I have mentioned that this is the home of the Maroons, and I cannot do better at this part of my travels than sketch the events which led to their segregation in these mountains. This involves a dip into the origin of modern slavery. Since the fall of the Roman Empire, and the rise of Christendom, slavery was almost unknown in Europe excepting in the serfdom of Moscovy until, in 1442, the Portuguese explorer, Prince Henry, whilst sailing down the African coast, compelled Antony Gonsalez, his countryman, to restore some Moors to their home whom he had seized as prisoners, some two years previously, in the neighbourhood of Cape Bojador. The wily Gonsalez obeyed the prince, but received in exchange ten blacks and some gold dust, which he took back to Lisbon. His friends and acquaintances evidently thought to do a roaring trade in following his footsteps, so they fitted out thirty ships to pursue this traffic.
In 1481 the Portuguese built three forts, one on the Gold Coast, one on an adjacent island, the other at Loango—their king assuming the title of Lord of Guinea! From this date the western continent, so recently discovered, was furnished with slaves. In 1502 the Spaniards employed them to work in the mines of Hispaniola, but we read that the governor forbade the traffic, as the negroes taught the Indians knowledge of their evil ways. But the latter becoming scarcer, owing to the cruelty of their conquerors, the Emperor, Charles V., granted a patent to certain persons giving them the monopoly of supplying four thousand negroes annually to Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, and Porto Rico. Herrera, the Spanish historian of those days, tells us that this patent was assigned to Genoese merchants. From that time the slave trade was an established and regular business.
Nor have we, nationally speaking, clean hands in this respect. Sir John Hawkins Knight, commander of Queen Elizabeth’s navy, found, says Hakluyt, “that negroes were very good merchandise, and that stores of negroes might easily be had on the coast of Guiney”; he resolved to make trial thereof, and communicated that device with his worshipful friends of London. He sailed to Sierra Leone in 1562. Two hundred years later, so great a trade had this become, that a list was prepared by the Liverpool merchants for the Privy Council 1772. In it we find in one year 74,000 slaves were exported. The British headed the list with 38,000, the French followed with 20,000, the Dutch 4000, Danes 2000, and the Portuguese 10,000. They were captured from Gambia, Sierra Leone, Cape Palmas, Gold Coast, Whydah, Lagos, and Benin, Bonny, and New Calabar, the Cameroons, Loango and Benguela principally.
It was Homer who said: “The day which makes a man a slave takes away half his worth,” and in the nature of things it must be so.
Surely our complicity and share in these dark days is being atoned for in the efforts to benefit the black race. The stings of the national conscience have been severe, but the growth in grace of our legislators a certainty.
Cheap cotton fabrics, specially manufactured to clothe their dusky limbs, come from Manchester. Food of the best and of the cheapest is within their reach; and I was even told by a landowner not long since, that it was no good going to law for the petty thieving which is so irritating, because “the judges favoured the blacks”!