts of Africa which they have long 
enjoyed, and seizing the fort of St. Andrews, which 
t he Dutch held by good title : t hat said fort may be 
restored to said Company and the damage repaired : 
and that henceforth His Majesty's subjects may more 
regularly observe the law of nations, and that His 
Majesty's allies may continue their trade in the R iver 
Gambia and at Cape Verd without hindrance." 1 Both 
nations, pretty innocents, were playing the game of 
the wolf and the lamb. 
Holmes sailed towards the end of 1663, "hut 
searching a Dutch ship by the way, he found express 
orders, as King Charles informs the States in 
his letter of 4th October 1666, from the Dutch 
West India Company to their Governor, General 
Valckenburgh, to seize the English fort at Corman-
tine, which discovery disposed him to go, as he 
thought he had a right, beyond his original com-
mission." 2 Arrived at Cape Verde towards the end 
of January 1664, Holmes captured in the offing two 
Dutch vessels, then, running inshore, summoned the 
Dutch forts on the island of Goree to surrender. 
This demand was refused with contempt, and not 
only with contempt but with violence, for the Dutch 
Governor, it is said, took it on himself to have the 
English messengers flogged. So Holmes, landing a 
I Ool. Pap. vol. xv. No. 86. 2 Campbell's Li'l)tJ$ oj the Admirals. 
128 
OUR DUTCH RIVALS 
party of rus men, stormed and took the works, 
capturing at t he same t ime a vessel which lay ready 
for sea under the protection of the forts' eight-and-
twenty guns. 
From Goree Holmes wrote to the A frican Com-
pany reporting its capture, and requesting that 
reinforcements might be sent without delay. To 
this course the Company consented willingly, giving 
as their reasons that "it is a strong fortified place 
where the ship may conveniently ride, and has been 
the chief Dutch factory for all the north part of 
Guinea. That if it please the Company to keep 
possession of said island, no nation can have any 
trade in any of these north parts." It did please 
the Company to keep possession of said island, but 
they omitted at the time to take into their calcula-
tions the existence of an energetic and inconvenient 
person named de Ruyter, whose views on t he subject 
of Goree, and of the Guinea Coast as a whole, with 
scant delay so far prevailed over those held by the 
English Company that on January 2nd, 1665, we find 
the latter in a Petition to the King not only repudi-
ating any connection with Captain Holmes or his 
acts, but requesting that the Dutch prizes taken by 
him should be handed to the Company, "seeing that 
de Ruyter declares his acts have been done in com-
pensation for losses inflicted by Holmes." " Heads 
I win, tails you lose " seems to have been then the 
creed of this injured and innocent Company- a creed 
not altogether unknown in connection with certain 
phases of commercial morality in our own day. 
However, in this case it paid them, to the extent 
K 129 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
at least that the Dutch vessel Golden Lyon, which 
Holmes had captured, was handed over to them,-the 
outcome, no doubt, of possessing a powerful Chairman 
of Directors. 
After the taking of Goree, Holmes proceeded 
leisurely down the coast, strengthening Fort James 
on the Gambia, " the next best fortification to Cape 
Coast Castle of all that are to be found on either 
the north or south coasts of Guinea," as Barbot 
says; then attacking and capturing Fort Witsen 
at Takoradi. Leaving in that place a sufficient 
garrison, he next made an attempt on St. George 
del Mina. But here he broke his teeth; St. George 
was t oo strong for the force at his command, and he 
drew off, leaving behind him as the price of failure 
more men than he could afford to lose. Better luck 
attended him at Cape Coast, or Cape Coast was less 
stubbornly defended, for that Castle, the strength of 
whose position alone should have made it impreg-
nable to any force such as Holmes could launch 
against it, was soon in his hands. Fifty men were 
left here as garrison, along with workmen and 
material to strengthen and put in order the fortifi-
cations,-a wise precaution, as things turned out ere 
many months had passed. From Cape Coast Holmes 
went to Mouree, out of which the Dutch were quickly 
driven. Anamabo followed suit, then Egyah; and 
now the whole Gold Coast was in his hands, with the 
exception of Elmina and him. 
Thus was war rendered inevitable between 
England and the Netherlands; Holland was bound 
to retaliate. From this" White Man's G1'&ve," the 
130 
OUR DUTCH RIVALS 
Guinea Coast, arose and spread the flames of a war 
whose consequences were world-wide, a war in whose 
battles brave men freely shed their blood, not in 
African seas alone, but in the Channel, and in the 
North Sea, in the East Indies, in America North and 
South, among the many -isled waters of the West 
Indies, wherever, indeed, English ship could meet 
Dutch. London itself ere that war ended shook 
to her foundations, when the Dutch A dmiral 
de R uyter swept like a hurricane up the Thames, 
burning and destroying. 
But before the actual declaration of war, many 
things happened. "The cursed C3!use " of the trouble, 
as some delighted to brand Captain Holmes,-though 
that fountain of ill sprang from a somewhat higher 
source,-sailed west t o America and there fell upon 
New Amsterdam, the Dutch colony that is now New 
York. And New A mstersdam passed for ever out 
of the hands of Holland. 
Meantime the English settlements on the Guinea 
Coast were left unprotected. The reinforcements for 
which Holmes had written did not arrive, or arrived 
tardily and in force insufficient to prove effective. 
There were on the coast no English armed ships, 
beyond a few traders of no aycount as a fighting 
force. The way was open, the door set wide on its 
hinges, inviting counter attack. 
Nor were the English long kept in suspense. On 
October 11th, 1664, as the workers toiled at Goree 
"mounting great guns and mending the breaches 
made by Captain Holmes," a fleet of twelve or thir-
teen sail hove in sight and ran in, showing Dutch 
13 1 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
·colours. De Ruyter, who had been in the Mediter-
ranean when news of Holmes 's reprisals reached him, 
slipped through the Straits of Gibraltar and hurried 
down t o Goree, demanding that "the island and the 
Company's goods in the ships" there at anchor should 
be at once handed over to him. De Ruyter held in 
his hand all the trump cards; there was nothing to 
be done but, with as good a grace as might be, to 
comply with his request. Following on this, Fort 
James on the Gambia was harried, Sierra Leone, 
lVlesurado, Sesters, and other English "fact ories" 
destroyed. Then on Christmas Day the Dutch 
"went against Tacorady with great store of men, but 
were repulsed by ten Englishmen and negroes, upon 
which with a thousand negroes from their factory 
they burnt the town and blew up the castle, stripping 
the English naked." The ruins of this" castle," says 
Colonel Ellis, were still in existence a few years ago. 
Meanwhile all down the coast, as the news of de 
Ruyter's arrival spread, there followed on its heels the 
rumour that Prince Rupert was coming and that all 
would yet be well. But the hopes of the English 
watchers were doomed to disappointment. Never 
came Rupert; his work was elsewhere. 
And now de Ruyter reached Cape Coast, where 
stood the Castle which he was specially desirous of 
taking. But to do this proved no more easy task 
tllan Holmes had found the taking of d'Elmiua. 
The fort's guns commanded the only available land-
ing-place, thus preveuting any direct attempt from the 
sea; nor could the Dutch ships approach near enough 
to silence the English guns. And de Ruyter was 
13 2 
OUR DUTCH RIVALS 
not equipped for @perations by hmd. To the bitter 
disappointment @£ Valckenbl1lrgh, the Dutch Director 
General, de Ruyter refused to make any :vttempt on 
the Castle ; but he did not scruple to give free vent 
to his opinion of the Dutchmen who had in the first 
instance permitted H @lmes to steal a march on them 
and to plant a garrison th ere. 
However, if he could not take Cape Coast, there 
were other places to be laid hold of. Fort Nassau, 
at Mouree, which Holmes had taken, was recap-
tured, Cormantine :vnd Anam:vbo reduced. A t the 
former place the Dutch and their native allies, the 
Fantees and others, suffered severely. T here was out 
a sprinkling of Englishmen in that fort, but " John 
Cabessa," the local native chief, and three hundred 
of his men fought for the English with extraordinary 
bra,·ery and vigour. The place was attacked both by 
sea and by land, de Ruyter's ships pouring a heavy 
fire on the works, whilst a large body of native 
auxiliaries under Valckenburgh himself, a body esti-
mated at ten thousand men, assaulted it from the 
land. So obstinate was the resistance t hat the D utch 
advance was for hours held in check, whilst the 
ground near the fort was littered with bodies of the 
dead. But in the end numbers prevailed ; the fort 
surrendered without terms. J olm Cabessa, who, the 
account says, " was truer to the English than any of 
His l\1ajesty's subjects there," rather than fall into 
the hands of the enemy, killed himself " Great 
reward was offered for whoever should bring his 
head to the Dutch, but the Blacks buried him at 
Old Cormantine." The negroes of this coast did 
133 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
not scruple in the olden days eagerly to accept 
reward from the Portuguese for the head of an 
Englishmen or a Frenchman, but where the head 
of one of their own chiefs was concerned-even when 
that chief was already dead-they were not to be 
bought; they were as deaf to the voice of the 
temptev, as incorruptible, as were the Highlanders 
of the '45 when a great price was put on the head 
of the young Chevalier. 
In this castle of Cormantine when it was taken, 
there was found, we are told, "a tried lump of gold 
in the wall 105 Ibs. weight, which was brought aboard 
the de Ruyter"; a welcome and substantial little 
salve, po doubt, to wounded national feelings. 
Except Cape Coast Castle, the whole Gold Coast 
was now in the hands of the Dutch. ';Ve  were 
indeed, as Pepys records in his Diary, "beaten to 
dirt at G uinny by de Ruyter and his fleet." The 
Company of Royal Adventurers, as has already been 
noticed, was stripped pretty clean, and did not long 
survive the process. De Ruyter had done his work 
well, and though amongst the Colonial Papers of 
that day appears one entitled "An Account of De 
Ruyter's Barbary ties on the Guinea Coast," those 
"barbaryties" do not appear to have been anytbing 
at which we could afford to cast a stone. He burned 
ships, it is true, and blew up fortifications, but he gave 
quarter to the English at Cormantine and at other 
places; and, for the rest, he seems to have been no 
worse than Holmes or any other of our own men. War, 
(and it was nothing else, though formal declaration 
was as yet delayed), war is not made with kid gloves. 
134 
OUR DUTCH RIVALS 
Official declaration of war, however, speedily 
followed from both parties, and the principal scenes 
of that war were soon being enacted in other waters. 
Under date 28th January 1665 there also appears in 
the State Papers the following letter addressed to 
the Commandants of our Settlements in New England, 
a letter signed by the King and countersigned by Secre-
tary Bennet: "Because of the iniquities, spoils, and 
affronts of the Dutch and their notorious proceedings 
on the Coast of Guinea, de Ruyter being sent thither 
with twelve ships of war to destroy all the King's 
interests in those parts, and His Majesty having cause 
to suspect, on his return to invade all the English 
shipping he can meet with and assault the Plantations 
in New England and other Colonies, they are ~equired 
to take care of' the forts and defences, and empowered 
t.o do what is necessary for the safety of the islands 
and navigation of English merchants." The King 
made no mistake as t o de Ruyter's designs on the 
Plantations, but the proceedings of the Dutch on 
the Guinea Coast were certainly no more "notori-
ous" than were those of our own people at Goree 
and at New York. On either side were fire-eaters 
whose actions rendered war sooner or ~ater inevitable, 
and if the Dutch were the first aggressors, our own 
men were little behind them. Moreover, it is certain 
that Charles wilfully closed his eyes to a good deal 
that was going on in West Africa. 
It is beyond the scope of this vol ume to trace the 
course of the war ' that now raged. The Peace of 
Breda in 1667 confirmed to both nations the con-
quests each had made. Hence England in America 
135 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
retained the New Netherlands (or the State of New 
York as it was now called out of compliment to 
.James Duke of York, Charles's brother), and in 
'IV est Africa was confirmed in her possession of Cape 
Coast Castle; whilst Holland, once more possessed 
of Goree and Fort Nassau at Mouree, gained also 
Cormantine and sundry other English factories and 
posts. 
The net result on the Gold Coast was greatly to 
t he advantage of Holland, but the balance did not 
long remain in her favour; with the advent of the new 
Royal African Company in 1672 English influence 
began once more to extend, forts were built at Accra, 
VlTinnebah, Secondee, Commenda, Anamabo, and 
other places, and the Castle at Cape Coast, enlarged 
and put in a thol"Ough state of defence, became head-
quarters of the English Company. 
Treaties are very excellent things. T he difficulty 
is, when they concern far distant and little known 
parts of the world, to see that they are properly 
enforced. As regards the Treaty of Breda, a clause 
ran to the effect that "whereas in countries far 
remote . . . especiall y in Guinea, certain protesta-
tions and declarations, and other writings of that 
kind, prejudicial to the liberty of trade and I1>wiga-
tion have been emitted and published on either side," 
for the future such protestations !U1d declarations 
should be ignored, considered null aod void, and 
trade and nm,;gation should be free and unhampered. 
A truly desimble state of affrurs, but more desir-
A.ble tl1an easy to enforce. Before a year was out 
E nglish and Dutch on the Gold Coast were agnjn 
136 
OUR DU'rCH RIVALS 
squabbling fiercely. The English had established 
themselves at Egyah. That, said the Dutch, was 
contrary to the terms of Treaty, for Egyah being 
under the guns of Cormantine, which had been ceded 
to Holland, was in the bargain necessarily regarded 
as Dutch property; therefore the English must 
evacuate their post at Egyah, a step which the latter 
refused to take. Then, owing to native troubles the 
Dutch blockaded that part of the coast on which 
stands Cape Coast Castle, and demanded that until · 
such time as their quarrel with the natives should be 
settled the English must cease to trade in those parts, 
-a preposterous demand, and one that led to great 
local friction. Neither side, we may take it, "played 
quite fair. " Bosman in his History complains of 
English treachery, accuses us of setting the blacks 
against the Dutch, and states that by bribes we 
induced the negroes to make war. It may be, but 
these are precisely the acts with which we charged 
the Dutch. The probabilities are that nobody's 
hands were very clean, no one quite void of offence. 
Yet no really serious trouble arose out of this or any 
other of these burning questions, not even during the 
war between England and the Netherlands in 1672-4. 
In matters of trade the two nations continued bitterly 
to oppose each other, but throat-cutting was confined 
to matters commercial, and where one party had 
succeeded in monopolising the trade of a district, 
the other merely endeavoured to oust the first comer, 
possibly even to the building of a fort, as we did at 
Commeuda, under the very guns of the Dutch. 
Such anxiety to monopolise trade did not tend 
137 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
towards improved treatment of the black man-at 
least by the Dutch; one hopes, perhaps in vain, that 
our own countrymen were more humane. In 1687, 
at Elmina, during a native rebellion, Barbot, who in 
that year visited the Settlement, saw three negroes, 
prisoners, who had been kept by the Dutch for nine 
months in irons, exposed during the day to the fierce 
rays of the sun or to the lashing of tropical rain-
storms, and during the night left without shelter 
from the inclemencies of whatever weather might 
be experienced. 
Bosman, too, gives an account of wbat General 
Swerts, the Dutch officer in command at Commenda 
when that fort was attacked by the blacks in 1695, 
calls" a comical accident." "Here," says the General, 
"I cannot forbear relating a comical accident that 
happen'd. Going to visit the posts of our fort, to 
see whether every man did his duty, one of the 
soldiers, quitting his post, told me that the Blacks, 
well knowing he had but one hat in the world, had 
maliciously shot away the crown, which he would 
revenge, if I would give him a few granadoes " [hand 
grenades]. "I had no sooner ordered him two, than 
he called out to the Blacks from the breastwork in 
their own language, telling them he would present 
them with something to eat: and giving fire to the 
granadoes, immediately threw them down among the 
crowd, who observing them to burn, throng'd about 
them, and were at first very agreeably diverted: but 
when they burst, they so galled them that they haC! 
no great stomach to such another mea\' '' General 
Swerts' ideas with regard to what is comic do not 
138 
OUR DUTCH RIVALS 
commend themselves to the ordinary individnal. 
Where officers of rank sanctioned, and enjoyed, 
"jokes" so inhuman, one may conclude that the 
treatment of the wretched negroes by the rank and 
file was unspeakably cruel. We shall see later some-
thing of the manner of treatment adopted by the 
various European nations where natives, and more 
especially where Slaves, were concerned. 
139 
CHAPTER X 
TROUBLES WITH THE FRENCH IN WEST AFRICA 
WHILST Dutch and English were fighting, and cut-
ting each other's throats, at first actually as well 
as in a commercial sense, the French, nnder Louis 
Quatorze, had been steadily consolidating their power 
to the north and were now a thorn in the side of 
both English and Dutch. In Goree, which had been 
captured by Holmes and retaken by de Ruyter so 
short a time before, the Dutch first suffered at their 
hands. The year 1677 saw that island seized by 
the French Admiral d'Estrees, and the forts utterly 
destroyed. N or was the position ever recovered by 
Holland, and from that date Dutch operations were 
chiefly confined to the Gold Coast. 
France, however, was not allowed to sit down on 
her new possession unassailed. In 1692 the island 
was seized by England, only to be retaken by the 
French in the following year. And then came our 
turn to suffer, Fort J ames on the Gambia being our 
vulnerable point. The Sieur de BrUe, who went to 
the Coast in 1697 as Director of the French Com-
pany's affairs on the Senegal, says that Fort James 
would be a strong place if it had "Cisterns and 
140 
TROUBLES WITH THE FRENCH 
Magazines Bomb-proof ... but for want of these 
advantages it has been often taken, plundered and 
demolished both by the French and Pil'ates, which 
at last reduced the English Comp3!ny's affairs to so 
Iowan ebb that nothing could have recovered them 
but a Parliamentary Assistance." 
