Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 1.djvu/52

 personal freedom he enters a new family, and the offspring of the free woman whom he marries are free like their mother.

It must be confessed that the condition of the African slave has been aggravated mainly through the influence of European civilisation. Even long before the discovery of the Coast of Guinea by the white navigators, and before the foundation of European colonies in the New World, slave markets were held in Seville and Lisbon. But when Portugal had taken possession of the seaboard, and the Spaniards, Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch required robust hands to replace the exterminated natives on their remote western plantations, then a large part of Africa was transformed to a vast hunting-ground for human quarry, and the name of "white" became synonymous with "cannibal," as it still is in the Galla language. All round the coast stations sprang up as outports for this new merchandise. The Portuguese forwarded to Brazil the Negroes captured in Angola; Jamaica, Barbadoes, and Virginia received their supplies from the Cape Coast; Louisiana and the French Antilles from Senegal and the Slave Coast; New Amsterdam from Elraina. Every American settlement thus had its corresponding emporium in Guinea. The horrors of the "middle passage" exceeded all description. To save space the living freight was packed in the smallest compass on board ship, where large numbers were swept away by typhus, heat, thirst, and suicide. It would be impossible even roughly to estimate the multitude of human beings sacrificed by the slave-trade, through the wars it fomented around the African seaboard, the epidemics it propagated, the revolts and massacres of which it was the consequence.

Although the Africans removed to the New "World must be reckoned by many millions, the coloured population, consisting almost exclusively of men, increased very slowly on the plantations. In the present century, however, the equilibrium of the sexes has at least been established amongst the exiled race. At present the number of pure or half-caste Negroes in America exceeds twenty-five millions, and amongst them there are still about one million five hundred thousand unemancipated. But since the sanguinary civil war waged in the United States for the liberation of the blacks, this ancient form of servitude is finally condemned, and the number of slaves is daily diminishing in its last strongholds, Cuba and Brazil.

In Africa itself, the institution has received a fatal blow by the closing of the maritime outports, and whatever may at times be said to the contrary, very few of the Arab and other craft engaged in. the traffic succeed in forcing the blockade along the shores of the Indian Ocean. Many however still cross the Red Sea, in defiance of the English at Aden, of the French at Obock, and of the Italians at Assab, while tens of thousands continue to fall victims to the Arab and other kidnappers in the interior of the continent. During the heyday of the slave-traders the traffic cost the lives of at least half a million Negroes every year. Compared with that already remote epoch, the present must be regarded as an age