Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/103

 Abyssinia and the adjoining desert. The Arabs and Moors, indeed, traversing the latter, knew something about Ethiopia, or the land of the negroes, but what knowledge they had was confined to themselves; and to the Europeans the whole of the continent to the south of the desert was an unknown and unexplored land. There were traditions of two ancient circumnavigations of the continent by the Phœnicians and the Carthaginians, one down the Red Sea, and round the Cape of Good Hope from the east, the other through the Straits of Gibraltar, and round the same cape from the west; but these traditions were vague and questionable. They were sufficient, however, to set the brains of modern navigators a-working; and now that they were possessed of the mariner's compass, they might hope to repeat the Carthaginian feat of circumnavigating Africa; if, indeed, Africa were circumnavigable. In the year 1412, therefore, a series of attempts was begun by the Portuguese, at the instigation of Prince Henry, to sail southward along the western coast. In every succeeding attempt, the bold navigators got farther and farther south, past the Canaries, past the Cape Verds, along the coast of Guinea, through the Bight of Biafra, down that long unnamed extent of coast south of the equator, until at last the perseverance of three generations succeeded, and the brave Yasco de Gama, in 1497, rounded the great cape itself, turned his prow northward, sailed through the Mozambique Channel, and then, as if protesting that he had done with Africa all that navigator could, steered through the open ocean right for the shores of India. The third or fourth of these attempts brought the Portuguese into contact with the negroes. Before the year 1470, the whole of the Guinea coast had been explored. As early as 1434, Antonio Gonzales, a Portuguese captain, landed on this coast, and carried away with him some negro boys, whom he sold to one or two Moorish families in the south of Spain. The act seems to have provoked some criticism at the time. But from that day, it became customary for the captains of vessels landing on the Gold Coast, or other parts of the coast of Guinea, to carry away a few young negroes of both sexes. The labor of these negroes, whether on board the ships which carried them away, or in the ports to which the ships belonged, being found valuable, the practice soon grew into a traffic; and negroes, instead of being carried away in twos and threes as curiosities, came to form a part of the cargo, as well as gold, ivory, and gum. The ships no longer went on voyages of discovery, they went for profitable cargoes; and the inhabitants of the negro villages along the coast, delighted with the beads, and knives, and bright cloths which they got in exchange for gold, ivory, and slaves, took care to have these articles ready for any ship that might land. Thus the slave-trade, properly so called, began. The Spaniards were the first nation to become parties with the Portuguese in this infamous traffic.

At first, the deportation of slaves from Africa was conducted on a limited scale; but about seventy years after Gonzales had carried away the first negro boys from the Guinea coast, an opening was all at once made for negro labor, which made it necessary to carry away blacks, not by occasional ship-loads, but by thousands annually.