For this-from an English point of view-deplor-
able state of affairs, 1\1. de Gennes, a French Admiral 
who raided the Gold Coast in 1695 with a squadron 
of four frigates, a corvette, and two "pinks," was 
the first to be responsible. Profiting by information 
supplied by an English deserter, be fell on the fort 
at a time when nearly the entire garrison was pros-
trate from fever, and provisions at lowest ebb. The 
Governor was absent on the mainland, and no sus-
picions were entertained by the garrison when seven 
sail, showing English colours, ran quietly in and let 
go their anchors within gunshot of the fort. Sick 
men concerned themselves not at all; convalescents 
gazed languidly across the turbid waters and idly 
speculated on the news that this squadron must be 
bringing from home; men still fit for duty thought 
probably only of fresh supplies and the luxury of 
being no longer on short rations, no longer stinted 
in the matter of rum. And suspicion slept, nor 
waked till every vessel was found to have been 
warped round so that their broadsides bore dil'ect on 
the fort. Then indeed there was hurry and a running 
to and fro; but almost ere men had fallen in or guns 
been manned-such guns as there were crews for 
in that fever-stricken garrison-an armed gig, making 
for the landing wharf, brought an officer bearillg 
141 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
summons to surrender Fort James to His Majesty 
of France. Blindfold, the French officer was led 
inside the fort, nor did surprise and dismay prevent 
the acting commandant from playing the game t o the 
last t rick. Royally the F renchman was entertained 
to the best the fort could provide; enthusiastically 
were drunk the healths of the . Kings of England and 
of France, and merrily ran the carouse into the small 
hours, when the Frenchman, none too sober, was sent 
off to his ship with the message to M. de Gennes that 
the fort would be defended " to the last extremity." 
Brave words 1 But there were not men available to 
make them good. · Moreover, the French had cut 
off all communication with the land, and food supplies 
of any sort were as unattainable by the Englishmen 
as if t hey had been in another hemisphere. The 
Governor, trying to gain the fort unobserved, was 
chased so hotly that as a last resource he jumped into 
the water and lay hid amongst the mangroves, only 
eventually, by stealth and with great difficulty, finding 
his way to his friends through the thick darkness of 
a moonless tropical night. The F rench had the whip 
hand of us. There was no possibility of beating them 
off, no delay could save, nor have other result than 
to starve men already but half fed. A few days saw 
the end, and many an Englishman exchanged for the 
squalor of a French prison such freedom as the 
Gambia gave,-a fate similar to that which later 
befell .M. de Gennes himself, who ended his gall8J~t 
life in prison at Plymouth. 
Before leaving the Gambia, de Gennes wrecked 
Fort James, destroyed the cannon, undermined and 
I4 2 
TROUBLES WITH THE FRENCH 
blew up the walls; so that, says the chronicle, as 
.. the profits they [the English] rlOceive from thence 
are computed to amount to one million livres yearly 
... the loss of that place cannot be easily repaired." 
The English Company, however, speedily recon-
structed the fortifications and recommenced trade ; 
but again, in 1702, says the Paris Gazette of that 
year, it was retaken, and ransomed this time at a 
cost of one hundred thousand crowns "that it might 
not be demolished" ; two hundred and fifty slaves and 
a large quantity of merchandise being carried off in 
addition to the ransom. 
Again in 1709 a similar fate befell it, and" after 
so many assaults by the French on Fort James ... 
Lhe Company thought fit . to abandon the said fort 
during the late war with France, and thus the trade 
of that river was left open to all Europeans in-
differently and has turned to the great advantage of 
several private adventurers." 
Nor was the Gambia the only point on the 
Guinea Coast where we suffered loss at French 
hands. On 17th July 1704 the Sieur Guerin, with 
two small ships of war, took our fort at Sierra Leone 
.. without any resistance made hy the English com-
mander, who fled from the fort with about one 
hundred men before he was attacked." This is the 
French version of the affair. One must hope that at 
least there were extenuating circumstances, or that 
perhaps the commanding officer's cowardice when 
enquired into might turn out to be (as in Scottish 
law) " not proven. " We have, however, only the 
French version, and that to a patriotic Briton is 
143 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
sorry reading. But even Monsieur Tessier, t he 
officer who told t he tale, admits t hat t here were some 
gallant soldiers in the garrison of Sierra Leone. ·T he 
gunner, he says, and eleven or twelve men did what 
brave men may do, and fired forty or fifty rounds 
from the big guns before they were forced to sur-
render. What were a dozen men, however, where 
t here were four-and-forty guns wanting crews! A 
st rong [llace was t his, "very handsomely built with 
four regular bastions, and had very fine warehouses 
and lodgings within it . . . ; over the gate was a 
platform and on it four large pieces, which might 
have done very good service upon occasion." Yet 
with so pitiful a number of men of spirit left to 
defend it, the fight was necessarily but short, the end 
fo redoomed. Many a time in later years has our Navy 
claimed astonishing minor victories over the French, in 
boat actions, cutting-out expeditions, and what not,-
even to the extent on one occasion towards the end 
of the Eighteenth Century of capturing an armed 
French vessel, in the fight for which our sailors were 
armed with nothing more formidable than their boat 
stretchers,-but it takes many such to wipe out this 
regrettable little incident of Sierra Leone, if the 
French account of the affair be a true one. 
And so Sierra Leone was pillaged very thoroughly, 
the fortifications levelled to the ground, ere the 
Sieur Guerin departed, taking with him, amongst 
other booty, four thousand elephants' t usks from 
within the fort and three thousand which were 
found on a small vessel that lay at anchor behind 
the island. I t is consoling, however, to read t hat 
144 
TROUBLES WITH THE FRENCH 
Nemesis overtook the French vessels. On their way 
home from New Spain, whither they had gone from 
the Guinea Coast, bearing rich ca,rgoes mostly of 
bullion and gold, they were captured by British men 
of war. M. de Guerin was unfortunately killed, but 
"one Tessier, who was an officer in his ship and gave 
me this account on the 5th December 1706, was 
brought over from Jamaica and New York to the 
prison of Southampton,"-where let us hope his stay 
was not very protracted. Yet, like so many of both 
nations, perhaps he too died a prisoner; for exchanges 
were few, and escape not easy. 
W ith all their endeavours, however, the French 
never succeeded in esta,blishing a permanent footing 
south of Senegal. They did indeed for a time-
from 1702 to 1704-hold a post at the mouth of 
the Assiny River, a post which the Dutch vainly 
attempted to capture. According to the Paris 
Gazette, the Dutch attacked it in force, but "were 
received with so much bravery by the Sieur Lavie, 
the Chief Factor, that they were forced to retire with 
the loss of t wenty-five men kilJed, amongst them their 
chief engineer, and eleven taken prisoner, leaving their 
cannon behind them." What the Dutch could not do 
by force, however, was accomplished by other means. 
The French fa,iled to establish a trade on that part of 
the coast, and in 1704, finding it no paying concern, 
they blew up their" lodge" and retired. 
That the Dutch were very bitter over their defeat 
at Assiny we may gather from the delight with which 
Bosman relates a stOl;y wherein the French are made 
to appear ridiculous. The French, says Bosman, 
L 145 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
were in the habit of seizing all blacks who might 
happen t o come aboard their ships for the pll1:pose 
of trading, and these men they afterwards used to sell 
in t he West Indies. T his in itself was little like the 
French, for they have ever as a nation been noted for 
making friends with uncivilised races more readily 
than have any other European people, and where 
they were endeavouring to gain a footing it is im-
probable that they would by treachery jeopardise 
the prospect of attaining their ends. However, 
Bosman says that they did do so, and t hat amongst 
the negroes abducted was one "of more sprightly 
genius than his other countrymen," who was carried 
to France and there after a period, by dint of cease-
less priestly persuasion, was baptized and received 
into the arms of Holy Church. This black convert, 
says Bosman, did not fail to see on which side his 
bread was buttered, and craftily he let it be under-
stood that he was the son of the King of Assiny, 
heir to the throne; and" he so insinuated himself into 
the good opinion of the Court that the King made 
him several rich presents and sent him back to his 
own country." Once there, however, the fraud was 
exposed. The" Prince" was but a slave after ali, 
a slave even in his own count ry, and indeed shor tly 
after landing he went back to his former master ; 
and, says Bosman, "instead of converting his subjects 
to Christianity, is himself returned to Paganism." 
W hat most appears to delight Bosman is t hat the 
French Court should have been "so ridiculously 
bubbled" by a slave, and he rejoices that by this 
means they "lost their aim, which was to get a 
146 
TROUBLES WITH THE FRENCH 
footing on the Gold Coast." Besides, as he gleefully 
adds, "the pious intentions of His Most Christian 
Majesty to convert a heathen prince and establish 
him on the throne were frustrated; the Cardinal de 
Noailles and the Bishop of Meaux labour'd in vain, 
and in short the whole French Court was disappointed 
in its expectations. " 
On the Gold Coast, henceforward English and 
Dutch were left practically to fight out the question 
of mastery; to them the chief stations and the chief 
trade belonged; other nations played but a subsidiary 
part. 
North of the Gold Coast, on the other hand, it 
was E nglish and French who took and kept the lead, 
almost to the exclusion of Dutch, Portuguese, and 
all other European races. 
But none, north or south, possessed territory,-
excepting perhaps in such instances as the isla-nd of 
Goree; they were there, so to speak, on sufferance, 
and as occupiers paying a yearly subsidy to the black 
owners of the soil, a subsidy which in the case of the 
Danes lasted until the transference of their rights 
to Britain. It was trade, not colonies, that E uropean 
nations then sought to establish, and, excepting as 
regards the Gambia and the Senegal, in those early 
days little attempt was made to penetrate into the 
interior. Thompson, as we have seen, and Jobson, 
amongst Englishmen, ascended the Gambia a great 
way, and others followed suit, or professed to follow 
suit. Vermuyden (if indeed he were a real adven-
turer and not merely a romancer) claimed to have 
ascended the river farther t han any other white man, 
147 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
and he gives a richly glowing account of his dis-
coveries of gold on or near the river-banks. Finally 
he reached, or says he reached, a spot where "the 
exceed of gold was such that I was surprised with 
joy and admiration. " In truth, could anything so 
payable have been found whilst the gold fever gener-
ated by the discoveries of 1849 and 1851 in California 
and Australia still throbbed in the veins of men, 
West Africa must have seen a Gold" Rush " the like 
of which the present generation has known only in 
Klondyke. 
Unfortunately no later traveller has been able to 
locate the spot where lies Vermuyden 's mine covered 
by the easily wrought river sands; it has vanished as 
completely as has Sindbad's Valley of Diamonds or 
the buried Pirates' Treasure of some lonely isle. Not 
even the infallible virga divina has been potent to 
rediscover that seductive "pocket." Vermuyden 
was one of those who hunted for gold, as men some-
times to this day in parched lands hunt for hidden 
water-springs, with the divining rod. But he does 
not profess to have found this rich deposit by aid 
of his rod. On the contrary, he admits that for once 
in a way it was a failure; and for this failure he 
accounts by the fact that during the voyage from 
England the hazel twig had become dry and brittle 
and had consequently lost virtue. How otherwise, 
indeed, could it have failed? 
Amongst the French, the Sieur Briie, of whom 
mention has already been made, was by far the most 
energetic explorer; but prior to his day, in 1637, 
Claude Jannequin, Sieur de Rochefort, had pene-
148 
TROUBLES WITH THE FRENCH 
trated some hundreds of miles up the Senegal, 
where, it may be noted, he complains bitterly of 
the assaults of "certain small flies," - doubtless 
mosquitoes. It is Jannequin, too, who gives it as 
his opinion that the negro youths could by no possi-
bility learn to read and write Arabic without the aid 
of the Devil. Truly that personage is responsible 
for many of the troubles of this world, and Arabic 
is no weighty addition to the load of sin he already 
bears. 
[49 
CHAPTER XI 
OLD MISSIONS 
AGAINST this same Devil went forth also in those 
days, and fro111 the earliest times of the Portuguese 
occupation, many missionaries, Capuchin Friars and 
others, burning to convert the natives to the True 
Faith. Hard, austere men, the most of them, deter-
mined to achieve their purpose by any and every 
means, even, in the early days, by aid of the lash 
if need be; but men too much absorbed by their 
one idea to be relied on to shed much light on the 
country fro111 a geographical point of view. Converts 
they must make, and converts in a sense they made, 
no doubt, by the thousand. With the utmost alacrity 
the natives came to be baptized, whole villages at a 
time, man, woman, and child, so that the good and 
pious priests could scarce find time to eat or sleep. 
It was a novelty; there was also from the native 
point of view something to be gained-beads and 
what not, salt perhaps, to them a prized luxury,-but 
the childish mind of the black converts did not soar 
higher. In a word, it amused them to become 
Christians-provided always that it did not interfere 
with their comfort or their mode of living. 
ISO 
OLD MISSIONS 
But when the good Fathers, conscientious, earnest 
men, without doubt seeking to do right according to 
their lights, began to interfere with ancient custom, 
the scene somewhat changed. From the point of 
view of the negro, the possession of many wives and 
of many concubines was a thing greatly to be desired; 
each man possessed as many as seemed good to him, 
or as his means permitted. The higher the rank, the 
greater number of wives and concubines did he own; 
the more he had, the greater was his wealth. Women 
in those latitudes were the beasts of burden, theirs 
the toil that kept husbands in ease and luxury. Man 
in those primitive communities was purely a fighting 
animal, woman the willing toiler, the breadwinner. 
Except as a slave (probably captured in war), man 
did not soil his hands by work. The arrangement 
suited all parties concerned; it was a custom from 
time immemorial. 
But in the eyes of those excellent Fathers it was 
sin of no ordinary dye, and against this device of 
Satan they proceeded to wage war fierce . and 
relentless. The faith of even the most zealous and 
enthusiastic of their native flock was staggered by 
the announcement that all wives save one must be 
put away. Concubines were anathema; of them a 
clean sweep must be made. The situat ion admitted 
of no compromise; there must be no evasion, no 
attempt to change the status of these unholy women 
by the flimsy device of styling them "servants." 
Root and ' branch must the custom be torn up and 
cast aside for ever. 
So, with intemperate zeal ruled the Fathers; and 
I 5 I 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
dismay fell on the blacks. It was not for innovations 
such as this that they had bargained when renouncing 
their fetishes and clumsy idols. Outraged feeling 
ran high, and for a time Martyrdom for their Faith 
was a probability never far removed from the 
Fathers. But they survived, and even-at least 
temporarily-made some impression on that custom 
which so shocked their sense of propriety, an 
impression short-lived at the best in most instances, 
one fears. 
When about the year 1645 Fathers Gabriel and 
Anthony undertook a mission to Batta, they found 
the "Duke " of that kingdom,-they were ali 
"Kings," "Dukes," "Marquises," or" Counts," those 
black chiefs, in the estimation of the simple-minded 
Friars,-they found the" Duke" of Batta a particu-
larly hardened sinner in the matter of concubines, and 
without delay they attacked this powerful chief and 
endeavoured to persuade him to put away his super-
fluous womenkind. The abominable sinfulness of 
the custom was eloquently dwelt upon, the soundest 
and most potent of arguments against it were 
advanced, the whole artillery of the Church was 
brought to bear. But the "Duke " remained un-
convinced, he failed wholly to see wherein lay the 
sin ; the custom was an old custom, and a good 
custom. What I His ancestors, and himself, con-
demned to perdition and to everlasting torment for 
the sake of a few trumpery extra wives? It was 
preposterous, an outrage I Finally, losing temper, 
he used strong talk with regard to the question of 
foreigners, newly arrived and ignorant of the habits 
15 2 
OLD MISSIONS 
and requirements of a country, presuming to interfere 
with, or even to express an opinion on, established 
use and custom. There is much to be said for the 
"Duke's" point of view as regards the foreigner; 
yet in a little time he gave way on the other point, 
made a clean sweep of his entire female staff, and 
was married according to the rites of Holy Church 
to the daughter of a neighbouring chief. So far 
so good, and the Fathers Gilbert and Anthony, 
pleased by their speedy and astonishing success, went 
on their way rejoicing. 
Farther inland the impression those good men 
made was not so marked; indeed it is grievous to 
relate that they became to the people subjects for 
mirth, and the objects of practical joke rather than 
of reverence or respect. It became popular pastime 
amongst the youth of the villages to wait until the 
Fathers were addressing an open-air meeting, then, 
as the preacher, borne on the wave's crest of his own 
eloquence, approached his climax, to scream" A lion, 
a lion! Run I Run I" make a dash for the nearest 
t1'ee, and there cling in helpless ecstasies of mirth 
while they watched the vain efforts of the un-
skilled monks to scramble out of danger. N or was 
it safe to disregard the warning cry; the lion 
might be there. The joke was unfailing in effect, 
a phenomenal success that added zest to life in the 
villages. 
Depressed by their want of success here, the 
Fathers decided to return to Batta, a more fruitful 
field where doubtless they might add to the power 
already gained, farther extend the influence of the 
153 
THE L AND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
Church, and confirm in their faith those who wavered. 
So to Batta eagerly they hastened. 
Alas for their enthusiasm I Not only was the 
" Duke " a backslider, but he had backslidden to 
a point never before attained by him; his harem 
was nearly twice the size that it had been in pre-
Gilbert and Anthony days. And not only was this 
the case, but all t he lesser chiefs also had hurried 
to follow an example so popular. It was a grievous 
blow t o the poor Fathers, one that t heir influence 
did not survive, for before they could do more 
than express pious horror and grief, the "Duke " 
and all h is subsidiary chiefs departed on summons 
from their lord and master, the King of Congo, 
T hereupon the women shut themselves and their 
children up in the houses and refused to listen to, 
or even to see, the priests. There was nothing 
for the good Fathers to do, and in bitter disappoint-
ment they closed the mission and returned to the 
Portuguese settlement of San Salvador. 
Father Jerome was another who about the same 
period went about the country, at periJ of his life 
destroying and bUl'l1ing the wooden idols of the 
natives, converting vi et annis, raking into the Fold of 
the Church armies of darkened Pagan souls. Fame 
of the miraculous power of his exorcisms against 
a devastating horde of locusts aided him in his 
campaign against the evils of concubinage and 
plurality of wives. Christianity made great st rides. 
But the success won by Jerome might have been 
cause of embarrassment to St. Anthony himself. 
Far up the River Congo, t he King of Con cob ella, 
154 
OLD MISSIONS 
ruler of a barbarous semi-cannibal tribe, eager to 
obtain the favour of wizard so potent, sent to Jerome 
as a choice and acceptable gift one of his subjects 
who for some fault or crime had lately fallen from 
favour with the King, and had been condemned to 
die. Now, the custom in these cases was for the 
recipient of such donation to kill and eat the prisoner. 
