Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/120

 their religion, at the instigation of a former governor, who had taken a dislike to him. This was a matter notorious at Goree.

Mr. Wadstrom knows slaves to be procured between Senegal and Gambia, either by the general pillage or by robbery by individuals, or by stratagem and deceit. The general pillage is executed by the king's troops on horseback, armed, who seize the unprepared. Mr. Wadstrom, during the week he was at Joal, accompanying one of those embassies which the French governor sends yearly with presents to the black kings, to keep up the slave trade, saw parties sent out for this purpose, by king Barbesin, almost every day. These parties went out generally in the evening, and were armed with bows and arrows, guns, pistols, sabres, and long lances. The king of Sallum practices the pillage also. Mr. Wadstrom saw twenty-seven slaves from Sallum, twenty-three of whom were women and children, thus taken. He was told also by merchants at Goree, that kiug Darnel practices the pillage in like manner.

Robbery was a general way of taking single slaves. He once saw a woman and a boy in the slave-hold at Goree; the latter had been taken by stealth from his parents in the interior parts above Cape Rouge, and he declared that such robberies were very frequent in his country; the former, at Rufisco, from her husband and children. He could state several instances of such robberies. He very often saw negroes thus taken brought to Goree. Ganna of Dacard was a noted man-stealer, and employed as such by the slave-merchants there. As instances of stratagem employed to obtain slaves, he relates that a French merchant taking a fancy to a negro, who was on a visit to Dacard, persuaded the village, for a certain price, to seize him. He was accordingly taken from his wife, who wished to accompany him, but the Frenchman had not merchandise enough to buy both. Mr. Wadstrom saw this negro at Goree, the day he arrived from Dacard, chained, and lying on the ground, exceedingly distressed in his mind. The king of Sallum also prevailed on a woman to come into his kingdom, and sell him some millet. On her arrival, he seized and sold her to a French officer, with whom Mr. Wadstrom saw this woman every day while at Goree. Mr. Wadstrom was on the island of St. Louis, up the Senegal also, and on the continent near the river, and says that all the slaves sold at Senegal, are brought down the river, except those taken by the robbery of the Moors in the neighborhood, which is sometimes conducted by large parties, in what are called petty wars.

Captain Hills saw, while lying between Goree and the continent, the natives, in an evening, often go out in war dresses, as he found, to obtain slaves for king Darnel, to be sold. The reason was, that the king was then poor, not having received his usual dues from us. He never saw the parties that went out return with slaves, but has often seen slaves in their huts tied back to back. He remembers also that some robbers once brought him a man, bound, onboard the Zephyr, to sell, but he, Captain Hills, would not buy him, but suffered him to escape. The natives on the continent opposite to Goree all go armed, he imagines for fear of being taken.

When in the river Gambia, wanting servants on board his ship, he expressed