Page:The American Slave Trade (Spears).djvu/84

 trading man, will you, captain?" said Jolinson, in remonstrance.

"If they will sell you I will buy you, be you what you may," replied the captain, and the kidnapping Ben Johnson became a slave himself. This story is especially interesting because of the picture it gives of the workings of the captain's mind. He would not kidnap a negro himself, but he would buy of anyone under any circumstances.

A man named Marsh, who was in charge of a shore station established for buying slaves at Cape Coast Castle, in those days, is on record as saying: "I do not mind how they get them, for I buy them fairly." It is a queer exhibition of conscientious scruples, though one, perhaps, not now wholly unknown.

But the slavers rapidly outgrew such squeamishness. They outgrew it simply because the increased numbers obtained by such methods were still inadequate for the demand. Moreover with the increase in the number in an average cargo came a special need for haste in procuring them. Captain Lindsay might keep forty negroes "in helth and fatt" under the deck of the Sanderson while gathering fifteen or twenty more by the old slow process, but when Captain Billy Boates, of Liverpool, a noted slayer, who was "born a beggar to die a lord," had two hundred and fifty on board the ship Knight, in which he won fame, he could not wait long for the remaining hundred because those already on board would die.

The trade in its origin had been an exchange of a fair measure of goods for individuals legally held as slaves. It arrived at a stage in which a majority of every cargo purchased consisted of freemen