I t was a thing well understood that this should be 
done; etiquette demanded it. No higher mark of 
appreciation and favour could have been offered to 
Jerome, and he accepted the gift, with the intention, 
no doubt, of setting free the wretched victim. 
Then the King, gratified by this apparent 
appreciation of his bounty, went farther, and pressed 
on Jerome the hand of his daughter in marriage. 
Nor was this the end; for thereupon every chief-
a great multitude, it seemed to the unhappy priest,-
every chief, incited by the royal example and eager 
to bask in the sun of Jerome's favour, also pressed 
his daughter on the disconcerted Friar, and would 
take no denial I "Timeo Danaos," well might Jerome 
cry, "et dona ferentes." It was an embarrassing 
situation. For it is ill to flout the matrimonial aspira-
tions of Kings, and of powerful and hasty-tempered 
Nobles; they cannot always be trusted to view 
in proper light the motives actuating the person who 
declines, from whatever cause, the proffered alliance. 
So much depends on the point of view. 
But a veritable St. Anthony was Father Jerome. 
He said that it cost him nothing to abjure all dealings 
in the matrimonial market. He even succeeded in 
convincing the King that to bestow his royal smiles 
ISS 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
on too many Queens was sinful in the last degree ; 
one Queen there might be, no more. And t o one 
the King adhered-till Jerome went away. 
Not so easily were the chiefs or the people 
pacified. P roffer of their daughters in wedlock had 
been rejected with scorn and horror ! W ho was 
this wretched stranger who put on them a slight so 
marked? Who was he that went so far as to pre-
sume to dictate to them how many wives they should 
keep, and who even t ook it on himself to insist that 
they must give up the cherished practice of eating 
human flesh? Such interference was intolerable, as 
indeed they were at some pains t o convince him; 
and the unhappy Jerome found it expedient to quit 
the scene of his labours. 
Alas! poor Father Jerome. He was a good man 
and a brave, but like most of his kind at that day he 
did not well understand the negro, nor was capable 
of plumbing the depths of ignorance and superstition 
in which the childish native mind lies fathom deep. 
Not t hat one desires that he should have wedded, 
or pretended to wed, all or any of the throng of 
royal and noble young black ladies who were offered 
to him in marriage. Heaven forbid! I n a priest, it 
were mortal sin. But there be ways and ways of 
declining a matrimonial alliance, and in the end t he 
suaviter in modo is probably the more efficacious 
method. Jerome's was the fortite1' in ?'e. Even a 
bigot ed priest may not hope in a benighted land 
to accomplish great t hings if the chief weapon in his 
store of arguments is of the nature of a cudgel. 
But Jerome's methods were mild when compared 
156 
OLD MISSIONS 
to those employed by two missionaries who in 1655 
left Massangano (where for six weary years had pined 
Andrew Battell) on a mission to Maopongo. It 
chanced that one of these pious men in the course 
of his peregrinations fell in with a Queen of that 
country. Now the Queen, as the fashion was, had 
taken with her-for an airing, as it were-her 
favourite idol, a god wooden and hideous, but 
precious in her eyes. H ere indeed was a chance 
to strike a death-blow to Paganism, and zealously 
the ardent priest seized his opportunity. He argued 
high, he argued low; but all his fervour and elo-
quence were thrown away; impervious to argument, 
the Queen at the end still clung to her idol. 
There remained one last convincing method, and 
with zealous soul the fervid missionary adopted it. 
The lash! Mid shrieks of pain the whip rose and 
fell, rose and fell, and the Queen's tears flowed as the 
stripes bit deep into her tender flesh. But never 
shrank the holy Father from his duty, till the idol 
was dropped and its owner had ceased to dispute 
with one so much more powerful in argument than 
she. Little short of mi.J:aculous was the rapidity 
with which her und.,rstanding was quickened. 
Then the good priest, never doubting but that 
he had gained the day, departed to his own abode. 
the glow caused by sense of duty well done pervading 
his being, the joy of noted victory won over the 
Devil simmering within him. Alas! poor man, little 
did he dream what weapons the Devil was now about 
to hurl. 
vVas it the prompting of the little heathen god, 
157 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
outraged and revengeful, or was it the cunning of her 
own base mind that led the Queen to adopt the 
course she took? In any event, the weapon she 
used was-in the case of a holy Father-one well 
calculated to rain dismay and confusion on the head 
of him against whom it should be employed.  
.It chaJ?ced that the little hut occupied by the 
priests stood on the bank of a secluded, shady rivulet, 
its one door opening almost on to the clear waters 
of the placid stream. A spot more condncive to 
thought, better suited to pious meditation, to holy 
communing, might not be fo:md in all West Africa. 
Now, the injured woman had taken thought with 
her fellow-queens, and to them it seemed plain that 
the only part of the river at all suitable for bathing 
was that immediately fronting the hut where dwelt 
the Fathers. Here therefore, morning, noon, and 
night, collected crowds of young women; shrill 
laughter and screams disturbed the meditations of 
the holy men, and never could either issue forth 
but his eyes were rudely shocked, his mind pained, 
by sights that drove those simple-minded priests to 
the verge of despair, and filled them with horror and 
consternation. 
Even the good St. Anthony himself might in 
such turmoil and trouble have failed for an instant 
to keep his eyes fixed on the page of his book. But 
the Fathers ran speedily to the King, never doubting 
that an end would at once be put to this scandal. 
Indifferent to their complaint was the King, however; 
nay, he smiled, smiled broadly; in any but a King, 
one would have said that he griImed, as if amused, 
158 

OLD MISSIONS 
and the scandal waxed greater. T here was no peace 
for the Fathers till they had set to with feverish 
haste and builded a high impenetmble fence round 
their modest home; and t hen, indeed, if still the ear 
might be troubled, at least the eye no longer was 
offended; for be sure t hat the gateway of the fence 
opened onto the forest and away from the river, 
so that the good men might go and come unabashed. 
Nevertheless, their credit and influence waxed thread-
bare and died, t heir favour both with King and 
people was a thing of the past, and nothing remained 
to them but to return, sad and halting, whence they 
had set forth. 
Such are a few instances of the early Portuguese 
missionaries and their methods. A ll, doubtless, were 
not of this stamp; there were no doubt some who 
tried to lead, and not to drive; yet the Age was 
one of credulity, ignorance, and superstition, and those 
priests in such matters were no whit in advance of 
the Age, nay, probably they were even in some 
respects behind it. Other nations besides the Portu-
guese also sent out missionaries to West Africa. 
Carli of Piacenza, for instance, and :Merolla of 
Sorrento, two Italians, visited the Coast in 1666 
and 1682, and have left full accounts of all they 
did and saw. But theirs too are mostly records of 
conversion by compulsion, as, for example, where 
Carli began his work, at which place the chief 
o1'dered all the people to bring their children so 
that they nright at once be baptized. The entire 
village was thus officially "converted,"- each con-
vert, by the way, bringing with him as an offering 
159 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
some small article, such as a fowl or other trifle useful 
to his reverence. A few, indeed, who had nothing 
to offer were, as Carli says, "christened for God's 
sake." After which the natives celebrated . the 
occasion by much beating of drums and blowing 
of wind instruments, "that they might be heard 
half a league off." But what they understood of 
the ceremony of baptism Carli does not venture 
to tell us. 
Once as Carli and his party travelled, a bush fire 
drove down on to them a terrified horde of wild 
beasts, lions, rhinoceroses, and many other ravening 
animals, so many that the entire party "would 
scarcely have made one good meal for them." To 
the negroes it was a simple matter to scramble out 
of the way up some convenient tree, but to the 
Fathers no such ready means of escape was possible; 
they had never learned how to climb trees, and after 
many futile efforts and severe struggles they re-
mained breathless on the ground until rescued 
ignominiously by the treed natives by aid of ropes. 
The lions, we are told, eyed the fugitives "very 
earnestly," but the approaching fire appears to have 
prevented any attempt on their part to make closer 
acquaintance with the refugees. 
Nor were lions the only trials under which Carli 
suffered. Rats, rats of giant bulk, infested his hut 
and ran riot over his body of nights, nor could the 
poor man devise any plan for getting rid of them; 
move his bed where he would, they "always found 
him out." Then he tried the plan of protecting him-
self by causing his negroes to sleep on the fiOOf, on 
160 
OLD MISSIONS 
mats, all ~ound his bed. But the remedy ' was worse 
than the disease. Not only did the rats still run over 
him, but the portentous snoring of the negroes, and 
what he calls "their wild and disagreeable smell," 
effectually murdered what sleep the rats might other-
wise have permitted him to take. Finally, by favour 
of the "Grand Duke," Carli obtained a monkey 
which smelt so strongly of musk that it counter-
acted the other unbearable odours, whilst its move-
ments were so incessant and so quick that it fairly 
drove the rats from its master's bed, and the good 
man slept in peace. 
As to his converts, Carli mentions a most gratify-
ing instance of their piety. One night, it seems, his 
ears were deafened hy a loud and very piteous 
wailing, which on investigation was found to be 
caused by the arrival of the entire population of a 
neighbouring village, come to do penance for their 
sins, beating their breasts and with shoulders bent 
low under the penitential weight of great logs of 
wood. The good priest preached long and earnestly, 
and great was his gratification on the lights being put 
out to hear those erring sinners draw out scourges 
of leather and cords of bark, and cantin ue for an 
entire hour to flagellate themselves. Thus, says 
Carli, did those "miserable Ethiopians " put to 
shame European Christians, who are more inclined 
shamelessly to cast ridicule on such piety than 
themselves to emulate the example. 
They were indeed very pious, these Ethiopians-
so long as they remained in good health. But, (to 
reverse the old saw concerning the Devil), no sooner 
M 161 
THE LAND OF T H E GOLDEN TRADE 
did they become sick than their former errors were 
apt t o recapture them, and they would have resort 
to the magicians of t heir tribe. And who can blame 
them? They and their fathers for centuries had been 
wont in cases of sickness to consult the tribal wizard. 
Now they were asked to put their trust in a F aith 
which was new to them, and t o abandon that which 
was familiar. If a patient under t hese circumstances 
should die, was it not to them proof posit ive that 
t he old was more powerful than the new plan ? And 
so the faith even of the most st eadfast was occasionally 
shaken to the foundat ions during the long conflict 
between priest and wizard. Has that conflict even 
to this day altogether ceased on the West Coast ? 
Merolla, also, was a priest who strove forcefully 
against the magicians, a preacher whose eloquence 
carried all before it. At least so it pleased him to 
think. There was in the neighbourhood where the 
good Merolla lived a black lady of high rank whom 
the Friar believed to be a witcb, for she openly 
practised certain doubtful a1ts; and not only this but 
she wore her hair in a scandalously rumpled condition, 
and had a drum beaten in front of her as she walked. 
A witch? Of course she was a witch I And not 
only so, but she was bringing up her son to follow 
the same evil course. It must be put a stop to, said 
Merolla. Accordingly, the lady and her son were 
pursued rigorously, till capt ured and brought before 
"the Count," (as Merolla styled the local chief). 
But that prince, though anxious to oblige the Fatber, 
was unaccountably prejudiced in favour of the 
prisoners, whom he caused to be smuggled off to an 
162 . 
OLD MISSIONS 
island in the river, to the great scandal and grief of 
Merolla, who with his tongue unmercifully lashed the 
miserable backslider, reminding him of the glorious 
example of the late" Count," who, whenever a wizard 
was known to exist in the country, at once had his 
head "lopt off without further ceremony." How-
ever, if Merolla's eloquence on this occasion failed, 
he had later a gratifying tribute to its power. So 
convincing were the burning words that flowed from 
him as he addressed his hearers one day on the evil 
of their ways, that a repentant sinner straightway 
arose, and, running home, beat his wife and daughter 
"without intermission" till they were persuaded to 
come and confess that they were in truth addicted 
to magic. 
"The Portuguese Missionaries," we read in that 
part of Astley's Travels and Voyages which deals 
with Sierra Leone, "made many Converts formerly 
in this Country, the People following the example 
of their King Fatima and some Grandees, whom the 
Jesuit Bareira baptized about the year 1607. But 
they all returned again to their own more natural 
Idolatry." 
They meant well, those early missionaries, but 
their methods were a trifle over-masterful. Brave 
even to rashness, passionately devoted as they were 
to the cause they had at heart, their very excess of 
zeal defeated its own object. It was reserved for 
other and less masterful hands t o leave more perma· 
nent impression on the unstable negro mind, to make 
a beginning, at least, with the slaying of ignorance 
and brutal superstition in West Africa. 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
Yet in all the years since European occupation 
began, how comparatively small has been the result 
of t he labours undertaken, how great is the work 
that remains to do. Little was accomplished, little, 
indeed, could be accomplished, so long as the Slave 
Trade with all its horrors poisoned the atmosphere of 
West Africa. But even since that foul plant in the 
early part of the Nineteenth Century began to wither, 
even since at a later date its roots were finally torn 
up, progress has been slow, and we have yet, in spite 
of vast efforts, as it were but touched the fringe of 
the great work that must be done. 
Good men in our own day have taken their lives 
in their hands, and have gone forth upon their 
Master's business, every whit as fearless as were the 
Portuguese missionaries of old, as much in earnest, as 
devoted as were the most zealous of the Friars, but 
with infinitely more of tact and sympathy, and less 
of intolerance, wider-minded, and better equipped in 
every way for the fight. Yet for all their effol'ts, all 
their devotion, can we claim that much more than 
the fringe has been attacked? 
The ,lIT est A frican negro is the product of a race 
corrupted by countless centuries of idleness, debased 
by ages of ignorance, bloodshed, and superstition, a 
race in whose midst Slavery has ever been present, 
and which, less than one hundred years ago, still was 
subject to the awful atrocities of the over-sea traffic 
in Slaves. Necessarily the field is one of difficulty; 
the outcome of ages cannot be reconstructed in a 
generation or two. The wonder may perhaps rather 
be, not that so little, bnt that so much, has already 
r64 
OLD MISSIONS 
been accomplished. A begiIming at least has been 
made, and magnificent work is being done. 
But the task is great. Do not, for instance, the 
native Secret Societies still exist? Is it certain 
that their malign influence, their hideous power, are 
things of the past, that no exciting cause could now 
fe-awaken the old evil? Is the noxious thing in 
truth slain? 
Writing in 1903; Mr. C. Braithwaite Wallis, late 
Acting District Commissioner Sierra Leone Protector-
ate, says regarding the Human Alligator and Leopard 
Societies: "Their objective and their operation were 
fiendish and devilish even in a land where deviltry 
flourished practically unchecked. Noone, whether 
of high rank or of low, was safe from their blooqy 
machinations. They struck swiftly, stealthily, and 
in the dark; and always their blow meant-death. 
. . . In very many directions Great Britain has, 
through her faithful servants, done splendid and 
enduring work in Western Africa; and in nothing 
more than by the placing of a sharp check upon 
these dreadful practices has she deserved the plaudits 
of humanity at large. I used the phrase' placed a 
check' advisedly. It is generally thought that these 
societies, and others like them, have been absolutely 
and finally eradicated. I wish that I were in a 
position to say that this was a fait accompli. 
Unfortunately I am afraid that matters are not so 
well as that. A lthough their machinations are no 
longer so openly devised as was the case, say, ten 
years ago, it is not possible to deny that these odious 
~ T~ .ddOO11C6 of O'ur Weat .L1.frican Empire. 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
cults are still exist ent; as the ghastly details of some 
crime which, for want of direct evidence for con-
viction, has to remain unpunished, still occasionally 
go to show." 
Where Government and Christianity combined 
have taken strong hold, doubtless the Societies are 
now seldom harmful, but the bush is vast and dense, 
and the arm of the law cannot everywhere stretch 
with equal promptitude. What but our determination 
to make an end of the iniquitous and degrading 
practices of these Societies led to the terrible native 
rising of 1898-9? Terrible indeed was that out-
break. And yet how little is its story known to the 
general public. "I will wager a moderate stake," 
writes Mr. Braithwaite Wallis, "that a very consider· 
able portion of the British Public have never so much 
as he'trd, even, of' the rising in Sierra Leone and the 
terrible massacre which followed it. Nevertheless, 
the latter was the immediate outcome of a widespread 
plot, hatched with !Lll the diabolical cunning, allied to 
secrecy, which form so conspicuous a trait in the 
chal'!tcter of the indigenous African. Spreading, as 
it did, almost in a day, over an immense area, tlus 
conspiracy showed the nature of the Negro in all his 
primitive savagery and b!Lrbarism, a barbarism which 
genel'!ttions of missionary effort towards civilization 
seem, somehow, to have failed to eradicate, although 
one must confess that enormous strides in the right 
direction have been made." 
It is of the Hinterland, of course, rather than 
of the actual colony of Sierl'!t Leone, that Mr. 
WILllis speaks. Here, he says, is "a land reek-
166 
OLD MISSIONS 
ing with fetish and superstition, and teeming with 
dark and bloody secrets. And here it was that in 
1898 and part of the year succeeding, a handful 
of British troops fought grimly to maintain the 
supremacy of the old Flag. . . . Here some of the 
most atrocious and treacherous murders recorded 
in history occurred-murders preceded by all the 
ingenious devices of torture of which the depraved 
mind of the African bush savage is capable. Black 
and white, old and young alike, were cut down 
and butchered in cold blood. Delicate white ladies 
were first outraged and then brutally done to death. 
Hundreds of educated Sierra Leoneans, clergymen, 
missionaries, traders, and even innocent little children, 
were tortured and afterwards hacked literally to 
pieces, or burnt alive. It was a very carnival of 
slaughter, engineered by hordes of ruffians in whose 
veins ran some of the cruellest blood in all wild 
Africa .... And ever their rallying cry was 'Death 
to the 'lVhite Man.' " 
Ten years ago, no farther back, these awful 
atrocities were perpetrated I And how little already 
are those dark days remembered by the stay-at-home 
public of Great Britain! How much indeed of the 
terrible tale was ever known, save by the few? 
We heard much frothy talk some few years back 
on the su bj ect of so-called Chinese Slavery. Certain 
persons, cursed with the cacoethes loquendi, persons 
whose positions cause them to be more or less con-
spicuous, and lend to them an ill-deserved publicity, 
have "in a fine frenzy " spoken on that question. 
