Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/109

 caused by the traffic on the coast; and ere long, the very negroes who seemed safest in their central obscurities, were drained away to meet the increasing demand; either led captive by warlike visitants from the west, or handed from tribe to tribe till they reached the sea. In this way, eventually, Central Africa, with its teeming myriads of negroes, came to be the great mother of slaves for exportation, and the negro villages on the coast the warehouses, as it were, where the slaves were stowed away till the ships of the white meu arrived to carry them off.

European skill and foresight assisted in giving constancy and regularity to the supply of negroes from the interior. At first the slave vessels only visited the Guinea coast, and bargained with the negroes of the villages there for what quantity of wax, or gold, or negroes they had to give. But this was a clumsy way of conducting business. The ships had to sail along a large tract of coast, picking up a few negroes at one place, and a little ivory or gold at another; sometimes even the natives of a village might have no elephants' teeth and no negroes to give; and even under the most favorable circumstances, it took a considerable time to procure a decent cargo. No coast is so pestilential as that of Africa, and hence the service was very repulsive and very dangerous. As an improvement on this method of trading, the plan was adopted very early of planting small settlements of Europeans at intervals along the slave-coast, whose business it should be to negotiate with the negroes, stimulate them to activity in their slave-hunting expeditions, purchase the slaves brought in, and warehouse them until the arrival of the ships. These settlements were called slave factories. Factories of this kind were planted all along the western coast from Cape Verd to the equator, by English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese traders. Their appearance, the character of the men employed in them, their internal arrangements, and their mode of carrying on the traffic, are well described in the following extract from Mr. Howison's book on "European Colonies":

"As soon as the parties concerned had fixed upon the site of their proposed commercial establishment, they began to erect a fort of greater or less magnitude, having previously obtained permission to that effect from the natives. The most convenient situation for a building of the kind was considered to be at the confluence of a river with the sea, or upon an island lying within a few miles of the coast. In the first case, there was the advantage of inland navigation; and in the second, that of the security and defensibleness of an insular position, besides its being more cool and healthy than any other.

The walls of the fort enclosed a considerable space of ground, upon which were built the necessary magazines for the reception of merchandise, and also barracks for the soldiers and artificers, and a depot for slaves; so that, in tin; event of external hostilities, the gates might be shut, and the persons and the property belonging to the establishment placed in security. The quarters for the officers and agents employed at the factory were in general erected upon the ramparts, or at least adjoining them; while the negroes in their service, and any others that might be attracted to the spot, placed their huts outside of the walls of the fort, but under the protection of its guns.