Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 3.djvu/255

 SIEEEA-LEONE. 207 daily gaining ground in this Negro town, founded by the English and Christian missionaries. In 1886 the Moslem community already numbered three thousand adherents, who were wealthy enough to erect a sumptuous mosque in the place. Here are represented all the races of West Africa, and a hundred and fifty lano-uao-es were current in this town, which the English cruisers had made the general depot of the captives rescued from the " slavers." After having long been a hotbed of the traffic in human flesh, Sierra-Leone thus became an asylum for the fugitives, a land of liberty for the emancipated Negroes. The English company who in 1713 had obtained the privilege of furnishing the Spanish- American possessions with slaves, transported in exceptional years as many as sixty thous.ind, the product of wars in which at least twice as many victims perished. But it was also at Sierra-Leone that in 1787 Granville Sharp and Smeathman acquired from tlie Timni chiefs a strip of territory to be converted into a land of freedom. A first group of black colonists was here established, and at the close of the American War of Independence these were joined by other refugees from Nova Scotia. Most of them perished of hunger and misery, but were replaced bv others from Canada and Jamaica, and after the official abolition of the slave-trade in 1807, the British Government replaced the Sierra-Leone Company as masters of the peninsula, using it not only as a home for rescued freemen, but also as a con- vict station for mutineers from its other tropical possessions. This intermingling of peoples of diverse speech and origin has produced a hybrid population unlike any other on the west coast, where they bear a bad name for greed, hypocrisy, and degraded morals. Nevertheless, the Sierra-Leone.^e are an industrious, enterprising people, and their blacksmiths, carpenters, and other artisans are highly valued in all the seaboard towns. Some even profess to teach, if not English, at least an English jargon to all the coast tribes, notably those of the Su-Sus of the Pongo Blver. Descendants of the freemen are met as far inland as the Niger basin, where they are generally known as potii^ or "whites," not merely because many are half-castes, but more especially because they represent a higher culture, and by their very presence recall such events as the suppression of the slave-trade, and the emancipation of the Negro. Some tribes have even been induced by their example to abolish servitude, and in the Scarcles basin a petty state has been founded, consisting entirely of fugitive slaves, whose courage and free bearing have secured for them the respect of their neighbours. The diverse origin of the Freetown Negroes has compelled them to adopt Eng- lish as the common medium of intercourse, but In their mouths this language has been so strangely transformed that no European Englishman would understand it at first, although consisting of but a very limited number of words. The Mora- vian Brothers had translated the Testament Into this jargon ; but the style and Mords necessarily used by the translators seemed so whimsical that, through a feeling of reverence for the sacred text, the volume had to be destroyed. It bore the name of "Da Njoe Testament, translated Into the Negro- English language by the Missionaries of the Unitas Fratrum," British and Foreign Bible Society, London, 1829.