From time to time also, these persons continue to 
167 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
speak injudicious and misleading words with regard 
to the supposed wrongs of our Indian brethren, words 
the disastrous effect of which they do not pause to 
calculate. A ll their compassion is lavished on the 
alien; it is to them apparently a thing not worthy 
of consideration that their words may incite that 
alien t o crime, even to the crime of assassination. Is 
there not one of them to dilate on the wrongs of 
h is own countrymen abroad, none whose heart is 
tender t o the sufferings and misfortunes of Britons 
in parts of the Empire remote and ill-aefended 1 
There is room and to' spare, Heaven knows, for 
sympathy with the hapless vict ims, and with the 
sorrowing relatives of the victims, of tragedies such 
as this of Sierra Leone. It were better, surely, to 
be for ever dumb than by wild talk to run risk of 
moving the passions which lead to like tragedies. 
Responsibility for murder is an ill thing to bear. 
Is not the man who incites to that crime, whether 
wilfully or through want of thought, as much guilty 
as is he who commits the crime 1 In truth, 
" It hath the primal eldest curse upon't, 
A brother's mw·der." 
r68 
CHAPTER XII 
THE SLAVE TRADE 
THERE comes now to be mentioned a subject which 
it is not easy to treat with absolute impartiality-
the Slave Trade. One is carried away by horror, 
the blood chills, the flesh creeps, as we read of the 
ghastly atrocities that were enacted in vVest African 
waters and on the Guinea Coast. As is well said 
by Mr. Lucas, in vol. iii. of his admu.'able Historical 
Geography: "The details are so revolting, the in-
evitable accompaniments of the traffic were so 
horrible, that any sober estimate of its causes and 
effects may appear at the present time as an attempt 
to condone the wickedness of white men, and to 
explain away the sufferings which for so many years 
they inflicted on a lower and a coloured race. Yet, in 
good truth, the Slave trade, in its origin and in its 
development, was due to natural, to economic causes." 
That is most true; and it is also what we have ever 
a tendency, almost a desire, indeed, to forget. 
In the first place, white men did not originate 
slavery in West Africa; the loathly plant flourished 
in that fruitful soil long prior to the advent there 
of Europeans. The natural outcome of war amongst 
169 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
savage races is slavery, that or indiscriminate 
slaughter. Kill your enemy, "extirpate the vipers," 
-unless they can be of more use as slaves,-is the 
savage's creed. 
Human life in West Africa was cheap, and the 
black man well accustomed to see blood flow on 
slender excuse,-the death of a chief and the con-
sequent necessity of sending victims to bear him 
company, the whim of a king, the ill -will of some 
local wizard. Just as any stick is good enough t o 
beat a dead . dog with, so was any excuse sufficient 
to justify the shedding of blood. Slavery and blood-
shed were the normal conditions of life. Prisoners 
captured in war, and offenders against the laws of 
the land or the will of the king, were alike con-
demned either to death or to life-long bondage. No 
man was safe. 
When the white man first arrived on the Guinea 
Coast he was not actuated by any special desire to 
make slaves; indeed the first few negroes who were 
taken to Portugal were taken more as rare and 
curious specimens of mankind than for any other 
reason. But the explorers found on all the coast 
south of Senegal slavery ready to their hand, and 
when early in the Sixteenth Century the Portuguese 
began to colonise Brazil, and when, more especially, 
there arose in the Spanish West Indian islands the 
necessity of finding a labour supply to take the place 
of the physically weak races native to those lands, 
(races for whose extinction Spanish cruelty was 
responsible), what more natural than that Spain 
and Portugal should utilise that which lay ready 
170 
THE SLAVE TRADE 
to their hand? But though the Portuguese from a 
very early date abused the Slave Trade, raiding 
villages by night and carrying off the inhabitants, 
even so they did not from the outset, except in 
rare instances, kidnap the black man. Prompted by 
cupidity, driven sometimes no doubt by famine, 
(when parents for a handful of corn parted with 
their children), it was the negroes themselves who 
first brought their fellow blacks to the Portuguese 
for sale,-though it would seem that the Portuguese 
were extremely apt pupils. Cadamosto mentions 
that even in his time (1454 -1460) seven to eight 
hundred negro slaves were imported into POl"tugal 
from Africa. 
Here, then, on the one hand were a climate 
and a country where Europeans could live and 
thrive, where life was pleasant, under certain cir-
cumstances ideal, but where no adequate supply 
of labour existed; on the other, a country and a 
climate such that permanent settlement, the making 
of a home, was to white races an impossibility, but 
where an unlimited supply of robust labour, ("the 
most magniiicent mass of labour material in the 
world," Miss Mary Kingsley calls it), was to be 
had for comparatively little beyond the cost of 
transport. 
It was as inevitable as the rising of the sun that 
those who, for the lack of labour, saw fortune and 
home slipping from their grasp, sbould stretch out 
a hand to West Africa and help themselves to 
what lay there ready to be taken up. The negro 
was a pawn on the great chess-board of world-
17 1 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
development. W ithout him the West Indian 
islands must have remained what they were in 
the days of Columbus, a tropical paradise of no 
particular use to t he outside world. Can we wonder 
if t hose old-time settlers regarded him as having been 
directly meant by a far-seeing Providence to fulfil 
the very purpose for which he was now being used ? 
Save our Puritan forefathers, none probably of the 
many nations concerned from time to t ime in the 
Slave Trade felt necessity t o soothe their consciences 
by quoting that Scriptural curse on the children 
of Ham : "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants 
shall he be unto his brethren." 
We must either go forward or go back; in this 
case there could be no going back, such a land must 
be developed. So the exploiting of the black man 
was inevitable. 
The same conditions which applied to the West 
Indies applied equally to Brazil, the one country that 
Portugal ever really colonised. To colonise it, labour 
must be obtained; the white man, in the nature of 
things, could not in that climate, and in the then 
state of sanitary knowledge, develop the land or 
cultivate that crop which best suited it-sugar. 
Here too the black man was needed; and he was 
taken. N or, though in our present- day eyes it is 
grievous, can we blame Spain and Portugal that in 
their share of world-development they took up the 
weapon that lay readiest to their grasp. In no oJher 
way could the work be done. There was no such 
thing as "free" labour; in Africa the free man did 
not work, his slaves or his womenkind worked for 
172 
THE SLAVE TRADE 
him. If ground were not cleared and tilled by 
slaves, it remained jungle or bush. The early 
European colonists, therefore, had no choice but 
between stagnation and development of the land 
by slave labour. 
So began the hideous over-sea traffic in human 
beings, a traffic carried on under conditions which 
to us of the Twentieth Century are beyond all possi-
bility of conception or understanding. Bad at its 
best from t he beginning, as men's minds became 
corrupted and their feelings blunted by familiarity 
with its vileness, the utter lack of humanity with 
which the trade was carried on became rapidly more 
and more marked, till it left on the history of the 
world a stain foul and for all time ineradicable. 
Nor did the evil die with the death of the Slave 
Trade. Dregs of that poisoned cauldron still si=er 
in the complex race problems which the traffic has 
bequeathed to certain quarters of the globe, problems 
that have yet to be solved, and the solution of which 
may be attained only through much tribulation, and 
perchance through shedding of blood. You cannot 
upset the balance of nature without paying the cost ; 
Nature never forgives, never writes off bad debts. 
In the beginning, as we have seen, it was the 
Portuguese alone who carried slaves over-sea, and 
from very early times the numbers carried seem to 
have been considerable. Thomas Turner, a contem-
porary of A ndrew Battell, and, like him, once for 
some years a prisoner of the Portuguese, reported 
to the Rev. Mr. Purchas that "it was supposed 
eIght and twenty thousand slaves (a number almost 
173 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
incredible, yet such as the PortugaIs told him) were 
yearly shipped from Angola and Congo to the 
Haven of Loando. He named to me a rich Por-
tugal in Brazil which had ten thousand of his own 
working in his Ingenios" '(sugar mills). 
In the early days of the traffic, the E nglish would 
have none of it, except, as has been already related, 
casually as in the case of Sir John Hawkins. But 
certainly by the beginning of the Seventeenth Century 
there were not wanting many of our countrymen who 
touched the pitch which already had defiled the hands 
of Hawkins. Peter van den Broeck, a D utchman, 
writing in 1606, relates how, whilst his ship was 
watering at Goree, an English boat arrived from 
J uvale and drove a bargain with him under the 
following circumstances. They knew, said the boat's 
crew, where lay a vessel richly laden with goods and 
slaves, the crew mostly down with fever. It would 
be no hard task to take that ship, and if the Dutch 
"would grant them the Black Slaves of either sex as 
part of the Booty," they (the Englishmen) were will-
ing to act as guides to the cove where she lay at 
anchor. The bargain was struck, the vessel takel1. 
She was" a Lubecker of two hundred and forty t ons, 
loaded with Sugar from S. Thomas, Elephants' Teeth, 
Cottons, a quantity of Rials of E ight, some Chains of 
Gold, and ninety Slaves of either sex. She had on 
board four Portuguese and eleven Lubeckers sick. 
The Master was dead, and she was bound for Lisbon." 
One does not admire that English boat's crew who 
played jackal to the Dutch lion, and one would 
without sorrow have read that t he D utchmen repu-
I74 
THE SLAVE TRADE 
diated their bargain and seized the entire cargo; but 
we learn that the slaves were duly handed over to 
the English, who no doubt made a handsome profit 
out of them in Brazil or in one of the Spanish West 
Indian islands. 
No doubt from this time onward the English 
increasingly dealt in slaves, and when our West 
Indian and American colonies, following the example 
of the Spaniards, saw the necessity of importing 
African labour, it did not suit them to depend for 
their supply on Dutch ships. Thus, whereas prior 
to 1672 Dutch over-sea traffic in slaves was ten times 
that of England, in 1768 of ninety-seven thousand 
negroes imported into our American and West Indian 
colonies, British shipping carried sixty thousand and 
French twenty-three thousa,nd, leaving only fourteen 
thousand to divide between the Dutch and Portuguese, 
and other nations. 
In 1665 a Petition of the Royal African Company 
to the King concludes with the words: "If the 
Company cannot continue t o supply the American 
Plantations with negro servants . . . the P lantations 
will either be useless or must take their slaves from 
the Dutch, which will utterly divert English ship-
ping from those parts." I n 1663 one of the objects 
of the Royal Aft·ican Company was stated to be 
"For the supply of the P lantations with negro ser-
vants " ; and the Company was "to grant licenses to 
all His Majesty's snbjects to fetch negroes on pay-
ment of £3 per ton on the tonnage of their ships, but 
binding them not to touch at certain points; also to 
make offers to Governors to fmnish them annually 
'75 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
with as many negroes as they will contract for at 
£17 per head at Barbadoes, £18 at Antigua, and £19 
at Jamaica, with reduction of £1 per head at each 
place to anyone contracting for a whole ship load 
and paying one fourth of t he price in advance with 
security for the remainder." 1 The Company in this 
year" Humbly represent that the trade of Africa is 
so necessary to England that the very being of the 
Plantations depends upon the supply of negro servants 
for their works." 
We were now fully committed to the trade, and 
not alone to supply our own necessities, for in 1665 
the Company had a contract with the Spaniards to 
supply three thousand five hundred negroes annually, 
"that will bring into the kingdom £86,000 in Spanish 
silver per annum." 
In accounting for this rapid fall from grace on the 
part of our ancestors, (a fall from that lofty pinnacle 
indicated by the words of Jobson to BuckoI' Sano at 
Barraconda), down to the debased standpoint which 
weighs Spanish silver in the balance against human 
suffering and misery, one must not forget that Slavery 
was a condition with which from the dawn of this 
world's history men's minds had been familiar. Of 
the ancient Eastern races, none were without t heir 
slaves, mostly captives taken in war. Hebrew law 
allowed them to the Jews, not alone in the case of 
prisoners of war but even of men of their own race, 
poverty-stricken debtors who had sold t hemselves in 
discharge of theil: debts. Greeks and Romans had 
them,-did not Odysseus himself narrowly escape t he 
1 Dom. elms. II. vol. lxvii. No. 162; Oal.. p. 36. 
176 
THE SLAVE TRADE 
fate of a prisoner of war! The Celts in Britain were 
in numbers enslaved by the Anglo-Saxons, and from 
Bristol the Christian Anglo-Saxons carried on with 
the Continent a regular traffic in Irish slaves. In 
later days, serfdom in Europe was practically slavery, 
and in England serfdom was not dead in the days 
of Elizabeth; indeed even towards the end of t he 
Eighteenth Century colliers and salters were virtu-
ally slaves, bound by law to perpetual bondage, to 
perpetual burrowing underground, nor were their 
sons at liberty to seek employment elsewhere than 
in the mines with which by birth they were 
connected. 
Europeans of all nations were captured and made 
slaves by the Barbary pirates, who raided even to the 
shores of Ireland; in English and Scottish churches 
IlS late as the Eighteenth Century collections were 
wont to be made for the purpose of ransoming Chris-
tian slaves from the hands of the Corsairs. What, 
too, but slavery was the life of those poor wretches 
-innocent often of all crime-sent by law, or sold 
sometimes, to His Majesty's Plantations; and what 
but slavery in its worst form was the fate of those 
fifteen hundred luckless Scottish prisoners taken at 
W Ol·cester fight in September 1651, who were granted 
to the Guinea Merchants "to be transported to 
Guinea to work in the mines there? " 1 
Men's minds were indeed familiar with the 
abominable thing, and if this over-sea bondage was 
comparatively a new phase in its history, at least 
it did not seem a great step downward from one 
I Whitelock's ,Mem<>rial-s, p. 485. 
N 177 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
t o the other. The horrors and appalling miseries 
incurred in the sea-borne traffic were known but to 
the few; the majority no doubt did not realise to what 
they were tacitly giving approval. Still, the stay-at-
home inhabitants of England cannot' have been alto-
gether ignorant. In 1764 negro slaves were far from 
uncommon in London; indeed there were believed 
to be thousands in that city at this date; and as 
late as 1771 "black boys" were advertised for sale 
in English papers. Lord Mansfield's famous decision 
that a slave was free as soon as his foot touched 
English soil was not given till 1772. 
It is true there were then many otherwise good 
and kindly-minded people who defended Slavery as 
an institution. Boswell, for instance, in his Life if 
Johnson says: "To abolish a st atus which in all ages 
God has sanctioned and man has continued would 
Dot only be robbery to an innumerable class of our 
fellow-subjects, but it would be extreme cruelty to 
the African savages, a portion of whom it saves from 
massacre, and introduces to a much happier life. " 
Doubtless many good folk took their stand behind 
Scriptural authority. There is not wanting wealth 
of texts which may be held to justify Slavery, 
Leviticus xxv. 44, 45, 46, for example. "Both thy 
bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, 
shall be of the heathen that are round about you; 
of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. 
Moreover of the children of the strangers that do 
sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, anTI' of 
their families that are with you, which they begat in 
your land: and they shall be yoUI' possession. And 
178 
THE SLAVE TRADE 
ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children 
after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall 
be your bondmen for ever." 
As regards the Slave Trade there is at least this 
much, little though it is, to be said in England's 
favour. If the trade was to go on,-and no human 
power in the beginning could by any possible means 
have put a stop to it,-the poor creatures were on the 
whole less infamously treated on our ships than on 
those of any other nation ; we showed, on the average, 
less inhumanity. 
But bad was the best at all times. When Britain 
abandoned the trade and when the traffic was made 
contraband, the state of affairs became incredibly 
revolting. Prosper Merirnee tells a tale of a French 
Slave-ship, the date of which is laid somewhat later 
than that of the battle of Trafalgar. To most readers 
of the present day, the scenes therein described can 
hardly fail to appear as gross exaggerations; but we 
shall see presently, as we go farther into the grue-
some history of the Trade, that, far from being 
exaggeration, M. Merirnee has in reality told not 
more than half the truth. 
" Ledoux" was a sailor who had lost a hand at 
Trafalgar, and who consequently had been discharged 
from the F rench Navy. Entering the merchant 
service, in time he became master of a small 
privateer, and when the Peace put an end also to 
this method of earning a livelihood, he entered the 
service of the Slave T raders, the "merchants in 
ebony" as they were called. It is not proposed 
here to re-tell M. Merirnee's story; it is alluded to 
179 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
merely in order that a translation of his descrip . 
t ion of a Slaver's 'tween decks may be quoted. 
"Wbat brought him most credit among the slave 
merchants," proceeds t he tale, "was the building, 
that he personally superintended, of a brig destined 
for the trade, a smart sailor, narrow of beam, long 
like a ship of war, and able nevertheless to accommo-
date a very large number of negroes. ... It was his 
idea that the 'tween decks, narrow and cramped as 
they were, should be only three feet four inches 
in height. He maintained that this space allowed 
slaves of reasonable height to be comfortably seated ; 
and what need have they of getting up ? 
'When they get to the Colonies,' said Ledoux, 
'they will be only too long on their feet.' 
The negroes, arranged in two parallel lines, with 
their backs against the vessel's sides, left an empty 
space between their feet, used in all other ships for 
moving about. Ledoux thought of putting other 
negroes in this space, lying at right angles to the 
others. In this way his ship held ten more slaves 
than any other of the same tonnage. It would have 
been possible to squeeze in still more, but one must 
have some humanity, and leave a nigger at least a 
space of five feet long and two broad in which to 
disport himself during a voyage of six weeks and 
more. 
'For after all,' said Ledoux to his owner, to 
justify this liberal allowance, 'the niggers are IJ:!en 
like the whites.''' 
It seems scarcely credible that human beings, (or 
live stock of any kind, for that matter), should be sent 
180 
THE SLAVE TRADE 
a voyage even of a couple of days' duration-let 
alone six weeks and more-cooped up in a space no 
higher than three feet four inches. Yet, as we shall 
learn on undoubted authority, this space, in which 
uow we would not confine a cargo of monkeys, 
this wild beasts' den, was by the insertion of another 
deck, or shelf, on not a few slave-ships reduced to 
incredibly small dimensions, sometimes to as little as 
eighteen inches in height, in order that another tier, 
or layer, of slaves might be carried. 
The miserable creatures used to be brought up on 
deck daily in batches ' if the weather were fine, and 
forced to take exercise, to dance to the tune of the 
whip, in fact, if need be ; for owing to one cause or 
another,-exhaustion from long confinement in a 
vitiated atmosphere, depression of spirits, sea-sickness, 
ibm which the negroes suffer€d even more than do 
Europeans,-it was no easy task to keep them on 
their feet whilst on deck. If the weather were not 
fine, then there was no exercise; and no ft'esh air, fo~ 
the hatches necessarily were kept on and the air ports 
were -closed if a heavy sea ran. I n either case they 
died fast, in crowds if the weather were dirty; the 
dead, indeed, those who succumbed early, were the 
more fortunate. 
A vivid and terrible picture of a Spanish Slaver 
is given in his Notices if Brazil by Dr. Walsh, who 
was returning from Brazil to England in May 1829 
on a British ship of war which overhauled the 
Spaniard. When boarded, says Dr. Walsh, "we 
found her full of slaves; she had taken on board 
1 Falconbridge, Accoumt oj the Slave Trade on the GOQ.$t oj .dfrica. 
181 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
five hundred and sixty - two, and had been out 
seventeen days, during which she lost fifty -five. 
T he slaves were all enclosed under grated hatch-
ways between decks. The space was so low that 
they sat between each other's legs, and stowed so 
close together that there was no possibility of their 
lying down, or at all changing their position by night 
or day. As they belonged to, and were shipped on 
account of different individuals, they were all branded 
like sheep, with the owners' marks of different forms. 
These were impressed under their breasts or on their 
arms; and as the mate informed me with perfect in-
difference, 'burnt with the red hot iron.' . . . The 
poor beings were all turned up together. They came 
swarming up like bees from the aperture of a hive, 
till the whole deck was covered to suffocation from 
stem to stern. On looking into the places where 
they had been crammed, there were found some 
children next the sides of the ship. The little 
creatures seemed indifferent as to life or death, and 
when they were carried on deck many of them could 
not stand. Some water was brought; it was then 
that the extent of their sufferings was exposed in 
a fearful manner. They all rushed like maniacs 
towards it. No entreaties, or threats, or blows 
could restrain them; they shrieked and struggled 
and fought with one another for a drop of the 
precious liquid, as if they grew rabid at the sight 
of it. There is nothing which slaves during the 
middle passage suffer from so much, as want of 
water. It is sometimes usual to take out casks 
filled with sea water as ballast, and when the slaves 
182 
THE SLAVE TRADE 
are received on board, to start the casks, and refill 
them with fresh. On one occasion a ship from Bahia 
neglected to change the contents of the casks, and on 
the mid-passage found to their horror that they were 
filled with nothing but salt water. All the slaves on 
board perished! We could judge of the extent of 
their sufferings from the sight we now saw. When 
the poor creatures were ordered down again, several 
of them came and pressed their heads against our 
knees with looks of the greatest anguish, at the 
prospect of returning to the horrid place of suffering 
below. It was not surprising that they had lost 
fifty-five in the space I)f seventeen days. Indeed 
many of the survivors were seen lying abont the 
decks in the last stage of emaciation, and in a state 
of filth and misery not to be looked at. W hile 
expressing my horror at what I saw, and exclaiming 
against the state of this vessel, I was informed by my 
friends who had passed so long a time on the coast 
of Africa that this was one of the best they had seen. 
The height sometimes between decks was only 
eighteen inches; so that the unfortunate beings 
could not turn round, or even on their sides, the 
elevation being less than the breadth of their 
shoulders; and here they are usually chained to 
the decks by the neck and legs." 
This ship was reluctantly allowed to proceed on 
her way. Red tape, or some legal flaw, one supposes 
forbade that her master and crew should be promptly 
hanged from their own yard-arms. In what un-
enviable position was the Captain of a British ship 
of war, impotent to succour those tortured human 
183 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
beings I "It was dark when we separated," con-
t inues Dr. Walsh, "and the last parting sounds we 
heard from the unhallowed ship were the cries and 
shrieks of the slaves suffering under some bodily 
infliction. " 
CHAPTER XIII 
THE SLAVE TRADE-ON SHORE 
BEFORE entering fully into the tale of the Middle 
Passage, it may be well to make some mention of the 
shore trade, between capture and shipment of the 
unbappy slaves. 
When the over-sea trade was fully established, it 
necessarily gave enormous impulse to local abuses. 
Petty prince now warred on petty prince in order 
that he might get slaves for sale to the white man. 
Did a chief high in power desire to provide a marriage 
portion for his daughter, there were districts to be 
despoiled and inhabitants to be carried off. Had any 
villager a hated rival, to stun him with a blow on the 
head and dispose of him to the dealers was easy; 
were parents like to perish of famine, there was food 
to be got for the price paid by the white man for 
their children; were a man urged by cupidity, did he, 
in short, for any reason desire to obtain money, there 
was the Slave-Dealer at his hand ready to supply 
funds-for a consideration, the consideration being 
in every instance what was called "black ivory"; 
and the Dealer did not concern himself with the 
source of supply. Had a villager become possessed 
185 
THE LAN D OF THE GOLD E N TRADE 
of property sufficient to make him an object of envy 
to some neighbouring petty chief ; did he chance to 
have a large family; then almost assuredly his house 
would be raided some dark night, his property burned, 
or, if portable, carried off, he himself murdered, and 
his children, fastened t ogether by the neck with 
forked sticks, driven hurriedly down t o the coast 
t o be sold as slaves. Noone was safe; nowhere was 
security. Village raided village, neighbour warred 
on neighbour, and the Dealer preyed on all. I n no 
part of Mrica, in fact, was safety. 
Bruce, who travelled in A byssinia in 1770, and 
Mungo Park, who made for himself so great a name 
through his explorat ions in West M rica late in the 
Eighteenth and early in the Nineteenth Centuries, 
both comment on the terrible prevalence of "village 
breaking." Settlements were attacked during the 
night, and at the very beginning of the attack were 
generally set on fire. T hen as the bewildered, panic-
stricken inhabitants rushed from the fiercely blazing 
huts, most of the grown-up men, and all the old 
of both sexes, were knocked on the head, t he women 
and the children taken down to the coast for sale. 
T he frequency of the practice in West Africa seems 
to have depended greatly on the number of ships 
which happened to be on t he coast. 
No doubt this method of obtaining slaves was in 
exist ence long prior to t he establishment of an over-
sea traffic, but equally without doubt the over-sea 
trade to a hideous extent intensified the evil. A nd 
for every native who was thus enslaved one must 
reckon that at least two were killed. A well-authen-
186 
THE SLAVE TRADE-ON SHORE 
ticated instance corroborative of this is mentioned by 
Mr. T. Fowell Buxton 1 on the authority of a report 
to the Board of Directors of the American Colonial 
Society from their agent at Liberia. A local "King," 
it seems, had arranged with a French Slaver to pro-
vide him on a certain date with a cargo of young 
slaves, and on his part the Slaver had advanced goods 
on credit to the value of the cargo. Date of delivery 
arrived, and the" King" had not collected any slaves. 
" Looking around on the peaceable tribes about him 
for his victims, he singled out the Queahs, a small 
agricultural and trading people of most inoffensive 
character. His warriOTs were skilfully distributed to 
the different hamlets, and making a simultaneous 
assault on the sleeping occupants in the dead of the 
night, accomplished, without difficulty or resistance, 
in one hour, the annihilation of t he whole t ribe ;-
every adult, man and woman, was murdered, every 
hut fired ! Very young children, generally, shared 
the fate of their parents; the boys and girls alone 
were reserved to pay the F renchman." 2 
In very truth, the Slave Trade, as Mr. Lander 
notes in his journal,' had" produced the most baleful 
effects, causing anarchy, injustice, and oppl'ession to 
reign in Africa, and exciting nation to rise against 
nation, and man against man; it has covered the face 
of the country with desolation. All these evils, 
and many others, has slavery accomplished; in return 
for which the E uropeans, fo~ whose benefit, and 
by whose connivance and encouragement it has 
1 The Slavs Tra<k, 1839. Z Ashmun's Li/e. New York, 1835 . 
• I,..under's Rec()1"ds. 1830. 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN T RADE 
flourished so extensively, have given t o the heartless 
nat ives ardent spirits, tawdry silk dresses, and paltry 
necklaces of beads." 
Of the numbers who were killed in the various 
"wars" caused hy these slave-hunting expeditions, 
it is impossible to form any est imat e, but Bosman 
mentions one hundred thousand as having been the 
victims of two such wars, and Villault (1663) says 
that in one raid over sixty thousand perished. Truly, 
with the Prophet Isaiah may one say: "This is a 
people robbed and spoiled; . . . they are for a prey, 
and none delivereth." 
As to the treatment of the unfortunate creat mes 
after capture, there can be no doubt that it was in 
the last degree inhuman. Mungo Park t ells how he 
fell in with a caravan consisting of about fifty slaves 
en route to the coast. "They were tied together by 
their necks, with thongs of bullock's hide twist ed like 
a rope, seven slaves upon a thong, and a man with 
a musket between every seven. Many of the slaves 
were ill conditioned, and a great number of them 
women." Methods of lashing them together, how-
ever, differed. Dr. Holroyd mentions that" a wooden 
stake, six or seven feet long, and forked at one 
extremity, was attached to the neck of one by means 
of a cross bar retained in its position by stripes of 
bull's hide; to the other end of the stake an iron ring 
was fastened which encircled the throat of another 
of these poor harmless creatures." 
Elsewhere, Park says that during detention prior 
to the start of the caravan for the coast, "the slaves 
are commonly secmed by putting t he right leg of 
188 
THE SLAVE TRADE- ON SHORE 
one and the left leg-of another int o the same pair of 
fetters. By supporting t he fetters with a string, 
they can walk, though very slowly. E very four 
slaves are likewise fastened together by the neck with 
a strong pair of twisted thongs; and in the night an 
addit ional pair of fetters is put on their hands, and 
sometimes a light iron chain passed round then: necks. 
Such of them as evince m3irks of discontent are secured 
in a different manner ; a thick billet of wood is cut 
about three feet long, and a smooth notch being 
made upon one side of it, the ankle of the slave is 
bolted to the smooth part by means of a strong iron 
staple, one prong of which passes on each side of the 
ankle." 
On the march, when, as happened frequently, the 
crack of the whip or the sting of the lash proved a 
stimulant insufficient to enable some poor exhaust ed 
slave to keep up with the caravan, according t o P ark 
" the general cry of the cqffle [ caravan] was ' kang-tegi' 
(cut her throat) " ; and there ended the t roubles of the 
poor over-driven creature. 
Cruelly ill-used, insufficient ly fed, marching during 
endless burning days under scorching sun on meagre 
supply of water, is it to be wondered at that men and 
women in numbers sank exhansted, far beyond the 
power of whips to rouse, and so perished? 
But if it were dreadful for adults, what of the 
children? Maj or Gray 1 mentions that of one detach-
ment of slaves which he met, " the women and children 
(all nearly naked and carrying heavy loads) were t ied 
together by the neck, and hurried along over a rough 
1 Gray's 7'ratVsla in Africa. 
T H E L AN D OF T H E GOLDEN TRADE 
st ony path that cut their feet in a dreadful manner. 
T here were a great number of children, who from 
their tender years were nnable t o walk, and were 
carried, some on the prisoners' backs, and others on 
horseback behind the captors, who, t o prevent their 
falling off, tied t hem t o the back part of the saddle 
with a rope made from the bark of the baolntll, which 
was so hard and rough that it cut the back and sides 
of the poor little innocent babes, so as to draw the 
blood. This, however, was only a secondary stat e of 
the sufferings endUl'ed by t hose childl'en, when com-
pared to the dreadfully blistered and chafed state of 
their seats, from constant jolting on the bare back of 
a horse, seldom going slower than a trot, or smart 
amble, and not unfrequently driven at full speed for 
a few yards, and pulling up short." 
1111'. Lyon, another explorer, tells us that "Chil-
dren are thrown with the baggage on the camels if 
unable to walk, but if five or six years of age, the 
poor little creatures are obliged to trot on all day, 
even should no stop be made for fOUl'teen or fifteen 
hours, as I have sometimes witnessed." "The daily 
allowance of food," continues 1111'. Lyon, "is a quart 
of dates in the morning, and half a pint of floUl' made 
int o bazeen, at night. Some masters never allow 
their slaves to drink after a meal, except at a water-
ing place. ... None of the owners ever moved 
without their whips, which were in constant use. 
Drinking t oo much water, bringing too lit tle wood, 
or falling asleep before the cooking was finished, were 
considered nearly capital crimes; and it was in v,tin 
for these poor creatures to plead the excuse of being 
190 
THE SLAVE TRADE-ON SHORE 
tired,-nothing could avert the application of the 
whip . .. . No slave dares to be ill or unable to 
walk; but when the poor sufferer dies, the master 
suspects there must have been something wrong 
inside, and regrets not having liberally applied the 
usual remedy of burning the belly with a red hot 
iron." 
It is no matter for wonder that an estimate, made 
in the early part of the Nineteenth CentU1'Y, of the 
average number of those who thus died on the 
journey from the interior to the coast, puts the 
figures as high as five-twelfths of the whole. 
And what of the condition of affaiJ.·s after the 
cruel journey to the coast was ended, and before 
the horrors of the " middle passage" began? D isease, 
insufficient food, close confinement, the fetid and 
poisonous atmosphere brea of prisons, these were 
the lot of the unfortunates who reached the sea. 
It is ill work to pictU1'e the result in such ciJ.·cum-
stances of an outbreak of small-pox or of dysentery, 
t lVO maladies to which the unhappy creatures were 
peculiarly liable. The marvel is that so many sur-
vived to be still farther tortU1'ed on ship- board. 
Lander mentions that at Badagry, in the Bight of 
Benin, he saw four hundred slaves "fastened by 
the neck in pairs, only one-fourth of a yard of chain 
being allowed for each," driven and pulled down to 
the beach and there packed into an 80 ton schooner. 
F Our hundred human beings crammed into the 
'tween decks of so small a craft, to undergo a 
voyage of si".  or seven weeks in the tropics I 
Says L ander farther: "Badagry heing a general 
19 I 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
mart for the sale of slaves to European merchant s, 
it not unfrequently happens that the market is either 
stocked with human beings, or no buyers are to be 
found; in which case the maintenance of the un-
happy slaves devolves solely on the Government. 
The King then causes an examination to be made, 
when the sickly, as well as the old and infirm, are 
carefully selected and chained by themselves in one 
of the factories (five of which, containing upwards 
of one thousand slaves of both sexes, were at Badagry 
during my residence there); and next day the majority 
of these poor wretches are pinioned and conveyed to 
the banks of the river, where having arrived, a weight 
of some sort is appended to their necks, and being 
rowed in canoes to the middle of the stream, they 
are flung into the water and left to petish by the 
pitiless Badagrians. Slaves, who for other reasons are 
rejected by the merchants, undergo the same punish-
ment, or are left to endure more lively torture at 
the sacrifices, by which means hundreds of human 
beings are annually destroyed. " "I have seen," 
writes the captain of a West African merchant 
vessel-" I have seen the most piteous entreaties 
made by the poor rejected creatures to the captain 
to take them, for they knew that to be returned 
on shore was only to encounter a worse fate." 
For cold-blooded atrocity it must be hard to 
match this King of Badagry. But another instance 
is given where the King of Loango having no market 
for a large number of slaves taken by him in a raid, 
(and who had been forced by their captors to carry 
to the coast the store of ivory which till now had 
192 
THE SLAVE TRA DE-ON SHORE 
been their own), "had them taken to the side of 
a hill a little beyond the town, and coolly knocked 
on the head." I In savage cruelty this can only be 
equalled by the methods of a King of Ashantee as 
revealed by him to a Mr. Dupuis, who about the 
year 1820 was British Consul at Kumasi. "My 
fetishe made me strong, like my ancestors," said the 
King to Mr. Dupuis, "and I killed Dinkera, and 
took his gold, and brought more than twenty thousand 
slaves to Kumasi. Some of these people being bad 
men, I washed my stool in their blood for the fetishe. 
But then some were good people, and these I sold or 
gave to my captains; many, moreover, died, because 
this country does not grow too much corn, like 
Sarem, and what can I do 1 Unless I kill or sell 
them, they will grow strong and kill my people. 
Now you must tell my master" (the King of England) 
"that these slaves can work for him, and if he wants 
ten thousand he can have them." The difference 
between" good people" and " bad people" one may 
conclude was with this monarch not so much a 
question of moral worth as of intrinsic value. 
Chains and the locks and bars of a prison, how-
ever, were not of themselves sufficient to deter the 
poor wretches from attempting to escape from their 
devilish captors. Captain Thomas Phillips, who, in 
command of the ship Hanniba~ of 450 tons and 36 
guns, visited the Gold Coast in 1693, mentions other 
means that were employed. 
Though a man more humane than most of his 
fellows at that time, Phillips yet dealt in slaves, at 
1 Leonard's V&yage to WuUrn ~friC(j. 
o 193 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
least to the extent of taking a cargo of them to 
Barbadoes. To prevent their running away after he 
had bonght them, he says he was advised "to cut 
off the arms and legs of some t o terrify the rest 
(as other captains had done)." But P hillips refused 
to make any use of a remedy so drastic; he could 
not think, he said, "of treating with such Barbarity, 
poor Creatures, who being equally the Work of God's 
Hands, are, no doubt, as dear to Him as the W hites. 
Neither could he imagine why they should be despised 
for their Colour, which they have from Nature ; or 
that W hite is intrinsically a better Hue than Black." 
He observes that" all Sorts of People are prone to 
judge favourably in their own Case ; and that the 
Blacks, in Contempt of the Colour, say the Devil 
is White, and so paint him." Doubtless the blacks 
had abundant excuse for painting Satan white ! 
"The N egros," says Phillips, "are so loath to 
leave their own Country, that they have often leaped 
out of the Canoa, Boat and Ship, into the Sea, and 
kept under VIT ater till they are drowned, to avoid 
being taken up and saved by the Boats which pur-
sued them: Having a more dreadful Apprehension of 
Barbadoes than they have of Hell ; though in reality 
they live much better there than in their own 
Count ry." 
Whilst the ship was still at Whydah, Phillips had 
twelve negroes who "wilfully drowned themselv.es" ; 
several others persistently refused food, and so starved 
themselves to death, "for it is their Belief that when 
they die they return t o t heir own Country and 
F riends again." 
194 
THE SLAVE TRADE-ON SHORE 
To prevent the slaves from attempting to escape 
from his ship, Captain Shurley, the master of an 
English vessel which sailed in company with the 
I-Iannibal, " used to make rus N egros take the 
Fatisl! that they would not swim ashore and run 
away, and then would let them out of irons. His 
Potion was a Cup of English Beer with a little 
Aloes: which operated upon their Faith as much 
as if it had been made by the best Fatishes in 
Guinea. " On the Guinea Coast, we are told, when 
the natives " make any solemn P romise or Oath, 
they take about six spoonfuls" of some concoction 
"mixed with some Powders of divers Colours which 
the Fatisl!man puts into it. This Potion is to kill 
them the Minute they break the Oath, and which 
they firmly believe." 
We do not hear if Captain Shurley's Fetish 
was effective, but at least it was more humane 
than clapping the poor wretches in irons below 
hatches. "For my part," says Phillips, "I put 
more Dependance upon my Shackles than any 
Fatish I could give them." 
Sharks are very plentiful along the coast, and 
at Whydah Prullips saw several slaves eaten by 
those monsters, "of which a prodigious number 
kept about the ship . . . and the A uthor had been 
told would follow her hence to Barbadoes for the 
dead Negros thrown over on the Way." P hillips 
says they" saw some every day, but could not affirm 
Lhey were always the same." 
As a general rule, the trade in slaves was con-
ducted from certain places on the coast where the 
195 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
poor creatures hopelessly pined in what were called 
"barracoons," there in misery of mind and torment 
of body awaiting shipment or death. "Ju  J u town 
(Bonny River) contains about twelve barracoons; 
they are built to contain from three hundred to 
seven hundred slaves each. I have seen from fifteen 
hundred to two thousand slaves at a time, belong-
ing t o the several vessels then in the river," wrote 
the master of a merchant ship about the year 1825. 
Many of these prisons were erected on sites which 
from a sanitary point of view were simply hotbeds 
of ilisease. Anything was good enough for a slave; 
whether he lived or died was no great matter,-there 
were plenty more to take his place if he ilid happen 
to die. When Phillips, accompanied by Captain 
Shurley of the East India Merchant, went ashore at 
Whydah t o purchase their complement of slaves-
seven hundred for the Hannibal, and six hundred 
and fifty for Shurley's vessel-the building in which 
they stowed the slaves pending shipment is described 
as standing in the marshes and "very unwhole-
some . . . it is a most unpleasant place to live in, 
by reason of the neighbouring swamps, whence pro-
ceed noisome Stinks, and vast Swarms of Mosquitos." 
The ships lay here nine weeks, so that for that space 
of time some of the unhappy creatures must have 
been confined either in this horrible prison, or under 
hatches on board ship, before ever setting out on 
their six weeks' voyage to the West Indies. It is 
dreadful to contemplate t hose fifteen weeks of help-
less agony and despair. 
Besides filling up from those depots of human 
196 
THE SLAVE TRADE- ON SHORE 
misery, there were also other ways in which a ship 
might pick up cargo; as she stood along the coast, 
here and there odds and ends would fall to her. 
Phillips mentions that when the Hannibal was on the 
Alampo coast "a Canoa came off with three Women . 
and four Children to sell: but t hey asked very dear 
for them, though they were not worth buying, for 
they were mere Skeletons, and S9 weak, being 
Hunger-starved, that they could not stand. '.rhe 
Master of the Canoa promised two or three hundred 
slaves if he would come ashore and stay two or three 
Days; but judging of the rest by the sample that 
he brought, and being loth to trust People where 
they did not use to trade, and had no Factory, they 
declined it. . . . The Natives here are reckoned the 
worst and most washy of any brought to the West 
Indies, where they yield the least Price; but he 
knew not why, for they seemed to him as well limbed 
and lusty as any other Negros. .. . The Golden 
Coast, (or, as they call them,) Kormantin Negros, are 
most in demand at Barbados, which will yield three 
or four pounds a head more than the Whydah or 
(as they are called) Papa N egros ; but these ;tre 
preferred before the Angola, as they are before the 
Alampo, which are accounted worst of all." 
But wherever they were got, and wherever 
detained, their lot was misery, and the transfer 
from barracoon to shlp as the transfer from frying-
pan to fire. 
If the ghosts of those who have died in sin in 
very truth haunt the spot where their wicked deeds 
have been committed, what a mob of the Damned, 
197 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
what a multitude of evil spirits of white men, must 
in an agony of remorse go to and fro upon the Gold 
Coast of West Africa I How many million years of 
P urgatory may suffice to purge of all the wickedness 
that has been there perpetrated? 
And surely the ghost of Captain Oiseau of the 
brig Le Louis will be not the least of those who 
now suffer torment. In 18~4 this vile wretch on 
completing his cargo forced the whole of his slaves 
down between decks, a space not three feet in 
height, and closed the hatches on them for the 
night. With the passing of the night passed away 
the lives of fifty of those poor creatures. "Pitch 
the -- overboard I " was Oiseau's only comment, 
as he hast ened ashore to get fifty more. Nothing 
must interfere with his having a full cargo at the 
start. 
CHAPTER XIV 
THE SLAVE TRADE-MIDDLE PASSAGE 
DEATH by asphyxiation was a fate by no means 
uncommon on slave-ships. When M. de Gennes 
in 1695 captured Fort James in the Gambia, he sent 
the English officers to Cayenne in one of the Fnmch 
" pinks," with one hundred and fifty slaves " shut up 
in the hold; but these poor wretches scarce having 
room to breathe, threw themselves one upon another, 
as it were in despair, so that thilty-four of them were 
found stifled." 
Needless to say that the slaves now and again-': 
though at rare intervals-rose, and murdered the 
crew of the ship whereort they were confined. To 
guard against this contingency, some Slavers carried 
fierce Brazilian bloodhounds, trained to keep watch 
over the hatchways and to tear to pieces any slave 
venturing on deck during the night. 
But even supposing that no dogs were on board, 
what chance of success had the slaves? How did it 
advantage them if they did succeed in capturing the 
ship? The white crew were speedily made food for 
the sharks. So far, so good; but then, in their turn, 
the blacks probably died a lingering death from 
199 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
h unger and thirst, for of skill in handling a ship or 
Imowledge of the science of navigation they were 
utterly destitute. A few weeks at most of spurious 
liberty, a few weeks of freedom from chains, a period 
during which all day the ship " boxed the compass," 
contin ually taken aback, continually with thunder 
of flapping sails going off on fresh tack, like man 
bereft of reason flying from mood to mood. T ill the 
inevitable end came; either she capsized in sudden 
squall, so bringing merciful death, or she lay, dis-
masted and helpless, a tangle of wreck on the heaving 
waters, whilst human beings perished nllserably. In 
his st ory, Tamango, Prosper Merimee draws a 
ghastly picture of such a scene. 
It was, however, not invariably the negroes who 
suffered in this way. In the year 1797, on the lOth 
of October, a boat containing two men and a boy 
drifted ashore on the north-east coast of Barbadoes. 
They were the sole survivors of the ship Thomas of 
L iverpool, which had been on her passage with a 
cargo of slaves from the Guinea Coast to Barbadoes. 
West Indian waters being at that time infested by 
French privateers, Captain M'Quay of the Thomas, 
who had been more than once attacked in the course 
of former voyages, had, as he thought for the better 
protection of the ship, during the voyage trained 
his male slaves to the use of arms, so that if the 
Thomas should be attacked they might help him at 
least to repel boarders. The exercise was no doubt 
extremely beneficial as regards the health of the 
slaves, but from the point of view of safety the 
expedient was of doubtful utility. It was like 
200 
THE SLAVE TRADE-MIDDLE PASSAGE 
training tigers to act as watch-dogs ; at any moment 
they might turn and rend their master. 
And so it proved in this instance. Early in the 
morning of 2nd September two hundred of the slaves, 
overpowering t he guard, seized the ammunition 
chest, and rusillng on deck, fired on the crew. Some 
fell, some jumped overboard, others cut . away the 
boat carried at the stern, into which twelve escaped 
through the quarter -gallery windows, leaving the 
captain and a few men who stood by him to the 
last vainly trying, with what arms were in the cabins, 
to quell the mutiny. Smitten with shame at their 
cowardly conduct, however, the twelve gave ear t o 
Captain M'Quay's angry remonstrances, and put 
back to the ship, and all might yet have gone well. 
Bnt panic once more seized them as they neared 
the cursing, swaying throng of fighting men; they 
hesitated, wavered, and again fled, leaving their ship-
mates to perish. 
Days passed, days of t orment, for of food there 
was none, and of water little, on board the boat, and 
the heat was unbearable. A sleeping turt le, floating 
on the surface of the sea, was caught and ravenously 
devoured, his blood eagerly gulped down the parched 
throats. Now, driven to extremity, they soaked, and 
when soft, chewed their shoes and " t wo hairy caps 
which they had among them. " At last-the last 
dread expedient of starving humanity-lots were 
cast. And he on whom the lot fell only bargained 
that he should be bled to death. Madness seized on 
most after tills, and they died- all who had partaken 
of that dreadful Thing-leaving but t he three to 
201 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
reach land; and of these, the boy fell in the surf 
from weakness as he tried to drag himself ashore, 
and he was drowned. History is silent as to the fate 
of the revolted slaves. 
Mr. Atkins, a surgeon in the Royal Navy, who 
visited the Guinea Coast in 1721 on H.M.S. 
Swallow, tells the story of a rising on a Slaver. 
There was a noted negro chief "of a tall, strong 
Make, and bold, stern Aspect," who had for long 
been a thorn in the side of Slave dealers. At 
length, surprised in the night, t his negro, "Captain" 
Tomba, had been taken, and when Atkins saw him 
a month later he was in the" Lodge," or barracoon, 
of a hoary villain named John Leadstone, commonly 
called "Old Cracker," a friend of Pirates, himself 
indeed a veteran of that brotherhood. Atkins 
particularly noticed this man Tomba because he 
" seemed to disdain the other Slaves for their 
Readiness to be examined, and scorned to look at 
the Buyers, refusing to rise or stretch out his L imbs 
as the Master commanded. This got him an un-
merciful Whipping, with a cutting Manatea Strap, 
from Cracker's own Hand; who had certainly killed 
him, but for the Loss he must have sustained by it." 
Later, at Jacque-a-Jacques, Atkins' ship fell in with 
the Robert of Bristol, a Slaver whose Master had 
bought this "Captain" Tomba from Old Cracker. 
The tale told by the Master of this Slaver makes the 
flesh creep. Says the account given by Atkins: 
"He gave them the following melancholy Story: 
that this Tomba about a Week before, had combined 
with t luee or four of the stoutest of his Countrymen 
202 

THE SLAVE TRADE-MIDDLE PASSAGE 
to mutiny, being assisted by a Woman-Slave, who 
telling him one Night that there were only five white 
Men on Deck, and they asleep, brought him a 
Hammer at the same time to execute his Treachery ·: 
He could only engage one more besides the Woman 
to follow him on Deck, where finding three sailors 
on the Forecastle, he presently dispatched two with 
single Strokes on the Temples: the other rousing with 
the Noise of his Companions [being] seized, Tomba 
murdered him in the same Manner. But the last 
two of the five taking the Alarm stood upon their 
Guard, and their Defence soon awaked the Master 
underneath, who running up took a Hand Spike and 
felling Tomba with it, secured them all in Irons." 
Here follows what was done by the Slaver's Master, 
a man named Harding, before whom even Captain 
Oiseau is as a healing angel. Harding," weighing 
the Stoutness and Worth of the two Slaves, did, as 
in other Countries they do by Rogues of Dignity, 
whip and scarify them only; whilst three other 
Abettors (but not Actors, nor of Strength for it) he 
sentenced to cruel, Deaths, -making them first eat the 
Heart and Liver of one of them he killed, The 
woman he hoisted by the Thumbs, whipped and 
slashed her with Knives before the other Slaves till 
she died." 
It is hard to believe that this tale can be true ; 
harder still to realise that the perpetrator of in-
humanity so awful was of our own blood and race, 
Yet if Phillips' tale be true of amputations of legs 
and arms to discourage attempts at escape, this also 
may well be so; it is no step downward from one to 
203 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDE N TRADE 
the other. It is instructive too to note how Tomba's 
attempt is styled "treachery." Had it been a case 
of white men rising against black, " heroism " would 
probably have been the t erm used ! 
Captain W illiam Snelgrave, who was much on 
the West Coast of Africa in the early part of the 
E ighteenth Century, and who wrote an account of 
the Slave Trade in 1730, says that the women and 
children were never chained, and that after the vessels 
got to sea the men's chains were taken off, that all 
were fed twice a day, and that in fine weather they 
were brought on deck at seven in the morning, where 
they remained till sunset. Every Monday pipes 
and tobacco were served out, and each day the places 
where they slept were thoroughly cleansed under the 
inspection of white men. 
It may have been so, doubtless it was so, in ships 
on which Snelgrave served-there were humane men 
even among Slavers-but this account does not tally 
with such evidence as one gets from other. sources. 
Even Snelgrave, however, though he says that 
" N egros are easily governed," has some grim tales 
of mutinies to record. In 1704, when under his 
father's command on the Eagle, of London, 
Snelgrave first knew what it was to cope with 
mutiny. It was at Old Calabar. They lay in the 
river, with a cargo of four hundred slaves, and of 
the white crew there were on board only eleven who 
were fit for duty, "for many were dead, and others 
sick," and part of the sound men were on shore 
cutting wood: Young Snelgrave, lying on a cot in 
the cuddy one afternoon, racked by fever and ague, 
204 
THE SLAVE TRADE-MIDDLEPA SSAGE 
heard sounds of a scuffle in the fOIe part of the ship, 
and a strangled cry for help. 
Dragging himself painfully on deck with his 
pistols, he found on the poop his father . :bnd the 
mate, unarmed, to whom he gave each a pistol. In 
the waist of the ship a seething mob of negroes was 
struggling to overpower one of the crew who had 
been on sentry duty; they were trying to tear from 
him his cutlass, which was fastened by a string to his 
wrist. But their very numbers were against them, 
and having failed to snap the lanyard and so secure 
the cutlass, they were now attempting to throw 
the man overboard. In spite of blows and fierce 
violence, the sail(i)r clung tenaciously to their naked 
bodies or to whatever his hands could clutch ; and in 
the meantime old Snelgrave, followed by the mate, 
scrambling forward on the booms, in vain threatened 
the mutineeFs, who paid to his threats no attention 
whatever. Then old Snelgrave, thinking to frighten 
them, jumped down and fired his pistol over their 
heads, whereupon one of the ringleaders with a billet 
of wood hit him a fierce blow on the head which 
brought him to his knees and partially stunned him. 
As the blow was about to be repeated, probably 
this time with fatal force, a boy to whom the captain 
had been kind jumped betwe,m the two and received 
the full effect of the stroke on his arm, which it 
shattered. Then the mate, seeing that the time had 
come for strong measures, shot the negro dead. T hat 
ended the affair; the two other ringleaders jumped 
overboard and were drowned, and the remaining 
mutineers threw up the sponge. It was an attempt 
205 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
that nearly succeeded, and doubtless but for the fact 
that the slaves had been unable to get rid of their 
chains, in a few more minutes not a white man 
would have been left alive on board the Eagle. 
Again, in 1721, when in command of the 
Henry of London, Snelgrave's ship was twice 
nearly being overpowered. It was in each case the 
Kormantine natives who rose, stubborn fellows and 
hard to deal with, in their greater determination and 
tenacity differing from all other tribes of those coasts ; 
"desperate Fellows, who despised punishment and 
even Death itself," says Snelgrave as he describes 
how at Barbadoes and other of the 'IV est Indian 
islands, frequently "on their being in any ways 
hardly dealt with to hreak them from their Stub-
bornness in refusing to work," as many as twenty 
at a time on one plantation have been known 
deliberately to hang themselves. 
It does not appear that on Snelgrave's ship the 
slaves had any specially harsh treatment to complain 
of, not even, indeed, in the measures taken to secure 
them after the risings were suppressed; but they 
were determined to get ashore again, poor wretches, 
by any means, even by cutting the ship's cable and 
letting her drive ashore during the night, as t hey had 
planned in the second of the two attempts. 
What Snelgrave describes as a "sad Accident," 
however, soon afterwards" brought the Slaves to a 
better Temper." On the coast the Henry fell in 
with the Elizabeth, another ship belonging to the 
some owner. The Captain of the Elizabeth and his 
chief mate were both dead of fever; she herself had 
206 
THE SLAVE TRADE-MIDDLE PASSAGE 
fallen into the hands of Roberts, the notorious Pira;te, 
who had, however, in an amiable mood (after inducing 
several of the Elizabeth's crew to serve under the 
Black Flag), handed the ship back to the second 
mate, saying that this was done" out of Respect to 
the generous Character his Owner bore, in doing good 
to poor Sailors." Respect not being a commodity 
in which pirates usually deal to any appreciahle 
extent, we may perhaps conclude that the Elizabeth 
was too dull a sailer to be of use to Roberts and his 
crew of villains, and that she had no cargo on board 
that suited them. In any case, when the Henry 
fell in with her at Animabo, she had collected about 
one hundred and twenty slaves, all of which Snelgrave 
offered to take on his ship, leaving to the Elizabeth 
all of the Hem-y's trading goods that had not been 
disposed of. The mate was quite ready to follow 
thi. course, but the ship's company, and especially 
her cooper, would have none of it, saying that the 
slaves had now been with them a long time, and 
that, as a great friendship existed between them and 
the crew, they would not part with the blacks. 
Snelgrave left for his own ship, but that very 
night about ten o'clock, " the Moon shining l~OW 
very bright," two or three musket-shots were heard 
on board the Elizabeth. Snelgrave jumped at 
once into his pinnace and made for the Elizabeth, 
followed by other boats from the Hem·y. As 
they neared that vessel, two negroes were seen 
swimming shoreward, but before the boats could 
come up with them both were torn to pieces by 
sharks. Holding on by a rope trailing over the 
207 
THE LAND OF THE GOL D EN TRADE 
Elizabeth's side were t wo more blacks, their heads 
just showing above water, trembling with fear at the 
awful sight they had witnessed, but unable, or 
unwilling, to regain t he ship's deck. On board, 
Snelgrave found t he slaves all quiet, but the ship's 
company in great confusion gathered in a bunch 
behind the quarter-deck barricade, where he was told 
that they feared the cooper, who had been on sentry 
duty over the fore hatch, must be killed. Snelg rave's 
scorn was unbounded when he found that, though 
t here was no lack of arms amongst t hem, m uskets, 
pistols, cutlasses, not one had had the courage 
to venture forward to ascertain what had been the 
cooper's fate. So wit h some of his own people 
Snelgrave went forward, where he found t he cooper 
lying on his back quite dead, with skull split in t wo, 
and lying beside him t he hatchet wit h which the 
murder had been co=itted. 
This mutiny also, it t urned out, was the work of 
Kormantines, a few of whom had been bought t wo 
or three days before. One of the t wo men fonnd in 
the water by the ship's side quite coolly confessed that 
the murder had been co=itted by him. He and a 
few other slaves, it seemed, had succeeded in getting 
up on deck, where they found not only the whole 
watch, but the sentry as well, sound asleep,-a piece 
of reckless carelessness not uncharacteristic of the 
British seaman, one fancies. 
Finding their way clear, t he slaves were st ealing 
quietly t o the ship's side, when unfortunately the 
cooper moved in his sleep. Equally unfortunately 
the cook's axe was lying in the galley, conspicuous in 
208 
THE SLAVE TRADE-MIDDLE PASSAGE 
the moonlight. Such temptation was too great; the 
slave snatched up the axe, brought it down with a 
crash on the sleeping man's skull, and jumped over-
board after the others. 
SneIgrave's first care was to remove all the slaves 
to under hatches in his own ship. The next day, 
in presence of the captains of eight other vessels 
lying in the roads,-rather a packed jury, one fears, 
- the murderer was tried and condemned to die in 
Jon hour's time. The condemned man argued that 
t hough it was "rash" of him to kill the cooper, yet 
if he were hanged they must remember that they 
would lose the money already paid for him. The 
white man would do anything for the sake of moneY1 
thought those poor blacks; but in this instance the 
"rgument did not prevail. Snelgrave deliberately 
and impressively turned the hour-glass. "As soon 
as that sand runs out, you die," said he. 
Then each captain returned to his own ship, 
turned up and armed all hands, and brought every 
:;lave up on deck, that they might witness and take 
warning from the execution. By a rope under his 
arms the condemned man was run up to the fore 
yard-arm, and instantly shot by a firing party of 
ten whites, and the body being lowered, the head 
was cut off and thrown overboard, for the greater 
punishment, because many of the blacks believed 
that if they were killed and not dismembered, their 
spirits would certainly return to their own land. 
The early Eighteenth Centmy was not distinguished 
for its humanity! 
As a finish to the scene Snelgrave harangued the 
p 2 0 9 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
slaves on his own ship, warning them that the fate 
of the murderer should be the fate of any of them 
who killed a white man. The warning had good 
effect, for though those blacks were on board for 
m ore than four months ere they were sold, never 
once in that time did the poor creatures give cause 
for the slightest uneasiness. 
Snelgrave mentions, however, the case of another 
vessel where mutiny was not suppressed at so little 
cost of human life as in the instance already men-
tioned. About ten days after quitting the coast, the 
captain of the Ferrers of London, a slave ship, contrary 
to Snelgrave's repeated advice, had imprudently gone 
alone amongst the slaves while they were at dinner. 
It was as if he had gone unprotected into a cage of 
hungry wolves; they fell on him, beat out his brains 
with the little tubs out of which they ate, and tore 
him almost in pieces. T hen they tried to rush the 
quarter-deck barricade, utterly fearless of the muskets 
and half-pikes presented at them through the loop-
holes by the white crew. So furious was the mob, 
so menacing the situation, that the chief mate ordered 
one of the quarter-deck guns to be "loaden with 
Partridge shot " and fired int o the mob. T his ended 
the mutiny. Nearly eighty human beings were 
accounted for by that one discharge, either from 
the actual shot itself (which swept a lane through 
the del?se crowd of blacks) or from the number of 
the frightened wretches who sprang overboard and 
were drowned when the gun was discharged. And 
afterwards, as we read in Astley's Voyages, "most 
of the rest, through sullenness, starved themselves 
2IO 
THE SLAVE TRADE-MIDDLE PASSAGE 
to Death; and after the Ship arrived at Jamaica, 
they attempted twice to mutiny before the Sale 
began; which with their former Behaviour, coming 
to be publickly known, none of the Planters cared 
to buy them, though offer'd at a low Price: So that 
this proved a very unsuccessful Voyage; for the 
ship was detained many Months at Jamaica on 
that Account, and at last was lost there in a 
Hurricane." In reading those old pages of Astley, 
one is at a loss to decide whether the misfortunes 
of this ship are not considered to be directly 
attributable to the grievous wickedness and ingrati-
tude of the blacks in objecting to capture and sale. 
It would almost seem that in the opinion of white 
men of the period, by expatriating them a direct 
benefit was being conferred on the negroes. It is, 
as a matter of fact, much what Boswell said. 
Later than other nations England entered on the 
Slave Trade. Certainly once she did enter on it, she 
seems, like Satan "by merit rais'd," to have lost no 
time in attaining to ba.d eminence therein. Cruelty 
and treachery went hand in hand in the treatment 
of black by white; and treachery, especially, one 
grieves to read, on the part of English ships, appears 
to have been all too common an experience of the 
natives. Naturally it led to reprisals on their part; 
mall)' an Englishman was kidnapped and long held 
to ransom because of this villainous practice, which 
prcvailed particularly, one reads, amongst Liverpool 
and Bristol ships-" a great Detriment to the Slave 
Trade on the Windward Coast." 
When, in the fall of the year 1726, Mr. Smith, 
211 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
Surveyor to the Royal African Company, visited the 
coast in the sloop Bonetta for the purpose of making 
"exact P lans, Draughts, and Prospects of all their 
Forts and Settlements; as also of all the prin cipal 
Rivers, Harbours, and other Places of Trade on the 
Coast of Africa from the Gambia to Whidaw," he 
was shown by the Master of the Q~been Elizabeth 
"a Letter from one Benjamin Cross who had been 
panyared [kidnapped] by the Natives of Cape Monte 
three Months before and detained there by way of 
Reprisal for some of their Men carried off by an 
English Trader." Deserted by his own ship, Cross 
wrote to the master of the Queen Elizabeth, and 
eventually was ransomed "at the Expense of about 
£50 sterling" by Smith's vessel. Smith noticed at 
Cape Monte" that the Natives who came off to trade 
with them were very cautious of coming on board for 
fear of being panyared; and even those who ventured 
on board, if they chanced to see any Arms about 
the Ship, immediately leaped into their Canoas and 
got ashore." Elsewhere, too, we read that at the 
Rio St. Andre" the Men are robust and well made, 
and want neither Sense nor Courage. They are very 
jealous, since some of them have been carried off by 
the Europeans. For this Reason they will venture 
on board no Ship whatever, till the Captain performs 
the Ceremony of dropping Sea Water in the Eye: 
nor will they when they come on board ever be 
prevailed on to go under-Deck or into the Cabins." 
This dropping of sea-water into the eye was looked 
upon by the poor creatures as a binding oath, equiva-
lent to praying to the white man's God that the eye 
2I2 
THE SLAVE TRADE-MIDDLE PASSAGE 
might be blinded if faith were broken. One sickens 
to read that this was considered "the most effectual 
Way to allure them." Hideous comment on our 
national honour I 
Yet bad as she was, and, in this, bankrupt of faith 
and honour, it was after England had set her face 
sternly against the Trade that the worst abuses crept 
into it. 
Then came into use a class of vessel in which the 
conditions were infinitely worse than anything that 
had been known on the old transports, (bad as things 
then were), in the days when the trade was legal. 
"Instead of the large and commodious vessels which 
it would be the interest of the slave trader to employ, 
we have by our interference forced him to use a class 
of vessels, (well known to Naval men as A merican 
Clippers), of the very worst description that could 
have been imagined for the purpose, every quality 
being sacrificed for speed. In the holds of these 
vessels the unhappy victims of European cupidity 
are stowed literally in bulk." 1 
These American clippers were built in the United 
States, sailed thence to the Havanah and on to the 
'Vest Coast of Africa, under the American flag, and 
took in there a cargo of slaves, which they landed 
in Cuba under the flag of Portugal. From June 
to September 1888 no less than ten ships fitted 
for the Slave Trade sailed from Havanah for the 
coast of Africa under the flag of the United 
States, one of the most notorious of them being 
the Venll,s, said to be the " smartest clipper-built 
I Laird, voL ll. 
21 3 
· THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
vessel ever constructed at Ba;ltimore," that home 
of clippers. 
In 1788 British vessels under one hundred and 
fifty tons were not allowed t o carry more than five 
slaves to every three tons; vessels over one hundred 
and fifty t ons might not carry more than three men 
to two tons; and the height between decks must in 
no case be less than five feet. T he Spanish and 
Portuguese regulations fixed a st andard somewhat 
lower. But insufficient as was even the British 
allowance, after the General A bolition Bill · came 
into force, whereby all slave trade was made illegal 
for British subjects after 1st January 1808, conditions 
arose which infinitely increased the sufferings of 
negroes during the Middle Passage. 
The acquisition by Great Britain of the D utch 
West Indian islands had naturally led t o enormous 
increase of British Slaving. When in 1805 an Order 
in Council prohibited that traffic in the conquered 
Colonies, when in the following year British subjects 
were forbidden to take part in this trade either for 
the supply of the newly-acquired Dut ch islands or 
for that of foreign parts, and when to these regula-
tions was added the measure of 1st January 1808, 
great numbers of British seamen,-men for the most 
part of loose moral character,' and demoralised by 
familiarity with every sort of cruelty, where at least 
black men were concerned,-were thrown out of 
employment. To them the obvious solution of the 
difficulty was then to sail under cover of the flag 
1 See Falconbridge's account of the conduct of officers and men on Slave 
ships. 
214 
THE SLAVE TRADE-MIDDLE PASSAGE 
of some other nation, preferably that of Spain or of 
Portugal. A new class of vessel was utilised, longer 
and narrower, wjth less height between decks, and 
huilt specially for fast sailing, so as to avoid captnre 
hy the British cruisers. These slave ships now were 
even more hideously overcrowded than before, and 
little or no attention was paid to the earlier Spanish 
and Portuguese regulation of five men to two t ons. 
Provided they could evade the cruisers, what mattered 
the torments endured by a few slaves I It was worth 
risking, they thought, for even if chased and in 
danger of being captnred, it was easy to throw a 
few slaves overboard and so bring the numbers down 
to regulation before the cruiser could overhaul them. 
A hideously common practice was this of throw-
ing slaves overboard. The Spanish brig em"los, 
captnred in 1814, was seen to jettison eighty before 
she was taken. The Paris Petition of 1825 states 
that "it is established by authentic documents that 
the slave captains throw into the sea every year 
about three thousand negroes, men, women, and 
children; of whom more than half are thus sacrificed, 
whilst yet alive, either to escape from the visits of 
cruisers, or because, worn down by their sufferings, 
they could not be sold to advantage." 
Not that this hideous practice of wholesale 
mnrder arose after the Slave Trade was made 
illegal. Unhappily it seems never to have been 
quite absent from the Trade if occasion arose. In 
1788, the master of a ship on passage from the 
island of San T home to Jamaica threw overboard 
one hundred and t hirty-two slaves, and his owners 
21 5 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
in England claimed on the underwriters for the 
full value of the slaves, on the ground that in 
order to save ship and crew and remainder of 
cargo there was absolute necessity to sacrifice these 
hundred and thirty-two, because the supply of drink-
ing water had run dangerously short, and there was 
not sufficient on board to preserve the lives of all. 
The underwriters denied the necessity, and refused 
payment of the claim, whereupon an action was 
brought to compel payment. 
The trial brought to light a dreadful tale. 
Evidence proved that "the ship Zong, Luke 
Collingwood, master, sailed from the island of St. 
Thomas on the coast of Africa, September 6, 1781, 
with four hundred and forty slaves and fourteen 
whites on board, for Jamaica, and that in the 
November following she fell in with that island; 
but instead of proceeding to some port, the master, 
mistaking, as he alleges, Jamaica for Hispaniola, ran 
her to leeward. Sickness and mortality had by 
this time taken place on board the crowded vessel, 
so that between the time of leaving the coast of 
Africa and the 29th of November, sixty slaves and 
seven white people had died, and a great number 
of the surviving slaves were then sick and not likely 
to live. On that day the master of the ship called 
together a few of the officers, and stated to them 
that, if the sick slaves died a natural death, the 
loss would fall on the owners of the ship; but if 
they were thrown alive into the sea on any sufficient 
pretext of necessity for the safety of the ship, it 
would be the loss of the underwriters, alleging, at 
216 
THE SLAVE TRADE-MIDDLE PASSAGE 
the same time, that it would be less cruel to throw 
sick wretches into the sea than to suffer them to 
linger out a few days under the disorder with which 
they were afHicted. To this inhuman proposal the 
mate, James Kelsal, at first objected; but Colling-
wood at length prevailed on the crew to listen to 
it He then chose out from the cargo one hundred 
and thirty-two slaves, and brought them on deck, 
all or most of whom were sickly and not likely to 
recover, and he ordered the crew to throw them into 
the sea. A 'parcel ' of them were accordingly thrown 
overboard, and on counting over the remainder next 
morning, it appeared that the number so drowned 
had been fifty-four. He then ordered another 
• parcel ' to be thrown over, which, on a second 
counting on the succeeding day, was proved. to have 
amounted to forty-two. On the third day the 
remaining thirty- six were brought on deck, and as 
these now resisted the cruel purpose of their masters, 
the arms of twenty-six were fettered with irons, 
and the savage crew proceeded with the diabolical 
work, casting them down to join their comrades of 
the former days." 1 The remaining ten jumped into 
the sea. 
U nhappily this is not a solitary instance of such 
brutality; there are many cases as bad to be found 
in the evidence given before Parliamentary Com-
mittees in 1790. And as a further example, there 
is the instance when Admiral Collier, in 1820, 
captured the French schooner La J 8UITUJ Estelle 
after a chase which lasted many hours. As the 
1 M6'IIIOir8 of GranvUle Sharp. 1820. 
21 7 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
frigate began to close on the slaver, but before 
she got within gun range, it was noticed that from 
the latter a good many casks were being thrown 
into the sea. To lay the frigate t o for the pUTpose 
of picking up or examining these casks would, of 
course, have rendered the escape of the slaver a 
certainty, so the frigate under heavy press of sail 
continued the chase. 
On the schooner heing boarded, her master 
strenuously denied that he carried any slaves what-
ever, and expressed great indignation at the insult 
offered to him and to the French flag in compelling 
him to heave to. He did, however, protest too 
much; and there were, besides, certain suspicious 
circumstances which caused the officer in charge of 
the frigate's boat to order close search to be made 
through every part of the suspected slaver. The 
result was nil; no trace of a slave was fOlmd; and, 
lashed by the foul tongue of the schooner's master, 
the British boat's crew were about to return crest-
fallen to the ship. 
The Estelle's master had better have held his 
t ongue, better have been content to get rid of his 
unwelcome visitors without attempting to express 
in too strong terms his triumph and his scorn for 
perfidious Albion. The delay occasioned by his 
indulgence in the luxury of abusing the British 
Navy was fatal to him and to his schooner. It 
enabled an A.B. to give an extra blow on the head 
of a cask in the Estelle's hold. That blow WHS 
answered by a feeble cry from within, and on the 
head of the cask being knocked out, two girl children, 
218 
Capture or the SIM'. .r  •• f..&. J,;une E .. teUe" by '" Brltl..$h F'rlgll.te 
THE SLAVE TRADE-MIDDLE PASSAGE 
from twelve to fOUJ:,teen years of age, were found 
packed inside. They were, it seemed, two remaining 
out of fourteen carried off From a village on the coast 
by this virtuous and humane mariner. The fate of 
the others was only too apparent, but they were 
never found. The chase had led the frigate far to 
leeward of the spot where the casks had been seen 
floating, and they were never picked up. 
It was a practice not uncommon to head up 
negroes in casks for purposes of concealment: no 
less than five young men were found in one water-
butt on board a Brazilian slaver by Captain Hamilton, 
R.N., in the year 1831. 
It would be easy indeed to go on multiplying 
indefinitely the number of those cases of atrocity, 
but many of the stories, especially some told by 
Falconbridge, who was at one time that rara avis, 
a surgeon on a slaver, are quite unfit for repro-
duction. Those" good old days," about which the 
most of us love to talk, were not so very good after 
all, it would seem. 
In 1811 the British Parliament unanimously 
passed a Bill which made the Slave Trade felony, 
punishabJe with fourteen years' transportation, or 
with three to five years' imprisonment with hard 
labour. In 1824 the Trade was declared to be 
Piracy, a capital offence if committed within 
Admiralty j misdiction; and though in 1837 the 
death penalty was abolished, it was still left punish-
able by transportation for life. A t various later 
dates most of the countries of the world fell more 
or less-generally less-into line with Great Britain 
21 9 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
in their ~reatment of the Slave Trade; even Brazil 
in 1826 declared that after the year 1830 it should 
be piracy for her subjects to engage in it. 
But for many years prior to 1830 a custom had 
prevailed whereby masters of slaving vessels when 
overhauled attempted to deceive officers boariting 
them from ships of war. In taking out their license 
to trade, it was an easy thing to overestimate the 
tonnage of their vessels ;-a little "palm oil" would 
ensure the document being signed without incon-
venient questions being asked, or scrutiny de-
manded, by the official whose duty it might be to 
issue ships' papers. In a letter written by Lord 
Palmerston to the British Ambassador at Lisbon, 
bearing date 30th April 1838, was enclosed a docu-
ment which stated that the Governor of Angola 
had" established an impost or fee of seven hundred 
thousand reis, to be paid to him for every vessel 
which embarks slaves from thence, it being under-
stood that upon payment of the above-mentioned 
sum no impediment to the illicit trade shall be inter-
posed by the Governor, nor any further risk be 
incurred by the persons engaged in the trade." In 
this way (as reported in the Sierra Leone Advertiser 
of 20th November 1824) the Portuguese slaver Diana, 
-one of three vessels captured about that date and 
sent into port by British cruisers, - held a royal 
license as a ship of one hundred and twenty tons to 
carry three hundred slaves. But she was found to 
be of little more than sixty tons, which gives a rate 
of nearly five slaves to the ton. Another of these 
vessels, of ninety-five tons, masqueraded as being of 
220 
THE SLAVE TRADE-MIDDLE PASSAGE 
one hundred and forty-six tons, and held a license to 
carry three hundred and sixty-five slaves; whilst t he 
third, which was stated to be of two hundred and 
thirty-one tons, measured only one hundred and 
sixty -five,- all this, of course, after making due 
allowance for the difference hetween a Spanish or 
Portuguese and an English ton. Two others, the 
Deux 8reurs of forty-one tons, and the Eleanor of 
sixty, had crammed, the first one hundred and t hirty-
two, and the last one hundred and thirty-five slaves, 
into a space barely capable of holding thirty under 
reasonable, or what were then thought to be 
reasonable, conditions. 
In the year 1819 Captain Kelly of H .M.S. 
Pheasant sent in the Portuguese schooner Novo 
Felicidade with seventy - one slaves and a crew 
of eleven, including the master. The schooner 
measured only eleven tons. Captain Kelly in his 
jlldicial declaration said that " the st ate in which 
these unfortunate creatures were found is shocking 
to every principle of humanity; seventeen men 
shackled t ogether in pairs by the legs, and twenty 
boys, one on the other, in the main hold-a space 
measuring 18 feet in length, 7 feet 8 inches main 
breadth, and 1 foot 8 inches in height, and under 
them the yams for their support." 
It is no matter for wonder that the mortality on 
the Middle Passage was so excessive; the wonder 
almost is that it was not greater,-though in respect 
of deaths it would be hard to beat the record of the 
brig Adamastor, on which vessel, out of eight hundred 
slaves, three hundred and four died during the 
221 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
voyage; or of the Aguila Vengadora, which arrived 
at the Havanah in June 1838, having lost three 
hundred and sixty out of five hundred and sixty 
negroes. Heavy weather had made it necessary to 
close the hatches for two days, at the end of which 
time, when the weather had moderated and the 
hatches been removed, nearly three hundred were 
found to have perished. We lament yet the suffer-
ings of our fellow-countrymen in the Black Hole of 
Calcutta in the year 1757, and shudder at the cruelty 
for which Surajah Dowlah was responsible. How 
does it compare with the white man's treatment of 
the black on West Mrica's coasts, about the same 
date and later? 
Suicide also of course largely added to the long 
death-roll on board Slaving ships. Numberless in-
stances are on record where men chained together 
deliberately jumped overboard rather than return to 
the hell which awaited them below hatches,and a neces-
sary adjunct to the outfit of a slave ship was a high and 
very strong net fixed above the bulwarks all round 
that part of the ship where the slaves were allowed 
to come on deck. As to the fate of slaves on a vesseJ 
which by evil fortune ran ashore, or which for any cause 
had to be abandoned at sea, it is well not to speak. 
The excessive mortality of course did not end with 
the landing; numbers were put on shore in a state 
of weakness and disease so miserable that a large 
proportion never recovered. It was reckoned that 
of the hundred and fifty thousand, or thereabout, 
landed in Brazil and Cuba, thirty thousand died in 
the" seasoning." 
222 
THE SLAVE TRADE-MIDDLE PASSAGE 
Yet in spite of the appalling mortality, so great 
were the profits of the hideous trade that the slavers 
were not greatly concerned, considered indeed that 
they had made not altogether an unfavourable voyage, 
if they landed anything much over one-third of the 
number originally embarked. 
The price paid for slaves on the African Coast, 
like that of every other commodity, varied accord· 
ing to circumstances. A native raid more than 
oruinarily successful, or it might be, a dearth of 
shipping on the coast, would cause a glut in the 
Illarket, and send values down; whilst, on the other 
hand, a long continuance of favourable winds might 
fill t he chief ports with more ships than there were 
cargoes ready for, when holders of course stood out 
for a higher figure. 
The greatest recorded boom in slaves occurred in 
1098, after the destruction of Fort James, Gambia 
RiYer, by M. de Gennes. So that the fort might 
be rebuilt without an expenditure so great that it 
would have crippled the Company, Parliament threw 
open the West African trade on condition that each 
ship visiting the coast should pay t o the A frican 
Company's Dixectors ten per cent value on her out-
ward cargo, or twenty per cent after her return to 
England. 
" It is scarcely possible to conceive," bitterly 
writes a contemporary French writer, "what a 
!lumber of English vessels this permission brought to 
t he Gambia, and what confusion it occasioned in the 
Trade. Each captain outbidding the other to get 
the sooner loaded, the price of negroes at Jilfray rose 
223 
THE L A ND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
to forty Bars a head; so that the Mercadores or 
Mandingo Merchants would no longer sell their slaves 
either at Barraconda or Guisches to the F rench or 
English Companies for the usual price of fifteen to 
seventeen Bars, but chose to come down the River, 
tempted by the great Profits made. . .. By this 
means the Servants of the French and English 
Companies were forced to sit idle and wait patiently 
to see the issue of this ruinous Commerce. Between 
January and June 1698 these separate Traders ex-
ported no fewer than three thousand six hundred 
Slaves, by which means they overstocked the Country 
with more Goods than they could consume in some 
Years. Nothing could be more imprudent than the 
Conduct of the English Company, who had better 
have received nothing from the Parliament for the 
reparation of their Fort than have accepted this 
Benevolence of ten per cent on conditions wholly 
destructive to their Trade, as appears from the 
extravagant Rate to which the P rice of Slaves has 
risen. It was easy t o see their Intention was to ruin 
the French Company, without reflecting that, while 
they hurt them but a little, they ruined themselves 
entirely." 
The French, however, seem to have attempted to 
retaliate on the English. According t o Moore, the 
African Company's Superintendent on the Gambia, 
French trade was greatly hampered by the English 
"not allowing them to give above forty Bars a 
head for Slaves. But in the year 1735, there being a 
great demand for them at the Mississippi, the F rench 
broke through that Agreement and gave fifty Bars a 
2 2 4 
THE SLAVE TRADE-MIDDLE PASSAGE 
head for Slaves, with six or seven of each of the Heads 
of Goods, which amounted to more than £10 ster-
ling: And though there were no fewer than three 
Liverpool ships trading at Jillefray, a mile above the 
French, who gave eighty Bars a head, yet they could 
not get near so many Slaves that year as the French 
did, their Goods being generally better than the 
English." . 
A "Bar," it is necessary t o explain, is a 
"Denomination given to a certain quantity of 
Goods of any kind ; which quantity was of equal 
Value, among the Natives, to a Bar of Iron when 
this R iver was first traded to. Thus a Pound of 
Fringe is a Bar; as are two Pound of Gun Powder, 
an Ounce of Silver, two hundred Gun Flints: So 
their Way of reckoning is by Bars or Crowns, one 
of which sometimes does not amount to above one 
shilling sterling, being dear or cheap according to 
the Goods they want These five Articles, viz. 
Spread Eagle Dollars, Crystal Beads, Iron Bars, 
Brass Pans, and Arrangoes, are called the Heads of 
Goods, because they are dearest." According to 
Park, a "bar" in CUl"rent value should be equal to 
two shil lings sterling. Even eighty bars, therefore, 
was no very extravagant price fo\· a slave. 
Atkins mentions that at Sierra Leone in 1721 the 
price of a good slave was about £15, "allowing the 
Buyer forty or fifty per cent Advance on his Goods." 
In later days, however, when the Trade had been 
declared contraband, prices were lower and profits 
vastl y greater. Then, as was stated by the Governor 
of Cape Coast Castle in 1838, "a prime slave on that 
Q 225 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
part of the coast with which I have most knowledge, 
costs about $50 in goods, or about from $25 to $30 
in money, including prime cost and charges; the 
same slave will sell in Cuba for $350 readily, but 
from this large profit must be deducted freight, 
insurance, commission, cost of feeding during the 
middle passage, and incidental charges, which will 
reduce the profit to, I should say, $200 on each 
prime slave; and this must be still further reduced, 
to make up for Casualties, to perhaps $150 per head." 
About the year 1835, too, Commissioner Macleay 
says: 1 "Of the enormous profits of the Slave Trade, 
the most correct idea will be formed by taking an 
example. The last vessel condemned by the Mixed 
Commission " [the Court of the Mixed Commission 
for the adjudication of captured slave vessels] "was 
the Firm." As stated by Mr. Macleay, the price 
paid for the cargo of this ship was $28,000; cost of 
provisions and ammnnition, and allowance for wear 
and tear, $10,600; wages paid, $13,400; making a 
total outlay of $52,000. The slaves on board fetched 
$145,000; making a clear profit of $93,000 (roughly 
£19,000), a gain of just abont one hundred and eighty 
per cent. 
Is there room for wonder that when profits such 
as this could be made (and made with comparatively 
little danger, for over all that wide stretch of coast 
necessarily the percentage of captures was small), 
an inexhaustible supply of scoundrels should have 
been found, willing to peril body and soul, to run 
any risk, capable of committing any atrocity, for the 
1 Parl. Paptn". No. S81. 
226 
THE SLAVE TRADE-MIDDLE PASSAGE 
sake of gains so easily come by, and that all Great 
Britain's efforts to cleanse this Augean Stable should 
for so many years have been of no avail ? 
The average mini7ll,um nnmber of slaves estimated 
to have been yearly landed in Brazil alone from the 
G uinea Coast, after the beginning of strong efforts 
to put an end to the trade, was seventy - eight 
thousand three hundred and thirty -one ; but as 
more than half the vessels arriving on the Brazili3in 
coast from Africa reported themselves as in ballast, 
it is safe to conclude that very large numbers of 
slaves were smuggled ashore by them at places other 
than Bahia, Pernambuco, Maranham, Rio, etc., so 
that it is probable the seventy-eight thousand might 
without risk of exaggeration have been put down 
as close on one hundred thousand. In the thirty-
eight degrees of latitude over which the Brazilian 
coast -line extends, there are spots in abundance 
where whole cargoes might have been set ashore 
wit,hout exciting remark. 
A number certainly not smaller must be set down 
as entering Cuba; (the Governor of Cape Coast 
Castle, who was assuredly in a position to judge, in 
]838 set down the number of slave ships for Cuba, 
as compared with Brazil, as in the proportion of three 
to t wo). 
If, therefore, to the huge total of human beings 
annually enslaved in those two countries we add the 
totals consigned to Porto Rico, Uruguay, Buenos 
Ayres, Rio de 10. P lata, and probably Texas, it will 
be realised how almost incredibly large was the annual 
drain of human life from African coasts as a whole,-
227 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
for east as well as west groaned under the awful rod 
of the white t yrant. From the Bight of Biafra and 
Benin alone, Captain M'Lean in 1838 stated that 
"in the year 1834 I have every reason to believe that 
the number of slaves carried off . . . amounted to 
one hundred and forty thousand." 
That this is no exaggeration, the following extract 
from a letter written from our Mission Station at 
Old Calabar in 1874 goes far to prove: "The country 
here is thinly populated. I do not think it is possible 
to arrive at any approximation of the real numbers. 
It is certain that early st atements (this I suppose 
refers to statistics sent home in connection with 
the Mission) made upon native authority are much 
exaggerated. The Slave Trade decimated this part 
of Africa. Dr. Robb has a book in his possession 
written by a Calabar Chief over eighty years ago, 
in which are entered the names of all the Slave ships 
that came to the river during that time (sic), with 
the names of their captains and mates, and also the 
number of slaves which they took away each time, 
with the various districts from which batches of 
slaves were taken. And during those three years 
not less than seventy thousand were sent out of the 
Calabar River alone. N ow the Slave Trade was con-
tinued through many years, and if seventy thousand 
were taken away in three years, how great the number 
that must have been taken altogether." 
In 1662, the third African Company undertook 
to supply the British W· est Indian and American 
Colonies with three thousand slaves annually. 
Making every allowance for the fact that in the 
228 
TIlE SLAVE TRADE- MIDDLE PASSAGE 
"sea oning" something like fifty per cent died, 
and that the wretched survivors were probably, 
most of them, permanent ly unfit, after t he horrors 
and sulferings of t heir voyage, to produce healthy 
offspr ing, how rapidly this annual import must have 
increased may be gathered from t he fact that eighty 
years later t he number of slaves in t he British West 
Indian islands and in Virginia totalled three hundred 
and forty thousand, 
But those evil days are ended, thanks chiefly to 
the tireless efforts of G reat Britain, Yet for many 
a year she fought on, not only apparently without 
good resu lting from her efforts, but almost, it would 
seem, as if from t hem arose fresh evil. The only 
changes at first effected were a change in the flag 
under which the trade was carried on, and a change 
for t he worse in the treatment endured by the slaves 
during the voyage. At first it was the French flag 
t liat gave protection. (Mr. Fowell Buxton, writing 
ill 1839, says that our Ambassador at Paris in 
1824 slated to the French Minister that that flag 
.. covered the villains of aU nations.") Later, it was 
ullder the flag of Spain that those villains t ook 
rduge; and, finally, t hey sheltered under that of 
Portugal. 
So far as in her lay, Great Britain wiped from 
of!' her shield the foul stain that participation in the 
Slave Trade had left upon it, and by every means 
in her power she made atonement for t he evil which 
in earlier days her sons had committed. Seventy-five 
years have pas ed since B"itain gave to the world 
a lead in emancipation, and one would fain believe 
229 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
that now over all the Globe Slavery is but a terrible 
memory. Yet who shall say that in that vast con-
tinent of Africa the evil thing does not even now lift 
its head in remoter parts, and in islands little visited 
by the greater nations does not even yet live, perhaps 
under a name at least of fairer sound? 
230 
CHAPTER XV 
PIRATES OF THE GUINEA COAST: ENGLAND AND 
DAVIS 
THERE exists in an early Eighteenth Century book 
of travels an interesting chart of Sierra Leone Bay. 
On this chart, on the south side of the Bay, on 
a deeply-indented little bit of coast inside of Cape 
Sierra Leone, appears the following entry: "Pyrates' 
Bay." A little to the east we find "Frenchman's 
Bay," with a " vVater Place. Where a Boat may get 
in at high Water"; and farther along, opposite the 
Watering P lace, the words: "Plenty of Oysters on 
the Mangrove Trees along this River." Farther still 
to the east lies" Bay de France,'· where is a " Spring 
descending from y' Hills." 
It reads as if the entries were culled direct from 
some piratical chart in a Boys' Romance, especially 
when one finds, in connection with old sailing direc-
tions, that" The Cape of Sierra Leona is known by 
a single Tree much larger than the rest and high 
Land on the back of it." But they are genuine 
enough, those entries, and each bay and point no 
doubt had its own special tradition and history. 
From Mr. 'I\Tilliam F inch, a merchant of London 
23 1 
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN TRADE 
who touched at Sierra Leone in 1607 on his voyage 
to the East Indies, we learn that "on the further 
Side of the fourth Cove is t he Watering Place of 
excellent Water continually running," where in six 
fathom of water ships lay "within M usket shot of 
the Fountain," (Bay de France, in all probability). 
"Here," one reads in Astley's Voyages, "on the 
Rocks they found the Names of divers Englishmen: 
A mongst the rest, those of Sir Francis Drake, who 
had been there twenty-seven years before; Thomas 
Candish, Captain Lister, and others." Drake, no 
doubt, as a young man may have been there more 
than once. Cavendish visited the Bay in 1586 
when on his way, viii the Straits of Magellan, 
with a little squadron to harry the Spaniards in 
the Pacific. 
This watering-place in the Bay de France is de-
scribed by Barbot as being" one of the most delight-
fu l Places in all Guinea"; but, as to the source of 
that water, "there is no approaching it, for the many 
Tigers, Lions, and Crocodiles which harbour there " ; 
and, alas, says Astley, " it must be observed that this 
W' ater has an ill Effect if taken in the beginning of the 
Winter, or Rainy Season . . . because the violent 
Heats having corrupted the Earth, and killed 
Abundance of venomous Creatures, all that malignant 
Matter is brought down by the great F loods, which 
descend at that Time and infect the Water, as hath 
been found to the Cost of many Sailors. Care like-
wise must be taken not t o eat the Fruit or drink the 
Water to Excess, because it causes a Sort of pesti-
lential Distemper which is almost certain Death." 
23 2 
PIRATES OF THE GUINEA COAST 
Moreover, there were also Serpents "so monstrous 
big ... tbat they swallow a Man whole." 
Tills Pyrates' Bay, then, in spite of its close 
proximity to one of the most delightful spots in 
Guinea, and in spite of its romantic surroundings, 
had its drawbacks. But doubtless it suited reason-
ably well the gentlemen after whom it took its 
title. Here, at as late a date as 1720,-when the 
50 gun frigate Swallow, under Sir Chaloner Ogle, 
visited the coast with her sister ship the Weymouth, 
for the purpose of putting down piracy,-dwelt the 
private Traders, or Interlopers, "about thirty in 
number, loose privateering Blades," who traded if 
they could, and if they could not trade, stole, " not 
so much to amass Riches as to put themselves in a 
Capacity of living well and treating their Friends 
... and with their Profits purchase from Time to 
Time Strong Beer, Wine, Cyder, and such Neces-
saries, of Bristol Ships, which more frequently than 
oihers put in there. " 
Jolm Leadstone, "Old Cracker," was the chief 
of those private Traders; he " had been an old 
Buccaneer, and in 1720 had the best house among 
them, with two or three Guns before his Door, to 
salute ills Friends the Pirates when they put in 
there." 
It was a haunt favoured of pirates in the olden 
days, this coast of Guinea; ships of war in those 
latitudes were never numerous, and seldom of great 
size or heavily armed, and if things piratical should 
chance to be dull, why, it was easy to load up with 
slaves and be off to a good market, another haunt 
233